 |
| Photo of a mountain. Image text: "If you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there,' and it will move. NIV Matthew 17:20." Image source. |
"From my point of view, telling someone "I'm afraid of balloons" made as much sense as saying "I don't like it when people kick me." Like, isn't that obvious? If you really believe that it's something you need to actually say out loud, that means you accept that your preference not to be kicked is something unusual. As a little kid, I refused to accept that. On some level, even though I didn't have the words for it, I truly believed my reactions were right, completely justified and reasonable based on the incredible pain caused by a balloon pop. (And please note: I was right, even though none of the adults understood.)"
(from last week's post, Globophobia)
I was right. When I was a little kid, I knew I was right- I stubbornly refused to believe that I was the weird one for reacting the way I did to balloons. The sound is overwhelmingly scary and bad, and I am the only one whose reaction makes any sense.
What I didn't know was that other people are actually hearing the sound in a different way than I was. But I was right about myself, when none of the adults were.
So this is the story of how I accepted that I was wrong about myself.
---------------------
When I was a little kid, maybe in middle school, I remember going to a family reunion or some kind of party like that. Somebody had bought a package of balloons- and I took it and hid it. Then when it was time to set up for the party, people were all looking around like "where are those balloons?"
My mom knew it was me that had taken it. She tried to get me to tell where it was. But I didn't. I refused. I never told anyone.
I look back on that story, and my first thought is, "Wow, that was definitely before I devoted my life to Jesus." Because if that had taken place after I made the decision to devote every single bit of everything 100% to God, then I would have told them where the balloons were. Because stealing is a sin and because I need to put others first- if other people want to have balloons and I don't, the correct Christian thing to do is to submit and die to self and let them have the balloons without saying anything about it.
If this was after I devoted my life to Jesus, then I could have been guilted into "doing the right thing" with a bit of talk about sin and selfishness and trusting God and obeying even when it's scary. It would have been framed as a choice between the "sinful" thing (hiding the balloons) and the "Christian" thing (submitting to other people's choice to have balloons at the party).
In that ideology, there's no way to recognize what's really going on: That loud sounds are unbearably painful for me and so I have a 100% legitimate NEED to not be at a party with balloons. I was never taught to get to know myself and my needs, I was never taught that it's okay if my needs are different from other people's, I was never taught that I should insist that my needs be respected even if other people didn't think that was important.
It was wrong to take the balloons and hide them (ideally I should communicate my needs to other people and be free to not attend the party if those needs aren't met) but I don't regret it one bit. It was the only way I had to protect myself back then. It would be another 10 to 15 years before I had access to concepts like "sensory pain" and "advocating for myself." (And autism.)
I don't think my parents ever punished me for that. Then again, I can't imagine any punishments that would be worse than enduring a party where people are touching balloons.
---------------------
When I was a freshman in college, I devoted my life 100% to Jesus. Before this, I was a Christian of course, but, as I used to say in my testimony, "God was the most important thing in my life, overall, but in certain parts of my life or certain situations, it wasn't always clear if God was the most important thing or not." But this all changed- I devoted every single part of my life to Jesus, 100%. When I woke up early every day to read the bible, it wasn't because that's what good Christians are supposed to do- it was because I loved God so much, I was so overwhelmed by how amazing God is, that I wanted to sacrifice my sleep time for God. I prayed constantly. I was so full of God's love that I just wanted to share it with everyone. I was so happy all the time, full of energy, loving my life, so free because of God.
And then one day, I went to a party, walked in the door, saw balloons on the floor, and turned around and left.
And I felt so bad. So terrible. Because I had been living so completely happy and free, like I can do anything through Christ, and then suddenly I couldn't go to that fun party which I wanted to go to, because of balloons. I decided that night that God didn't want me to live like that, with the phobia- God wanted me to be free; "I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full."
I was so committed to God, and this was what God wanted me to do. I believed it was possible; God would work a miracle and cure my phobia. And then I would react- or rather, not react- to balloons like a "normal person."
So I got to work. I told a bunch of friends I was planning to go through the steps to get myself "desensitized"- the same idea that the doctor had taught me all those years before. I got a group of friends to support me ("accountability"), and I wrote emails to them on a weekly basis about the progress I was making. I made a list of scary balloon-related things, in order of scariness, and scheduled when I would do them- the plan was to get "desensitized" to each one, and work up to the scariest ones.
