INSECURITY
by Forrest Church
October 5, 2003
Opening the year, I am giving a short sermon series on fear, drawn from my new book, Freedom from Fear, which will come out early next summer. Last week I spoke about guilt. Week after next, I shall talk about dread. And I shall close the series with my reflections on fear and freedom in America today. This morning, however, my topic is insecurity.
If fright is triggered by real danger, worry by imagining all the terrible things that might happen to us, and guilt by a bad or fretful conscience, insecurity almost always comes packaged with feelings of inadequacy. Insecurity is a form of narcissism. Being self-conscious, we are less conscious of others. For the same reason, we stand apart or feel apart, even in a crowd. With perfect one-way X-ray vision, we feel conspicuous in a world filled with people who appear to know exactly how to dress for life’s every occasion. When fraught by feelings of inadequacy, we want nothing more than simply to disappear. Success and failure; public speaking; crowds; the telephone; and, authorities: these things, among many others, trigger insecurity and leave us scattering for cover.
When we are asked to rate the things that scare us most, public speaking almost always tops the list. No wonder. It presents insecurity with the perfect opening. We are standing in front of a group of people whose eyes are fixed upon us, on the lookout for the slightest flaw in our appearance or delivery. Even those of us who speak in public all the time must walk through our fear on the way to the podium. Once we begin, our feelings of inadequacy abate, but let a single person get up and walk out in the middle of what we are saying and they return with a vengeance. If we happen to lose our place or forget our train of thought, fear freezes us. Insecurity turns into panic.
Insecurity can strike at any time, even when we are sleeping. Most so-called "anxiety dreams" are basically insecurity dreams. One version familiar to many of us is set in school. It is the last week of classes and we are about to graduate. But then we remember that we have one more exam to take. Unfortunately this test is on a subject that we know nothing about. Our graduation hinges on passing this course. So close to success, we are certain now to fail and can’t do a thing about it. I must have had some version of this dream dozens of times when I was in school and over the years to follow. But for the most part, since entering the ministry, the same nightmare has taken a vocational turn. It has to do with public speaking.
It is Sunday morning. I have lost track of the time, if not the entire day. Suddenly I realize that I am on in five minutes. I don’t have my robe. I don’t have my manuscript. In a panic, I rush through the church offices–a suddenly unfamiliar rabbit warren–desperately searching first for my robe and sermon and then for the sanctuary. This search is thwarted by locked doors and labyrinthine passageways. Finally, I happen upon the door to the chancel, entering a church full of expectant worshipers.
Off balance already, at this point in the dream I begin to unravel completely. The service has already begun; my papers are out of order; I can’t find my Bible for the reading; when I do, I can’t find my place in it; I begin speaking anyway, making things up as I go along; the microphone doesn’t work, so no one can hear my voice; people get restive and begin leaving; I rush to plug in the sound system and get tangled in a snake pit of wires; returning to the chancel, I have no idea where we are in the liturgy and can’t find my order of worship; I look out and the church is half empty; I happen to glance down, horrified to discover I’m wearing no pants; I begin preaching, without a clue as to what I am saying; only a few worshipers are left in the pews; I decide to offer the benediction but can’t remember how it goes, so I run for the exit; and then I wake up.
Lawyers tell me they sometimes dream of showing up in the wrong courtroom or without their briefing papers. Doctors find themselves in the middle of a complicated operation unable to place their hands on the necessary surgical instruments. Teachers can’t find their classroom and when they do the children get up and leave. Perhaps the most harrowing anxiety dream I have ever heard came courtesy of a waitress I was counseling. With her as its hapless star, it included everything that could possibly go wrong in a restaurant.
Despite their distinctive settings, there are elements common to such dreams. Whether we find ourselves in a meeting, outdoors in a crowd, or riding in a packed elevator, most of us have had the sinking experience of looking down to discover that we forgot to put our pants on. That’s precisely what insecurity feels like–being naked in public.
To feel exposed is to feel inadequate. We shouldn’t beat ourselves up over this. Not everyone suffers from an occasionally fragile ego, but the old psychological term for individuals who function with an almost non-existent capacity for insecurity is "character disorder." Most of us, however, could afford a little less insecurity–a little less concern about appearances. We can get so tangled up in our emotional underwear that it is hardly possible to walk into a room without feeling vulnerable. Cringing from the imagined judgment of others–who are fretting more over their own emotional wedgies than anyone else’s–we succumb instead to the merciless critic within.
Why do we feel inadequate as often as we do? For one thing, because being human is intrinsically awkward. We are not driven only by instinct. We make thousands of little decisions every day, from the moment we wake up in the morning to right before we drift off to sleep at night. The simplest doubt–such as, did we chose the right clothes when we got dressed this morning?–can keep us off balance all day long. Because we doubt ourselves, we naturally assume that others must be questioning us as well, shaking their heads as we pass, wondering what possibly could we have been thinking when we pulled that particular combination off the rack in the closet. Insecurity is self-consciousness. Rather than being conscious of the world around us, we fixate how we appear to the world around us.
