"A Closer Look at Unworthiness"

Do you ever feel unworthy to receive good things in your life? It’s not an easy question to answer. Some of you are in touch with your feelings of not deserving. Some of you are not. I dare say that feelings of unworthiness are present in most of us, although we might not be aware of them. The first step in overcoming these feelings is to become aware of them. This can’t only be a mental process. Feelings of unworthiness need to be recognized and felt, before healing can happen.

Joyce and I see many people in our counseling practice who deny any feelings of unworthiness. These same people show some of the classic signs of unworthiness: difficulty asking for what they need, most forms of procrastination, resistance to lifestyle improvement, not taking good enough care of themselves, or problems with addiction. There are perhaps many times when we resist something good simply because we don’t believe we deserve it.

Where do these feelings of unworthiness come from? Our childhood can hold some important clues. In a previous article, “How We Internalize Blame” (on our website, SharedHeart.org), I wrote about a violent act by my mother and the message given to me that her violence was my fault. I learned that I deserved violence … not helpful! But I very much needed to become aware of this feeling, before I could learn on a feeling level that no child deserves violence.

I also learned in my childhood that love was conditional. I needed to earn love by being extra good. So as an adult, and a doctor/psychotherapist, the more I helped people, the more good I did in the world, the more I deserved to be happy (or so I unconsciously thought). But this never worked because it was a flawed concept. Perhaps twenty years ago, at a couple’s retreat at Rowe Conference Center in Massachusetts, I vulnerably shared these feelings. Scott Kalechstein Grace, our musician and assistant, suggested I experiment with lying on one of the couches in the back of the room and completely letting go of leading the workshop. He said, “Don’t worry, Joyce and I can lead the workshop just fine.” Just then, an older man suggested I lie with my head in his lap so he could father me and keep giving me the message that I was perfectly worthy without having to do a thing, without having to prove my worthiness.

It was a fabulous experience! I really let go. Even though I only lay there for perhaps twenty minutes, I returned with a whole new feeling of worthiness that did not depend on doing anything. I became a human being rather than a human doing. It’s simply not possible to earn love or happiness. Love and happiness are our birthright.

The healing of unworthiness lies in understanding our dual nature. I’ve said this before but it’s worth saying again: we are both human beings having a spiritual experience AND we are spiritual beings having a human experience. If we identify with either one, and push away the other, we delay our healing of unworthiness. If we’re only human beings having a spiritual experience, we become too identified with our unworthiness, and so cannot let it go. If we’re only spiritual beings having a human experience, we risk minimizing or even denying our human feelings, including unworthiness.

Healing our unworthiness depends on our acceptance of our humanity and our divinity. Here’s an example. Many years ago, Ram Dass lived close to us and was an important teacher for us. He was writing a book about his guru, and had not spoken in public in many months. Then he received an invitation to speak at a local college, the University of California Santa Cruz. We saw him the day of the talk. He admitted to us that he felt more nervous than he had in many years. He felt unworthy to speak as a teacher to so many people. And he had been praying deeply for divine help.

Joyce and I went to the talk that evening. We told him later that it was the best talk he had ever given. He actually agreed. He said he was more in touch with his humanity … and his unworthiness … than ever before. As a result, he also opened more to his divinity and his need for divine help.

One of my heroes is Saint Francis, a man who was intimate with his unworthiness. He actually took unworthiness to a whole new level. He often stood in the Piazza del Comune, the village square in Assisi, dressed in rags and acting like a fool. Even now he is still referred to as the “Fool of God.” People called him names, spit at him. Children threw rocks at him. All the while, he thanked God for the bad treatment. He actually celebrated his unworthiness! Was he a masochist? Not at all. He felt so close to his beloved Jesus while he was being abused. He became completely identified with Christ who also suffered even worse abuse. As a result, Francis also rose into a spiritual ecstasy, into a true awareness of his divine worthiness, his full divinity.

Okay, maybe it’s a bit of a stretch to celebrate your unworthiness. But still you can accept these feelings as part of accepting your full human condition. Only then can you more fully accept your divine condition and open to your original worthiness. We have always been worthy. We are all divine beings too. Nothing we have ever done, or could ever do, can take away our inherent worthiness. Yes, we all make mistakes, some very big ones too. But we are not our mistakes. We are sparks of the one divine light. We deserve all the good the universe has to offer. When we know our worthiness, we are then free to give all of our love and make our dreams come true.

Here are a few opportunities to bring more love and growth into your life, at the following longer events led by Barry and Joyce Vissell:

Oct 11-17 — Assisi Retreat, Italy

Feb 4-11, 2018 — Hawaii Couples Retreat on the Big Island

Joyce & Barry Vissell, a nurse/therapist and psychiatrist couple since 1964, are counselors near Santa Cruz, CA, who are widely regarded as among the world's top experts on conscious relationship and personal growth. They are the authors of The Shared Heart, Models of Love, Risk to Be Healed, The Heart’s Wisdom, Meant to Be, and A Mother’s Final Gift.

