mms wrote:...with it as usual.
At MAAD, a new thread was posted on how to avoid "guilt trips" and find joy.
Luigi responded as follows:
I see this [guilt] with my believing wife. I tell her repeatedly how wonderful she is and how she does so much and yet she continually insists that she isn't good enough and she needs to be better. She lives the expectations of the Church better than almost any member I've ever met (with the only exception that comes to mind being one relative of hers) and yet she is constantly expressing feelings of inadequacy and even unworthiness for the most trivial things.
Personally I don't think there is a remedy to such situations which would leave Mormon doctrine intact. I tried all of the Mormon doctrine approaches when I was a believer and now (as I also did as a believer)I reassure her that she is an incredibly moral, compassionate, all-around good person.
Then comes Pahoran quoting Luigi and responding as follows:
Perhaps you need to step back and take a more holistic approach. Perhaps she is displacing her feelings of inadequacy, etc., over quite a different cause.
In other words, perhaps you might try reassuring her that she is not to blame for your wrong choices.
Personally I don't think you are much of an authority on Mormon doctrine.
Regards,
Pahoran
To think, this guy actually believes he does good with his comments. Of course, no one on his "team" will take him to task for this clearly un-christlike display. Par for the course.
Perhaps someone needs to point him to Stephen Robinson's telling anecdote about his wife found in
Believing Christ, 14-17. It appears that she had the same struggle:
Let me illustrate. A number of years ago our family lived in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. Things were pretty good there. We owned our own little home in a nice neighborhood, and we liked our neighbors. I had a good job at a local college and was doing well in my career. Our family seemed happy enough. We had family home evening and family prayers regularly, and Janet and I said our prayers together every night. We held temple recommends and attended the temple as often as possible. I was in the bishopric in the local ward, and Janet was the Relief Society president.
Janet had a particularly exciting year that year. Besides being Relief Society president, she graduated from college for the second time (in accounting), she passed the CPA exam and took a job with a local firm, and she gave birth to our fourth child (Michael)-all in her spare time, of course.
Actually, Janet was under a lot of pressure that year, but like many husbands, I didn't notice or appreciate how much pressure she was under until something blew. And blow it did.
One day the lights just went out. It was as though Janet had died to spiritual things; she had burned out. She became very passive in her attitude toward the Church. When her Relief Society counselors called her, she told them that they could do whatever they wanted to, that she had asked to be released from her calling. One of the worst aspects of this sudden change was that Janet wouldn't talk about it; she wouldn't tell me what was wrong.
Finally, after almost two weeks, I made her mad with my nagging one night as we lay in bed, and she said, "All right. Do you want to know what's wrong? I'll tell you what's wrong-I can't do it anymore. I can't lift it. My load is just too heavy. I can't do all the things I'm supposed to. I can't get up at 5:30, and bake bread, and sew clothes, and help the kids with their homework, and do my own homework, and make their lunches, and do the housework, and do my Relief Society stuff, and have scripture study, and do my genealogy, and write my congressman, and go to PTA meetings, and get our year's supply organized, and go to my stake meetings, and write the missionaries . . . " She just started naming, one after the other, all the things she couldn't do or couldn't do perfectly-all the individual bricks that had been laid on her back in the name of perfection until they had crushed the light out of her.
"I try not to yell at the kids," she continued, "but I can't seem to help it; I get mad, and I yell. So then I try not to get mad, but I eventually do. I try not to have hard feelings toward this person and that person, but I do. I'm just not very Christlike. No matter how hard I try to love everyone, I fail. I don't have the talent Sister X has, and I'm just not as sweet as Sister Y. Steve, I'm just not perfect-I'm never going to be perfect, and I just can't pretend anymore that I am. I've finally admitted to myself that I can't make it to the celestial kingdom, so why should I break my back trying?"
Well, that was the beginning of one of the longest nights of our life together. I asked Janet, "Do you have a testimony?" She responded, "Of course I do-that's what's so terrible. I know the gospel is true, I just can't live up to it." I asked her if she had kept her baptismal covenants, and she replied, "No. I've tried and I've tried, but I can't keep all the commandments all the time." I asked her if she had kept the covenants she had made in the temple, and again she said, "I try, but no matter how hard I try, I don't seem to be able to do all that's asked of me."
Now I need to make it clear at this point that the reason I proposed marriage to Janet many years ago was because she is the finest, sweetest, most genuinely loving and selfless person I have ever met. So what she was telling me just didn't add up. So we went back and forth for some time with her cataloging all her faults, inadequacies, and imperfections, and with me knowing she was a better person than most and trying to find out what was really wrong. Finally it occurred to me what the problem was, and frankly, I was astounded. Here I was supposed to be a "doctor" in the field of religion, and I couldn't see Mt. Everest right in front of my nose. What I realized finally was that Janet did not completely understand the core of the gospel-the atonement of Christ. She knew the demands, but not the good news.
(Stephen E. Robinson, Believing Christ: The Parable of the Bicycle and Other Good News, 14-17)
Robinson suggests that this was due to a
lack of understanding of the LDS gospel. I wonder how common it is for women like Janet and Luigi's wife to misunderstand such things.