With the possible exception of worry, insecurity is the most contagious of fears. We catch it from each other in a backhanded way. For instance, one person may compensate for her feelings of insecurity by putting others down. She doesn’t become any more secure by doing this, but those whom she puts down certainly feel less secure. As sensitive as she may be to criticism or slights, she is utterly insensitive to how her own words or actions may be hurtful. This drives others away, which adds to her own insecurity by isolating her from the kinds of personal connections that might help her to overcome it. Insecurity is rooted in isolation, an isolation we more often create than inherit. Either we drive people away or we run from them.
Insecurity accompanies us into unfamiliar situations. One parishioner laughingly told me that when she walks into to a room full of strangers her hands begin to grow. What is she to do with these conspicuous, throbbing hands? I told her that this is one reason men have pockets in their trousers. Since she wears dresses, I more helpfully suggested that, the next time this happens, she might consider avoiding all eye contact and finding, if possible, a bulletin board or kiosk, one with hundreds of notices on it. Read the notices, I said. Over time, I told her, her hands will probably begin to shrink. Then, with hands the size of everybody else’s, she may be ready for the room. I did add, if she’s looking for a short cut, all she has to do is go up to somebody who is standing all alone and introduce herself to him. Odds are, he will be just as relieved as she is to be thinking about someone other than himself. This whole conversation may sound silly to you, but it never feels silly when we crippled by self-consciousness.
All forms of fear trigger a fight or flight response–we either defend ourselves or run for cover. One problem with insecurity is that both fight and flight make it worse. Charles Darwin observed, "The free expression by outward signs of emotion intensifies it." Even as brooding on our anger makes us angrier, emotional insecurity feeds itself. By "fighting" it, we get more entangled in it. "Fleeing" such feelings doesn’t solve the problem either. When we bury emotions, they fester.
Since insecurity is a form of narcissism, the secret to overcoming it lies in breaking the grip of self-absorption. Like our pew mate’s throbbing hands, most insecurity ranges from unnecessary to senseless. Little things that might possibly happen to expose or embarrass us–all the million "mortifying" ways in which we can, figuratively speaking, spill tomato juice down the front of our shirt–won’t cause much of a blip on any radar screen except ours. When we find ourselves fixating on our inadequacies, the best thing to do, therefore, is to turn off our own monitor and tune in to someone else’s. Group therapy is often successful, because, by listening to others, we discover that they feel just as inadequate as we do. Problem solving with a friend will also place our problems in perspective.
In addition to finding strength in numbers, we might seek it by sneaking a peak at the clock. One member of the congregation has come up with the "one hour rule" about any experience she is emotionally at sea about–chairing a meeting, say, or delivering a speech. In one hour, more or less, it will be over. And what’s an hour in the context of an entire life? When we neglect the "one hour rule," insecurity can pervade our entire existence. To counter it, we need only remember, first, that we are not alone, and, second, that the feeling will soon pass. How much better this is than getting lost in our own reflections.
The Greek story of Narcissis is the tale of a boy who falls in love with his reflection in a pool, wastes away on the banks of the water, and dies. Mirrors are complicated. Our reflection in them is altered by our reflections upon it. Self-conscious about our inadequacies, we drown not in our reflection but in our reflections. Drowning in our reflections is a perfect metaphor for self-absorption.
I heard the Reverend William Sloane Coffin say once, "There is no smaller package in the world than someone who is all wrapped up in himself." Fear can prompt this in several ways. When we are all wrapped up in our worries, guilt-feelings, and insecurities, we have no room to maneuver. We can’t lighten up, because matters are too grave. To open the present is no answer, because the present is dreadful. It is all we can do simply to escape from it. As for what we have, who would want it? And we can’t act, because nothing we do ever turns our right. Life is stupid. We are worthless. Or victims. Or the subject of a vast, hidden conspiracy. When we feel like this, there is only one way to improve the picture: remove ourselves from the middle of it. The mirrors we look into improve greatly, when the thing that catches our attention in them isn’t us.
The ultimate goal is to devote our precious attention to something more sustaining than mere appearances. Life’s occasions may seem longer when we fret our way through them one painful minute at a time, but time exists to lose ourselves in, not to count. When we lose ourselves, time passes like a dream, not a nightmare.
When time passes like a dream, should someone ask us how people seemed to respond to what we wore to life’s ball the other evening, we won’t need to ponder the answer. We came as we were. It’s as simple as that. Once the party got started, we had no time to devote our precious attention to anything as unimportant as mere appearances. The hours absolutely flew by, as they always do when we are not fretting our way through them minute by minute.
We can recall loosening our collar and kicking off your shoes. Our hands? All we really remember is the hand we were holding. As for the ball itself, it passed like a dream, not a nightmare. What an evening it was! How glad we are that we came. The life of the party, we danced until morning. Unafraid of the darkness, we saw in the dawn.