Righteous Anger part 2 - a "whole brain" approach

 

Background: Part of the growing understanding of how the brain works is summarized practically in the book The Whole-Brained Child by Daniel Siegel and Tina Payne. I'm trying to simplify what they say and there will be some inaccuracies, so if you have concerns, please consider reading the book.

When babies are born, they are ruled by the need for safety. Their consciousness is ruled by the need for safety, which is entirely dependent on their needs being met. This safety is ruled by what the authors call the downstairs brain - where the brain interfaces with bodily functions. When the baby is hungry, when the baby is thirsty, when the baby is tired or uncomfortable, the downstairs brain creates powerful emotions that translate into crying, screaming or other signals to the parents that the child senses a lack of safety that needs to be met.

As the parents meet the needs of the child, the upstairs brain is developing understanding of the world around. The child develops a sense that his needs will be met without jeopardizing safety. He sees the caregiver disappear and come back. The child's brain starts to be aware of its connection with others in the world, strategies for dealing with those connections, and other emotions like happiness and comfort.

During the first few years, the role of the caregiver is vitally important in developing proper conscious responses to emotions as the right and left brains develop pathways about what is important to bring to conscious attention. We start to understand things that happen in our bodies - hunger, thirst, cold, warmth, pain in various places, touch, loneliness, love - and our consciousness interacts with the world around us to meet needs and now desires.

Behavioralism: In 1913 a psychologist named John Watson created a rationalistic approach to understanding and processing the world around us. Behavioralism ignored emotions and focused on objective, rational observation. The worldview that Behavioralism brought in was that any person could become anything their superiors wanted through a reward and punishment system based solely on observed behavior. Emotions were seen as unimportant towards the end of producing the desired behavior. The desires of the child were secondary or unimportant in the drive for exceptional behavior. The psychologists powerfully demonstrated their theories by training pigeons to plunk out songs on a piano.

Even though Behavioralism has been shown to be flat-out wrong, it still powerfully occupies our understanding of how society ought to be structured, and this is readily apparent in instruction and discipline. We didn't just forget the tools of dealing with emotional development, we piled them up in the back yard and set them on fire!!! 

I remember watching Dead Poet's Society and I simply didn't get the point of it. As I reflect back, it's a statement against Behavioralism. The students are trapped in a dull existence of behavioralist expectation. The parents have paid top dollar for the school to produce perfect specimens. The protagonist arrives and with him, the light of emotion and purpose, which comes in direct conflict with outside behavioral parents. The student who is the most enlightened and freed finds his world crashing down when his behavioral parents will now do everything in their power to put him back on the approved track. This is a common theme - a child whose desires and gifts put him in conflict with parents' and societal expectations. Isn't this the story of the obligatory consecration service, where the (male) youth get to hear God's demands and expectations of sacrificial service to the church.

Reasoning vs. Emotional errors: Consider what happens when a child expresses a reasoning error. My family has a grocery list, when something is low or out, it gets put on the grocery list and the next time we go shopping, the item appears. A child realized this, and the next week, CANDY was scribbled on the grocery list. We didn't spank our child, we didn't even make it a big deal, we just explained that there was a logical error - the list wasn't a guarantee that we would buy something, just a reminder, etc. What happens when a child expresses an emotional error? One child feels jealousy because another child is playing with a toy they feel entitled to. Anger bursts out. How is that emotional error dealt with? Do we redirect? NO!! We somehow must punish all emotional mistakes. What do you think when you're in the store and your kid or someone else's kid throws a temper tantrum? If that parent doesn't spank the kid or take the kid out to the parking lot, they're a parental disgrace! Yet, in a sense, these emotional errors are equivalent to the logical errors we so effectively handle. We think of reasoning errors as perhaps innocent mistakes and emotional errors as sin that must be eradicated.

We have toys that teach logical cause and effect, our educational system is designed to teach reasoning and logic, but societally, the only solution, if you can say that, for emotional intelligence is punishing any sort of emotional outburst.

