"Character Defect: Uppity"

((This blog is third in a four-part series "Attitude Problem"))

A brief disclaimer: I am not black. Or "African-American" or whatever other PC term uptight white people need to hear in order to understand what I'm talking about. Now, I have been called a brotha of another color, which truly warmed my heart. I've also had someone tell me they hated that I was white but occasionally "talked black". He and I are no longer friends because he didn't appreciate my calling him out on his racist bullshit. Such is life. Anyway, this post has nothing to do with any of that, except for me to acknowledge that 'uppity' is a racially charged term and to say, yes, I did use it deliberately.

As a child, I didn't have abusive parents. No one ever called me names. I was never beaten. I never got molested. But I did have a, shall we say, unbalanced upbringing. My father wasn't involved in my childhood and my mother was way, way, way too involved. It took a while for me to understand I had abandonment issues from my dad, because he was present. He didn't literally abandon me, like move away, but because he was so uninvolved, the effects were the same as if he had. It's possible that that's one of the reasons my mother was so over-involved--she was trying to compensate for the attention I wasn't getting from my father.

Being too involved in your children's lives--so much so that they become reflections of yourself, when you are unable to conceive of them as separate individuals, when you place upon them the burden of your feelings because you are getting your happiness and sadness and anger and joy through them--has a specific name in psychological circles. In it's most extreme examples, it's a form of emotional abuse called enmeshment. This is a codependent pattern, and is healthy neither for the child nor the parent. The former, because they are saddled with a responsibility they cannot live up to, that of their parent's emotional life. And the latter, because they aren't being responsible for their own emotional lives and are setting a very poor example for their children of how to deal with life.

Children who grow up in this sort of environment tend to fall into two categories: feeling special, and feeling worthless. They also have a very poorly-developed sense of self--if they have one at all. I ended up with all of the above. My feelings of being special were hard-wired in at an early age. I learned that I had to be perfect, the good little boy, or I wouldn't get the love I needed. But if I was all those things, then not only was I loved but I was Special. The main influence there was my mother. In the rest of my life, the other children I socialized with for example, I got the message that I was worthless. It created a never-ending cycle. Mom would tell me I was special. I'd go out into the world believing I was, and the world would let me know that I wasn't. So I'd go home and cry to mommy that I wasn't special. Who, in turn, took even greater pains to make sure I knew that I was.

The experts will tell you that a child who grows up feeling 'special' rarely forgets it. As I got older, my feeling special became a chip on my shoulder so large that I'm surprised I didn't topple over from it. I was a know-it-all who thought he was God's gift to... well, all humanity I suppose. It was a defense mechanism, something that stayed in place because I needed it to cover up the deeply wounded, deeply insecure child inside. I could list dozens of examples of how this double-edged ego issue of mine caused damage to me and those in my life, but my real point is the simple one: I thought I was special, and the more life tried to disabuse me of this notion, the more tightly I clung to it.

With Recovery, this attitude of mine has slowly changed. I've done a lot of work on it and see it now as a two-sided coin: on the one side is my overinflated ego--the know-it-all, on the other side is my insecurity and the idea that I will never be good enough. As I've chipped away at this character defect, and gradually worked on the building up of my self-esteem, a change has taken place. A new attitude has taken up dominance in my brain. It's a genuine knowledge that I am enough and that I don't need to be anything other than who I am in order to be loved. Slowly, I have learned (and am still learning) how to be right-sized.

For me, being right-sized is a balance. I don't indulge my ego, but I also don't have to tolerate others treating me as less-than. It takes honesty; being honestly in touch with myself, knowing my strengths and my weaknesses, and knowing too that I am a person of worth and value. This is where my power comes from, the power of aligning myself with God by being who I am as he created me. And I don't have to give that power up to anyone.