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On The Bookshelf: The Drama of the Gifted Child

I have a confession to make: I judge commuters on the T by the books they read. It’s rare to see someone even reading a book on the train these days, so when I do see a fellow bookworm, I steal a glance at the pages spread out on his lap. Is it a novel? What kind? James Patterson or James Joyce? You can tell a lot about a person based on what he reads.

Which is why I’m a little nervous about what my fellow commuters on the T have thought of me recently as I sat there with my copy of The Drama of the Gifted Child opened before me. I know what would have gone through my head if I saw someone else reading such a book. Oh, so you think you’re so gifted, do you? Your privileged life must be SUCH a drama. I feel SO bad for you and your hardships, O Gifted One.

I did my best to keep the cover folded over so that no one could see it.

Despite its not-so-humble title, Alice Miller’s The Drama of the Gifted Child was a fascinating read. Miller writes about the wounds that we all carry around with us because we were not loved as we wanted to be by our parents. Even the best parents cannot love us perfectly, and our job—if we want to truly grow up—is to mourn that fact. We have to experience the feelings of pain, shame, and anger that we felt as children, but which we’ve long repressed since they are such difficult emotions to feel.

When I was a chaplain at Emory Hospital a couple of years ago, I had a supervisor who sat me down in her office every week and asked me how my visits with patients had gone. At first, I told her, “They were good,” mostly believing what I said.

As the year went on, however, I realized that a lot more was going on in my heart. One day I was sitting with a patient’s husband who was fuming at the way the hospital staff was treating his wife. The more he talked the more the volume of his voice rose. I found myself thinking about how I could get out of this hospital waiting room. I couldn’t leave, though, because it was my job to be there. Once I realized that there was nowhere to go, my mind started to wander, and I thought about all the other tasks I had to finish that day. Meanwhile, this man plowed ahead in his criticism of the doctors and nurses.

When I talked about this conversation with my supervisor, she asked me, “What did you feel while talking with this man?” I could tell her what I thought: let’s get the heck out of here! It was harder for me to access my emotions, though. Eventually, I named it. I was afraid. I was afraid of this person’s anger, and I was even afraid of my own anger that it might trigger.

That day I realized that I didn’t want to feel any unpleasant emotions and that I had some tricks up my sleeve for how to avoid feeling them.

The main point that I’m taking away from The Drama of the Gifted Child is that if I want to grow up and become an adult (instead of a twentysomething child), I have to experience the pain of these undesired feelings.

Why should I go back to childhood, as it were, and experience this pain rather than just pick up and move on with my life?

Well, because history repeats itself, including our own personal histories.

I’m in a helping profession. I’ve been called by God to walk alongside students who are asking big questions about their lives and trying to figure out what it means to grow up. I want them to become more knowledgeable about their faith. I want them to become skilled in their discipline. But above all, I want them to experience the love of Jesus that frees them from their pain and allows them to love God and others with abandon.

The only way out is through.

Miller puts it this way:

The true opposite of depression is neither gaiety nor absence of pain, but vitality—the freedom to experience spontaneous feelings. It is part of the kaleidoscope of life that these feelings are not only happy, beautiful, or good but can reflect the entire range of human experience, including envy, jealousy, rage, disgust, greed, despair, and grief. But this freedom cannot be achieved if its childhood roots are cut off. Our access to the true self is possible only when we no longer have to be afraid of the intense emotional world of early childhood. (61)

Although as far as I can tell she’s not a Christian, I recognize in her words much of the journey that God has taken me on in the last couple of years. What God wants for us is freedom: the freedom to accept the love that he pours out on us and the freedom to love others lavishly. We’re not going to be able to do it if we don’t let him heal the wounds from our childhood.

I am a master at staying busy. Some people think that I am a mystic because I am introverted. They think that I spend my time meditating on the deep mysteries of life. In reality, I spend much of my time worrying about what I’ll be eating for lunch. (But don’t tell anyone that.) Introverts aren’t somehow better at being quiet in the sense of quieting the mind and stilling the heart to be in the healing presence of God.

Three times, though, in the last several months I have been in that place of quiet before the presence of the Lord. I wrote about one of those moments here. For all of them, I was praying with other people; in fact, they were praying for me. When they asked God to heal me, memories and feelings from childhood came up each time. Why?

Because I’ve avoided them for so long. There was a coal mining accident in my heart. I’ve broken the shaft and buried everything deep. Only in prayer, in the presence of trusted people and a trustworthy Lord, have I been safe enough for those memories and feelings to arise.

I don’t know exactly what healing is going to look like. I think that it will involve a freedom from fear, in which I’ll be able to experience anger, shame, and the like without panicking. I think that it will draw me closer to the Lord. I think that it will allow me to sit with others who are in pain more patiently.

I think it will transform the drama of the gifted child into the comedy of the loved child. Comedy in the sense that Frederick Buechner talked about it:

“Blessed are you that weep now, for you shall laugh,” Jesus says (Luke 6:21). That means not just that you shall laugh when the time comes, but that you can laugh a little even now in the midst of the weeping because you know that the time is coming. All appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, the ending will be a happy ending. That is what the laughter is about. It is the laughter of faith. It is the divine comedy.

Come, Lord, and heal us of our wounds, that we might be like children again, laughing with you at the goodness beyond the pain. Amen.