Call 831-684-2299 or write to the Shared Heart Foundation, P.O. Box 2140, Aptos, CA 95001, for further information on counseling sessions by phone or in person, their books, recordings or their schedule of talks and workshops. Visit their web site at SharedHeart.org for their free monthly e-heartletter, their updated schedule, and inspiring past articles on many topics about relationship and living from the heart.

"What would your sign say?"

January 21 will long be remembered as the day of the women’s marches. It is so inspiring that women from each continent participated, even Antarctica. We just watched a women’s march that took place in Israel in which Jewish and Arab women marched together. We could not read their signs but I could only imagine that they all wanted peace. There seems to have been such a feeling of joy within these marches.

Barry and I had scheduled our second mentorship four day session during this time, not knowing that these marches would take place. I woke up that morning feeling that something special must be done to honor all of the women and men marching all around the world, and in some way join in their energy. And so Barry and I and the nine women in our group sat at our dining room table and made our own signs using large pieces of paper, crayons, markers and colored pencils. We asked each woman to express the deepest feeling they would like to put on their sign, just as if they would be on full display in Washington DC.

When the signs were finished, we went into the living room and each person stood up with their sign and spoke why the words were so meaningful to them. In this way each person gave a little talk which was inspiring and also insightful into who they are and their deepest values.

My sign was quite simple and said, “Love one another as I have loved you --Jesus.” I have always loved this quote, and my mother repeated it to me often when I was growing up. Jesus loved all people. They did not have to be his own Jewish religion for him to love them and reach out to help. He gave water to a non-Jewish woman at a well, which was forbidden to do. He helped a prostitute and saw goodness in her so that she wanted to change her life and follow him. He had dinner at a tax collector’s house, a man that everyone despised. He even invited another tax collector to be one of his followers. Even his own disciples criticized him for opening his heart and love to so many different types of people that others were shunning. And his response was that he came to help all, a true sense of equality. Equality and love for all beings is what I want to march for.

Barry went last to hold up his sign and we all loved it. “I am a man dedicated to making it safe for all women.” Truly this is who Barry is. Can you only imagine a world in which more men could hold up a sign like that and truly mean it? I posted Barry holding this sign on my very small Facebook page and am pleased with how far this photo went. It is a message needed at this time.

After each person spoke about their sign we then marched around our living room holding our signs and singing a powerful song. We felt connected to each person who was out marching the streets in towns and cities around the world.

Did the marches all over the world do any good?

Forty-eight years ago, Barry and I were in one of the first civil rights marches in the south. We lived in Nashville, Tennessee at the time and we heard about a civil rights march several hours away in the deeper rural south. We, along with our friend Jim, were excited to go and participate. We reached this small southern town and a man named Dick Gregory was there as the organizer and speaker. There were many blacks, but we were the only whites. We were welcomed, but told it was more dangerous for us as whites. We marched with these poor blacks down the streets of the town. The whites looking on yelled and cursed at us and some threw things. It was loud and noisy and scary, but we continued down the street. Then it became violent. The police came and started using clubs and arresting people. One of the organizers told us to leave quickly as they would be hardest on us. Like Harry Potter and the invisible cloak, we left undetected and drove home realizing that we had placed ourselves in a very dangerous situation. There must have been TV coverage of the march, for the next day I was called into my place of work as a public health nurse and told I could never march again or I would lose my job and never be able to get another one in the city.

One march. Did it do any good? Was our effort and putting ourselves in danger worth it? I like to feel that yes it was. True it was only a drop in the bucket of what had to happen, and yet it was a drop and we participated in that drop. Forty years later, our country proudly elected our first black president. All those marches, all those signs, all of that effort in the end truly paid off.

What would your sign say? As a really good practice, sit at your dining room table with crayons or markers and paper and make a sign that holds your deepest feeling about what is going on right now in our world. Make it positive, inspiring and loving, something you could show your children and explain why you wrote what you did. Or you could sit with a group of friends and create your signs together, or sit with your children and talk about it. Your sign, and especially how you live the truth of what it says, will place another drop into the bucket of what is needed right now.  

Here are a few opportunities to bring more love and growth into your life, at the following longer events led by Barry and Joyce Vissell:

Oct 11-17 — Assisi Retreat, Italy

Joyce & Barry Vissell, a nurse/therapist and psychiatrist couple since 1964, are counselors near Santa Cruz, CA, who are widely regarded as among the world's top experts on conscious relationship and personal growth. They are the authors of The Shared Heart, Models of Love, Risk to Be Healed, The Heart’s Wisdom, Meant to Be, and A Mother’s Final Gift.