I had so much faith. The idea that I could be "like a normal person" seemed impossible, but this time I believed God would do it.
See, when I was a little kid, I was "stubborn." I resisted the term "phobia." I was a good kid who followed the rules, so I probably never said this out loud, but I was very much NOT in agreement that my avoidance of balloons was an "irrational fear." I believed that balloons were just self-evidently terrible, and I hated how people wanted me to explain what the problem was, as if it wasn't OBVIOUS that the sound was unbearably, inhumanely loud. My mom took me to therapy for globophobia, and I went along with it like a good kid, obeyed what the doctor said, but on a big-picture level, I wasn't really on board with it. I didn't truly believe there was anything wrong with me avoiding balloons; I was baffled about why everyone else wasn't reacting the same way I did.
Please note: Little-kid Perfect Number was right. Right about myself, wrong about everyone else being unfeeling and heartless. But right about myself. The missing piece of the puzzle was the concept that different people can experience the same sensory input in extremely different ways. (Like the age-old question: When I look at something and say it's "red", and you look at the same thing and say it's "red", are we actually both seeing the same color? There's no way to ever know.)
But college-student-totally-devoted-to-Jesus Perfect Number decided that little-kid Perfect Number was wrong. I looked for information about phobias online; everything I read said they can be completely cured through therapy. And even though it felt impossible, I chose to have faith. I decided that the reason therapy hadn't "worked" back in middle school was that I was never truly committed to it on a big-picture level. But this time, I decided to believe it.
To believe that I was the one being unreasonable. To believe that the way "normal people" acted around balloons was the right way, and that God would make me that way too. To say the words "I'm afraid of balloons"- labelling myself as the weird one, rather than insisting that my response was appropriate to the reality I experience.
My whole life, everyone told me- either directly or indirectly- that I "overreacted" to balloons and to loud sounds, that it's "not that bad", that my reaction is unreasonable and wrong. But I never believed them. I knew- even though I couldn't put it in words- that I wasn't "overreacting." That all changed when I totally devoted my life to Jesus. Now I was 100% surrendered to God, and I couldn't go on insisting that my reaction was right when everybody else said it was wrong. That was my stubbornness, my selfishness, my sinful nature. It was a belief I would need to "let go of" so God could do amazing things in my life. All this time, I had been so sure of what I needed (ie to avoid balloons), but it was time to give that up and trust that God would take care of me.
Surrender. Die to self. Take up my cross.
I followed a Christianity which very much did NOT believe that people are experts on their own lives and their own needs. Instead, I believed we are fundamentally selfish and sinful, and we will have all sorts of desires for things that are actually bad for us. We think we need them, but we really don't- and giving them up and realizing God is all we need is the only way to be truly free.
So I did. I swallowed my pride. I surrendered. I told people "I am afraid of balloons." And then I told people, "Jesus said, if you have faith, you can say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there,' and it will move."
I really believed God would heal me. I believed God would make me like a "normal person." I believed- even though it made no sense to me- that my reaction to loud sounds was wrong and that God would teach me to react in the "correct" way. I told one of my best friends, "Someday I'll be able to say, 'I used to be afraid of balloons.'" And she said, "Maybe you'll be the balloon-animal expert in our group!" We had so much faith.
Little-kid Perfect Number knew she was being reasonable, even when everyone else said she wasn't. She was stubborn; when the whole world reacted in a completely different way than she did, she still refused to believe her reaction was wrong. But totally-devoted-to-Jesus Perfect Number died to self and accepted what all those other people said.
---------------------
Even as I write this, it's mind-blowing to remind myself of the fact that other people hear sounds so much differently than I do. Other people experience the sound of a balloon popping not as overwhelming, unbearable sensory pain, but as a minor annoyance, maybe like being poked or hearing the sound of fingers snapping. (I guess?) All these years, this has been one giant miscommunication. I thought they were telling me I needed to learn to be okay with suffering massive sensory pain. They thought they were telling me I should calm down because it's not a big deal when something makes me a tiny bit startled.
They were wrong about me. But back then, I thought the first step to healing was to accept that they were all right about me.
