Of course, there could be other reasons, as well, which I will leave to the readers' imagination, but as of this writing, it is only the Americans that this seems to pertain to. (By the way, I'm an American too, but I consider myself an equal opportunity critiquer, and I think that my American readers may be perhaps a certain class of Americans.)
So I see that those Americans might really like me to keep on that kind of simple autobiographical mode. Very interesting. Then maybe I shouldn't do that. What do you think? Should I just give them what they want? It could be my old boss among them (the director of the mission now). As Evgeni Zamyatin said in "We", in discussing how to deal with the overarching control of the state, "You have to think, it helps." (Nado dumat', eto pomagaet'.) That's what got me through my years in Vienna... barely. Why stop now?
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The next text is:Seidel, Andrew B. (1981, Summer). Developing a healthy self-image. Military Chaplains' Review, 49-59.
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"Certainly Jesus Christ neither lived nor advocated a life that would qualify by today's standards as 'self-actualized. 'For the Christian the self is the problem, not the potential paradise."That's true, the gifts of the spirit are not for personal building up and to make you feel good, that's not what they are intended for. I don't know of any passage where people in the Bible said they "felt good" for giving to others or helping others. Often they were acknowledged or thanked for doing something, but what the givers and doers felt is not an issue evidently. And the focus is more on meeting needs. Individuals are given spiritual gifts to meet various needs and they use them for good.
However, the church is supposed to value each member of the Body, so that one part can't say to another part that s/he doesn't need the other (I Cor. 12:14-23), no matter how apparently insignificant the role a person plays in the church. (I underline apparently because that's just a biased view and not God's view of the individual's role in the church.)
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"A person's self-concept is also the product of his own evaluation of his experiences. All of us react to our experiences by making value judgments about them. When we succeed in accomplishmeing something we desired to do, we feel good about ourselves. When we do not succeed, we place a negative value judgement on ourselves for failing and feel bad about positive self-image. A number of failures to meet our own goals would tend to produce a negative self-image. It is, however, extremely difficult to talk about value judgments as being strictly individual because our goals and values are so heavily influenced by other people." (p. 52)The mission already crushed my self esteem by sending me home to the U.S. in the 5th month of my time with them. I was reading through some of my notes from them and the contrast from the sommer of 1987 to the fall of 1987 was amazing. They did it to me. What else could it be? But it wasn't how they want to make it out to be as much as they are dying to do so. They want so much to say that I just couldn't stand the stress, as if I was trying to cooperate, but couldn't. But that isn't so. This is how it really was: I was withstanding their pressures to conform and couldn't stand the stress. There's a big difference. I never did try to fully cooperate.
Even after the counseling in the USA, I had decided just to cooperate in the areas that wouldn't impinge on my values. That's like me not being a cultural relativist and being okay with taking my shoes off at the door but as soon as you start impinging on my moral beliefs I won't budge. I wouldn't budge with the mission either. So for them to say that I just couldn't stand the stress is really misleading, because the reason I couldn't stand the stress was because I was withstanding them the their pressures. And in a lot of ways, I was flaunting it actually, by having friends come from the States, going to the Austrian church, insisting on my own apartment, etc. And I didn't come running to them all broken like I was supposed to by the stressors they were throwing at me either, and I wasn't telling anyone about what I was thinking about all the things they were throwing at me. So they had no clue what I was thinking at all, except that I was cheerful and under stress, which I'd told a couple secretaries.
The Vienna mission really broke my self-concept a lot, but I knew that everything I'd done with them I'd done well and they never said otherwise. But it was humiliating that I knew I could do a lot more than they ever had me do. And the fact that when they finally did have me go on mission trips and I did well and they seemed to think so too that I knew that I had redeemed myself and proved to myself and them too that I really was everything I knew all along I was and everything they treated me like I wasn't.
But, still, I returned home to the U.S. humiliated and there was no getting around that. I was devastated and all the humillation that I'd had to live with and bury inside myself all those 2 years I was finally free to release. But then I had to find people who would believe me, and that was a very hard thing to do it turned out.