Call Toll-Free 1-800-766-0629 (locally 831-684-2299) or write to the Shared Heart Foundation, P.O. Box 2140, Aptos, CA 95001, for further information on counseling sessions by phone or in person, their books, recordings or their schedule of talks and workshops. Visit their web site at SharedHeart.org for their free monthly e-heartletter, their updated schedule, and inspiring past articles on many topics about relationship and living from the heart.

"Feeling ALL Our Feelings"

There are popular feelings: joy, happiness, love and affection, to name a few. And then there are unpopular feelings: anger, sadness, grief, hurt, and fear, among others. Most of us tend to hide the unpopular feelings and, instead, only feel and show the popular ones.

If we want integrity and wholeness in our lives, we must embrace all our feelings. Picking and choosing simply won’t work. Believe me, I’ve tried it plenty, and in a bit I’ll tell you what happened to me.

Remember, there are no good or bad feelings. There are just feelings. They make us divinely human and humanly divine. It may not be necessary to express them all with others, but we need to be aware of them within ourselves. Feelings are part of our experience here on Earth. Our feelings don’t define us. As souls in these bodies, we are always more than our feelings. Still, they are vital.

Joyce and I recently remembered a powerful experience I had starting out as a resident in psychiatry. I was especially fixated on only feeling … and showing … the above-mentioned popular feelings. I was able to fool a lot of people by my appearance of unswerving peace and happiness. I was not able to fool two persons in particular. One was Joyce. She always saw what I really felt. She saw right through my false pretense, even when I didn’t. She knew when I was angry, even though I was smiling. She knew when I was sad, even when I had no clue.

The other person I could never fool was Leo Buscaglia, the author of many books on love, and our friend while we lived in Los Angeles during my final two years of medical school. He was not polite with me. If I wasn’t being genuine, he’d get right in my face and say, “Barry, you’re being phony right now!” I actually appreciated his candor, and felt the “tough love” in his honesty. Unfortunately, when we moved up to Portland for my residency training, I hadn’t yet learned how to be genuine with my feelings.

That was about to change. Early on in my psychiatry training, the first-year residents, eleven of us and our spouses, were required to attend a five-day intensive led by Lee Fine, a master-teacher of psychodrama. I should add that the year was 1973, and a significant part of the five days would be better termed “Encounter Group.”

All of the participants became vulnerable, showed their fears, their sadness, their grief over losses in their lives. One resident went over the top in the expression of his vulnerability, and described, through his tears, coming home from school as a child and discovering his father hanging in the garage.

I showed no vulnerability, no fear, no pain. Instead, I presented myself with a smile on my face and peace in my life. Some of the residents were gentle and compassionate in their probing for my depth. Yet my smiling mask never faltered. Looking back at my level of emotional immaturity, it’s embarrassing to me now.

One by one, all the residents came around me and began confronting me. Each, in their own way, asked me to be more genuine and honest with all my feelings.

One resident asked, “How can I feel close to you if you’re pretending to be happy all the time?”

Another said, “It looks like you’re hiding behind a mask.”

And yet another blurted out angrily, “It’s pissing me off how phony you’re being right now!”

Still, I remained frozen in my phony happiness. I just was not able to access my “unpopular” feelings.

So the confrontation escalated. Some of the residents were angry at my apparent resistance. Forget psychodrama. This was pure 1970’s encounter group. I was sitting on the floor while all ten residents stood above me. I felt real compassion coming from some of them.

Finally, something broke inside me. I just wasn’t strong enough to withstand the mixed barrage of love and anger. I started crying … then sobbing. I had flashes of being a little boy and not wanting my tormentors in the tough neighborhood in Brooklyn to know that I was scared and hurt. I learned to show the world how strong I was. I learned that my vulnerability couldn’t be trusted with anyone else. It was me against the world.

In that moment of the workshop, I felt completely vulnerable with ten psychiatry residents. Now they could pounce on me and finish me off. I was defenseless.

But that didn’t happen. When I opened my eyes, I saw the gentlest, most caring faces looking down at me. I saw loving fathers, mothers, siblings and friends. I heard gentle compassion in their words. I felt accepted … and acceptable. It was a moment of coming-out as a sensitive, vulnerable human being.

It was also a turning point in my life. From that moment on, I knew my spiritual and human growth depended on my opening to all my feelings. I have accepted this work as essential. I’m far from perfect at identifying my feelings. It’s hard work. Sometimes, when I need Joyce’s love, I push her away instead. Sometimes, when I feel hurt, I still rationalize and talk myself out of the feeling. But I do recognize that, because I am committed to feeling all my feelings, I am becoming a better counselor, teacher, husband, father … and person.

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