Lack of Connection: The purpose of our right brain is to develop a sense of connection with those around us. We develop sympathy and empathy to connect ourselves with others in a healthy way. We develop higher order emotions and emotional regulation. We develop trust. Our sense of worth and purpose is developed in our right brain. We can sense emotions in others and we can sense when things are "off" - we call that intuition. It's been studied that people's right brains recognize dangerous people, but because we're trained to suppress our "gut feeling", we put ourselves in harms way. In fact, studies have shown that dogs don't sense dangerous people, instead, they sense our emotions. For most people, their own dogs know more about what their emotions are telling them than they do! When the right brain is underdeveloped (or suppressed), our consciousness gets only half of the input - the rational input, which is very black and white. So, for example, when you have a theological disagreement with someone, your right brain may have shown you ways to be empathetic and gracious to this person, but your left brain is saying, "this person is WRONG, therefore EVIL". Consider this, if your value is what the church decides it is, and that is adherence to a system of doctrine, then what happens when you disagree with someone over doctrine? Your value is at stake. Losing the argument means that you are less valuable. You can't acknowledge the difference and still both be valuable people. I see this clearly in the political process. Societally, we can no longer accept other peoples' passion for issues like social justice and care for the sick and poor, yet at the same time acknowledge our desire for a peaceful and prosperous society. Therefore, we disconnect and demonize others. We use social media to connect only to those who share our opinions, and our Google news feed shows us only what we want to see.

The behavioral emphasis on reason also destroys self-worth. The clear piece is that the standard by which we are judged is someone else's standard. That is, our objective behavior is rewarded or punished based on someone else's desires for us. The pigeon will eventually plunk out the right notes because, regardless of what the pigeon wants to happen, the concerns of the pigeon are secondary to the concerns of the experimenter. So, in the church, we are taught that our [Spirit-inspired] desires are secondary to the direction of the Session. The less clear piece has to do with the brain. Just as we test our reason against our caregiver, we test our connection. As we bring our own desires into the relationship we look for confirmation of the value of those desires. The "terrible twos" is a developmental stage where the child differentiates from the caregiver. In the Reformed church, the will of the 2yo must be squashed. So, what has happened? The right brain seeks connection with the conscious. That connection is rejected. So, the brain must navigate the rejection. The conclusion (with the help of the black and white left brain) is that I must be bad if I'm rejected. From a behavioral point of view, this is good because the will of the child must be broken for the child to obey the adult. But, we are just setting the child up for a lifetime of self-deprecation and abuse.

Emotional Trauma: Because the church minimizes and denies the work of the right brain, the church denies the existence of emotional trauma. Let's say there are two violent acts in the church. The first violent act is a woman who gets brutally attacked during a robbery. Her knee was shattered and through extensive surgeries and physical therapy, she's able to walk, but not without pain and a limp. The church surrounds her and recognizes that the limp is a natural consequence of the physical damage and pain they condemn the robber and vindicate her. Let's say there is another woman in the church. She is violently raped by her boyfriend. Her whole world is shattered. She attempted suicide and ended up spending time in a mental hospital, but even now that she is released, she is seeing a psychologist because she can't stop cutting herself. First of all, the church is reluctant to take sides without fully hearing both the perpetrator and victim? Did her sin contribute to the rape? Then, when they see the obvious scars from the cutting, they condemn it and start mentioning church discipline. They condemn her for seeking "unbiblical counseling". Do we see the difference?

Breaking the Peace - the Assault on Righteous Anger: Since behavioralism specifically ignores emotions and focuses only on observable behaviors, it's obvious that the results of strong emotions are going to be misunderstood and punished. Let's say I'm in middle school, and immaturely, I decide that I should poke the boy in front of me with my pencil during class. The teacher does not like interruptions when he is teaching, so the boy tries to suppress the anger while he waits for an appropriate time. It doesn't work. He explodes in anger. "STOP POKING ME WITH YOUR PENCIL!!!" What do you think happens? It's obvious. BOTH of us are going to the principal. Both the offender and the victim get punished for breaking the peace.

It makes sense, because right and wrong are somewhat superfluous in the quest for perfect behavior. The behavioralist does not care anything about the feelings of the pigeon so long as the expected behavior is met, and likewise, the tendency in the church is to not care what happens in private so long as the public peace is preserved.