It made no sense to me. How could other people have so little reaction to something so monstrously loud? But I "had faith"- I accepted the premise that other people's reaction (or lack thereof) was right, and I need to learn to be like them. (Gaslighting.)
The rationalization I came up with was that the sound only lasts for a moment, then it's gone, so no matter how bad the sound is, it doesn't really justify the amount of anxiety I felt and the lengths I went to to avoid balloons. Which is partly true- to a certain extent, this is a phobia- but that doesn't mean the solution is to "be like a normal person" and pretend the pain doesn't exist at all. (The solution is to recognize the very real pain that loud sounds cause me, to treat it as a serious thing that people need to care about, and decide on appropriate measures to take to protect myself from the pain. It's the same as a food allergy.)
Because I was willing to surrender everything to God, I accepted that my reaction to balloons was wrong. To use analogy about physical pain, I understood it in this way: "Everybody else is fine with it if someone just comes up out of the blue and whacks them- and refuses to apologize or acknowledge that the whacking even happened. The pain only lasts for a second, so it's not a big deal. Why can't you be fine with it too?"
I believed God would teach me to be fine with it.
---------------------
So I had faith. I believed God would heal me, even though it seemed impossible. I believed that God would help me have the same (lack of) reaction to balloons as a "normal person" did, even though for my entire life I had been completely, utterly unable to fathom what the heck is wrong with people to make them (not) react the way they do. Again, please note: I was right about myself. My inability to understand why everyone else didn't hate balloons in the same way I did meant that there was some crucial piece of information I was missing, NOT that I'm being selfish and God wants me to just give up my sinful desire to have people notice and care about my pain.
I started my DIY desensitization. I watched videos of balloons, inflated balloons and hung them in my dorm room, and watched other people (who had promised to be very careful and not pop any) inflate balloons. These are all things I actually can become desensitized too; these are things totally in the realm of the phobia- no sensory pain at all. While experiencing these things, I listened to Christian music and read bible verses. I told myself over and over to trust God and that God would heal me.
Meanwhile, I began encountering balloons at an astonishingly high frequency as I went about my regular life. Saw them hanging as decorations in various places. There was even a physics class where we were talking about how the fabric of spacetime expands, and the professor gave everyone a balloon we were supposed to inflate as a hands-on way to understand the concept. Another time, I was at a restaurant, and a guy came around from table to table making balloon animals for customers- and I was so shaky and nervous, and my friends wanted to help me but I said no we can't tell him not to come to our table, I can't go out of my way to avoid balloons, that's how the phobia becomes worse (the "pretend to be a normal person" strategy that I had learned from the therapist all those years before). But one of my friends went and told the balloon man not to come to our table anyway.
I believed that God was causing all these balloons to appear in my life unexpectedly- maybe God was trying to help me with my therapy, or God was showing me how important it is that I do the work to get "healed" because "you can't avoid them forever."
Seriously, I swear to you, from the time I started "working on" my phobia and trying to get "desensitized," I encountered balloons at an abnormally high rate, and I was sure it was God's doing. (It was maybe about once per day.) It's okay if you don't believe me- I probably wouldn't believe someone who said that. I'm a math nerd, I know what confirmation bias is. You guys, I made graphs. I sorted the balloons encounters into different categories- an offhand mention of balloons gets less weight than an actual sighting- and made graphs of the frequency at which they occurred. It was a lot.
But it's okay if you don't believe me. I no longer believe in a God who would do something like that anyway. If God really wanted to help me, maybe God could have caused the words, "Some people experience loud sounds (like balloons popping or fireworks) as intense pain- if you think that hearing a balloon pop and getting slapped hard are about equally bad, maybe this describes you, and in that case, your pain is a real thing and it's totally reasonable to avoid balloons" to appear somewhere, perhaps in an article I read as I researched globophobia online. (Followed by "Also maybe check into getting an autism diagnosis." Yeah that would have been nice.)
(And actually, there was an awards dinner I was invited to, for having a high GPA or something, and I was SO SURE there would be balloons there. Because God was causing balloons to be in all sorts of unexpected places, so surely the awards dinner would also be decorated with balloons, right? I told people, "I'm going to this thing, I'm sure there will be balloons there, pray for me." And then no balloons there. Make of that what you will.)