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"For most people it does not matter whether these values are right or wrong. What does matter is that the majority of people hold these values." (p. 54)The author is talking specifically here about physical attractiveness and intelligence, but for me I'd like to just discuss this in general. The thing is that I've had to go against the flow both in Vienna with the mission and in Russia with the Komsomols (! that's not how they billed themselves), so I've gotten sort of used to not really caring what people think too much and just going by my own judgment and value system, which generally isn't too far off, but sometimes could use a little fine tuning for contextualization.
It's just hard now with the hurts I've been through. I try to learn from the mistakes I make now though (Oops! I guess I should have let my guard down there and considered what the group values were...) I think people who have been through extremely difficult or painful situations often have some kind of re-learning to do that might take time to get comfortable with certain kinds of situations again. I know I'm not being very clear, but I don't really want to go into examples.
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"Because a person's self-image is constructed primarily from interpersonal relationships (particularly with his parents), his self-image may be modified through the same process." (p. 57)I would like to have more interpersonal relationships, but how? Last Friday I went out with a gal from church, maybe 15 years or so my elder. We just had dinner and went to her place for dessert, which I brought, and sat around and talked. I got home late, just wiped out and it was too much for me so the next day I was sort of set back somewhat. Then Sunday it turned out my migraine indeed had gotten worse, so now I have an appointment tomorrow with the neurologist about it, and I missed church Sunday.
When I first moved here I had a friend from the government agency library branch down here that was the same as the agency I was working for in the D.C. area. We got along great and when I got sick she came to me, which was nice, but then she started trying to get me to make new friends, but she didn't understand how hard it was being sick. I was trying to go to a Scrabble group and church and a midweek Bible study, but those were all sporadic, depending on how I felt. So it was hard to make friends, and still is. Eventually we just sort of drifted apart, and then I moved up to New York.
Then I came back yere and I have a couple acquaintances, but no real friends, I don't think. There's no one I can just buddy around with, no one I can just call up and chat with (or e-mail, or whatever), no one to have coffee with. Since I'm not well and don't have a lot of energy, I would need someone who understands that and isn't very demanding. Even just stopping by for half an hour or an hour for coffee or tea would be nice.
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"The desired end result is a more accurate, balanced, and healthy self-concept." (p. 58)Seidel is determined to treat the individual's self-concept, and since he is, I guess this is a reasonable secular end-result.
I assume by accurate, he means not over or less then the truth.
And by balanced, he means considering various aspects of the person, or perhaps various perspectives.
And, finally, by healthy, he means constructive, rather than emotionally destructive.
God would definitely want "accurate", so I don't think that that's an issue. I say that because He is interested in the truth.
I'm not sure what God would say about "balanced", because I think that "balanced" could be used as a kind of self-rationalization for sin, so it depends on how "balanced" is used.
As to "healthy", I don't think God is so interested in that. God is interested primarily in whether something is morally right or wrong. But I think that if something is morally right it will more than likely be also "healthy." I don't know all the different cases and situations for what is morally right to say for sure, but I'm pretty sure that will be the case. That is, if a self-concept is morally right (or upright), then it will also be healthy.
Okay, so let's say we're left with an accurate / truthful and morally right /healthy self-concept as the ideal that God might want for the Christian.
I think I had an accurate view of my knowledge and skills and this was born out by the time I left Vienna, such as during the mission trips I took. Also, my view of myself in these areas was based on actual experiences and feedback from others prior to coming to Vienna so I had concrete reason to believe that these things about myself were true.
In contrast, when I left the mission feeling a huge failure there was not a whole lot to hang that feeling on except the way the mission treated me like moving me around so much and things like that. Otherwise, they did nothing to negate the fact that the previous things I knew I could do I could still do and still knew. They only humiliated me. So they didn't have evidence that I didn't know how to do things, such as type or file or travel in Eastern Europe, etc. That is, my self-confidence was at least in part because I was dashed because I was "standing up on the inside," for example, and the repercussions of that stance. Being my father's daughter may have made standing up on the inside a more heinous crime than it otherwise might have been, resulting in a stronger and more multi-faceted backlash.
So the humiliated self-concept I had when I returned from Vienna was not at all accurate to the true me, but it was what the Vienna mission did to me, through the way they treated me.
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That's it for this article.