That's why we expect sermons like Rut's on Righteous Anger. Imagine if Rut preached a sermon about logical discourse in Bible studies. He says that Bible studies are a great place to ask questions about doctrine. But... you can always keep quiet because "better to be quiet and have others think you a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt!" [Mark Twain, not the Bible!]. But... lest you fall into the erroneous thinking of Satan, before you ask a question, you should make sure you've done all the proper research and read the right scholars' opinions on the matter, and... before you ask a question, you should make sure that you understand the definition of each word you're going to say, and... before you ask a question, you should search the Bible for every passage that speaks on the topic, because it's easy for our fallible logic to be led astray!

Every pastor I've heard has said that RP doctrine should withstand scrutiny, and that we should be ready and willing to answer questions gently and with wisdom. Why do we so much fear the other side of our humanity, then? If we are not afraid of reason, why are we afraid of emotion? Why are we so deathly afraid of "sinful anger" that it's better to hold our peace when some pastor tells us that God tells us to abuse our children in His name - the same God who sends rain on the just and the unjust commands us to withhold food from our own children?

Righteous Anger part 1 - stream and rocks analogy

 Since Chris brought up the concept of righteous anger, I thought it would be worth talking through some analogies about righteous and sinful anger. First of all, anger is an emotion. We may think that our emotions are fallible and we need our intellect to keep it in check, but in actuality, both our emotions and intellect are fallible. We need our emotions to keep our intellect in check as much as we need our intellect to keep our emotions in check.

For example, we talk about intuition or "gut feelings" - gut feelings are often right, and we somehow assume that it was luck or providence, but evidence shows there is more to it. My plan is to cover that in part 2.

My best description of anger is an energy we feel as a result of a sense of injustice. Our emotion is telling us that something is wrong, and not just that something is wrong, but something needs to be fixed. We feel a surge of adrenaline, our faces turn red, our pulse quickens. Often our emotional sense of the situation precedes our intellectual sense of what happened.

It is at this point that our intellect is racing to catch up. WHY? is the first question to ask. Why am I angry? What injustice has occurred? Because our emotions are fallible, we need the combined strength of intellect and emotion to understand. Is the injustice I'm experiencing true or false injustice. That is, am I angry because I or someone I care about being treated disrespectfully, or is it some perceived entitlement that has been threatened?

To understand psychology, anger can be resolved (processed) or it can be suppressed. If I understand that I'm at fault, I can use the energy of the anger to work towards change in my own heart - to seek forgiveness and restoration. It can be resolved through putting the energy towards constructive conflict - seeking justice personally or systemically. However, it can also be suppressed. Suppressing anger is flatly unhealthy, yet as we see, in religious circles it seems to be the most acceptable and compelling option.

This is an analogy of an abusive relationship that has blown up. The person on the left is experiencing mostly unrighteous (idolatrous or self-righteous) anger. The person on the right is a target of idolatrous abuse, and is angry as a result of being treated disrespectfully or unjustly. Because the anger grows past the "ability to tolerate", the public peace is broken. For the sake of the argument, this has happened in the church context.

What should happen? I would argue that the church needs to deal, first and foremost, justly in this situation. If you read Shepherding a Child's Heart, you would see that Tedd Tripp disagrees. In his mind, we notice that there is red (unrighteous anger) on both sides and we deal solely with the red without recognizing the sheer volume of red on one side. In his description, the child who holds the toy is sinfully greedy instead of sharing, while the child who steals the toy has resorted to violence. The solution, then, is to punish both for disturbing the peace of the house.

So, what happens is what is called all sorts of things - gaslighting, grooming, normalizing, burying one's head in the sand, whatever. This can happen as a result of one's own codependency or external factors. The point is that the anger is not "put away" - it's still there and it's still as big as ever. Yet, the anger is no longer visible in the community. The abuse is still as strong as ever.

This is what is taught in the RP church. Instead of teaching people to deal with anger in a healthy way by choosing to stand up for justice and give strength to victims of abuse, the church chooses a peaceful image. Under the holy and righteous image of the church is unresolved and abusive conflict. What is unfortunate is that it is the opposite of justice.

There's more complexity to it, but as long as the RPCNA chooses to whitewash over conflict in the church through sermons like this, not only will abuse and injustice persist, but anger itself will grow unchecked, hidden under what appears to be a a calm sea of suppression. This is what I mean about choosing image over truth. The anger is still there, the abuse is still there, but it can all be conveniently ignored because everything looks like a calm stream. The church does the opposite of its calling. Instead of shining a light in the darkest places, the church chooses to hide and obscure injustice because it looks good.