Anyway, I got desensitized to all the things that don't involve popping. Because, wow, it makes so much sense now- of course I can get desensitized to those. The popping sound will always be unbearable pain for me, but in addition to that I have globophobia, where I associate balloons with "people don't care about me", which is indeed an irrational association. (But very understandable how it came about- over and over again experiencing overwhelming sensory pain, and having everyone tell me "you're overreacting, it's not that bad.") That part truly is a phobia, and it can be completely cured. But the part where loud sounds are painful isn't going to change. So of course I can get desensitized to everything about balloons except for the popping sound.
So I worked my way up the list of scary things, and became desensitized to all the items on the list that did not involve loud sounds. All that was left was hearing real-life popping. At that point, my DIY therapy kind of lost momentum and stopped. And now it's obvious why, but at the time I didn't really understand. Of course, to me it felt obvious that anything involving popping sounds would be orders of magnitude harder to get "desensitized" to, but remember, I had "died to self" and accepted other people's opinions on what should and shouldn't be hard.
I don't even remember noticing that I had stopped doing the therapy. I thought I had made a lot of progress, and I felt good about it- at one point I literally did say the words, "I used to be afraid of balloons." And I guess I didn't encounter any balloons for a while after that. Until this one time, I was at a party, and somebody starting making balloons, and I suddenly felt really guilty because the previous few weeks I had been thinking a lot about attractive boys, and I prayed, "Oh God I'm so sorry I've been so interested in boys and I'm acting like I don't need you but oh help, you gotta help me, you gotta take me back, you gotta help me be brave and be okay with these balloons." And I believed God had sent the balloons like the famine in the story of the prodigal son. So. In case you were interested in examples of the intersection of purity culture and autism.
---------------------
I want you to know that I believed in a God who thought it was wrong for me to advocate for myself. From the time I was a little kid, I believed that the sound of balloons popping is unbearable and it's reasonable for me to avoid it, and everybody told me- directly or indirectly- that I was wrong. When I finally devoted my life 100% to Jesus, I knew that it meant I would have to swallow my pride and accept that I was wrong and everyone else was right about me. Die to self. Even though the concept of not really reacting much to balloons popping had always been an unfathomable mystery to me, I put my faith in it. Because of God. Because it was sinful to keep insisting that I had a need that everyone else said wasn't real. I had to accept that they were right about me.
I remember how my mom decided to take me to therapy, all those years ago when I was in middle school, because of an incident at a school carnival. There were tons of carnival games in the school gymnasium, and I was with my family, playing games and having fun. Except that whoever was in charge of the helium balloon tank was really really bad at it, and over and over balloons exploded. You know how sound gets trapped in a school gym? It was loud, overwhelmingly loud. It happened again and again, and I ended up outside the school refusing to go in. And apparently my mom thought, "this phobia has gotten so bad, now she can't even participate in fun things like the carnival" and that's when she decided I really need to go to therapy.
And now I think back on that, and I'm struck by how incredibly reasonable my behavior was. It wasn't safe for me in the gym. Over and over, with no warning, there were moments of huge, unbearable pain. How can you expect anyone to stay and play ring toss in that kind of environment? I couldn't put it into words back then, but my behavior was right, even though everyone else thought it was wrong.
And through all those therapy appointments when I was in middle school, I did what the adults said, but I never really accepted their claim that there was something wrong with the way I protected myself from balloons. I don't even know if I was fully aware that the adults all believed my behavior- refusing to go in the gym- was wrong and that they were trying to "help" me change. To the extent that I was aware, I COMPLETELY DISAGREED. Because I'm "stubborn."
But in college I finally surrendered all to Jesus, and I accepted what everyone else had been telling me for my whole life: It's wrong for me to protect myself. It's wrong for me to expect people to care about my pain. It's wrong for me to claim I have needs different from those of a "normal person."
---------------------
Related: "Seek First God's Kingdom" Doesn't Work If You Have Autism
Comment policy: I don't really have any patience for any comments along the lines of "oh you misunderstood the verse about faith moving mountains, here let me explain it to you" or "I've never met you, but here is my baseless speculation about what God was actually doing in your life."
No comments:
Post a Comment