Standing up for yourself is a form of justice work.

I like to please people, I like to make people happy, and I hate conflict. I easily pick up on other people’s moods and feelings, sometimes without them having to say a word. I’ve lived my life in this mode; and I’ve told myself that this way of being makes me a good priest and a good friend.

Recently I’ve been learning that not only is it deeply unhealthy for me to live this way, but it’s also not healthy for the people I minister to.

My life of people pleasing and avoidance of conflict comes at a deep personal cost. I spent years not speaking my truth in order to keep people happy. I avoided confronting people who are unhealthy and harmful because I wanted them to like me and be happy.

I stayed in situations and relationships and jobs much, much longer than it was healthy because I didn’t want to disappoint anyone or let anyone down. I spent time running through the 101 of trans identity, answering invasive and inappropriate questions, and doing people’s work for them.

And I thought this made me a good pastor, a good employee, a good teacher, a good friend, and a good person.

After all, I worked hard to make people happy and to do my job. After all, I was relentlessly loyal no matter what the cost. After all, it’s a pastor’s job to make people happy and comfort them. After all, if I don’t educate people about transgender issues how will they learn? After all, if I’m not nice all of the time (even when someone is being harmful or abusive), how will they know to change?

All of the “After All” statements above are patently untrue. This behavior helps no one. My fear, my avoidance of conflict, my refusal to set boundaries, helps no one. When I try extra hard to be nice all of the time, even when someone is being insulting or hurtful, this behavior hurts us both. Not only that, but my refusal to stand up for myself, to set boundaries both in my personal life and in my community, to say the hard truths, enables other people to remain in bad and unhealthy behavior.

Here’s what these behaviors look like in my life:

I’ve made myself available at all times and to all people no matter how burnt out I was

I’ve agonized over every piece of criticism even when I knew it was completely unfounded

I’ve spent hours explaining myself and trying to make people understand my decisions even when I was clear the first time

I’ve agreed to meet or speak with people even when I have felt unsafe in an effort to educate them

I’ve felt like I owed my time and attention to every single person that demanded it

I’ve said my truth and when I got pushback waffled and tried to hedge so as not to make anyone angry

I’ve tried to mold my actions, ideas, and more in order to make them more palatable to people

I’ve taken in the brunt of people’s emotions and thought that I had to absorb them

I’ve held myself responsible when people reacted to me with anger or by lashing out and tried to figure out what I had done wrong

I have ignored my intuition about people and given them second, third, fourth chances even when I felt from the get-go that they were toxic individuals (and chalked this up to good Christian duty)

I’ve ignored my intuition about people, situations, and environments that are unsafe in order to be what I thought was kind, generous, and giving.

This list could go on and on…

I’ve kept up with these things because I thought they made me mature and noble and empathetic and a good priest, even as they were eating away at me and keeping me from developing my own spiritual life and moving the ministries I am involved in toward greater health and growth.

Do you recognize any of this? Do you see these patterns in your own life?

I’m learning that I cannot manage people’s emotions for them. I cannot make them want to be healthy. I cannot make people want to grow or change or invest in things. I cannot control how people will respond to honesty or to my setting of boundaries.

What I can do is live honestly and authentically. I can set boundaries and honor them. I can be firm in my commitment to the truth and to my own spiritual, mental, and physical well-being. I can be committed to my own growth and education. I can be a non-anxious and self-differentiated leader (thanks to Edwin Friedman for those concepts. His book A Failure of Nerve is brilliant.) What I can do is learn and work on disentangling myself from other people’s reactions and emotions.

So these days I am trusting my gut. I am saying “No” to people and situations that are harmful.

I am setting boundaries and sticking to them.

I am speaking the truth in love and then refusing to justify myself when it’s not warranted.

I am refusing to get sucked into the emotional circles of other people.

I am learning my own weaknesses and working on them privately and with trusted friends so that they don’t come out in unhealthy ways in my congregation.

I am staying away from drama at all costs.

I am learning what emotional health looks like in my own life and how to keep from being dragged into emotionally unhealthy relationships.

I am saying “No” to more people and more opportunities so I can focus on the opportunities and people that are life-giving to me and where I really think I can make a difference.

What might you do to break out of these behaviors and patterns?

• Spend some time figuring out what gets you stuck or hooked into emotionally unhealthy relationships and how you might get unhooked. (As an example, for me it’s the fear of not being liked.)
• Find trusted friends who can help you think through criticism you receive so that you know what to listen to and what to discard.
• When something comes up, take some time before responding. You don’t owe anyone an immediate response.
• Listen to your gut: if someone or some situation feels unsafe, you can say no to it.
• Know that you don’t owe anyone your time or attention. You can say no without feeling guilty.
• Know that it’s okay to set boundaries and stick to them and that it’s okay to ask other people to respect your boundaries.
• Release yourself from being responsible to how other people react to you.

This is hard work. It’s hard internal work. It goes against my nature as a people-pleaser. It means that sometimes people will hurl accusations against me that are hurtful (that I’m mean, stuck up, arrogant, an asshole, a control freak, etc.) when in reality I am standing up for myself and working on emotional health and maturity. All of this means that I will disappoint people and probably make people angry (both things I hate to do). But it also means that I will be healthier, stronger, a better leader, less burnt out, and more able to do the ministry that I am called to do. Growth is a hard and painful thing, but I am learning that it’s very much worth it.

Your journey might not look exactly like mine; we all have our own emotional processes and places where we get sucked into toxic situations just as we have different needs around boundaries and how to get out of those situations. But we all have to do the work in order to be healthy and whole people and to protect our own hearts and minds as we move through the world.

Doing this work is all about standing in your own power: Standing in your power to define yourself. Standing in your power to set the boundaries that cause you to feel and be respected. Standing in your power to protect yourself.

Where do you need to stand in your power?

Photo by michaelkowalczyk.eu

It’s happened more times than I care to count. On a day when I desperately need to feel connected to the holy, to hear a word from God, to feel connected to the mystery, I drag myself out of bed and into something resembling nicer clothes. With fear and a lot of hope I get myself to a church and I file into a pew. My need makes me nervous, but it also makes me brave. A desperate brave, but a form of bravery all the same.

I sit and I wait. And invariably I am let down. A preacher delivers a lifeless (or even worse an offensive) sermon. People in the congregation are standoffish. Everyone seems to be going through the motions. I stumble back out onto the street feeling worse than I did when I walked in. Wondering, once again, why I so often feel disconnected from God.

Over the years I’ve heard from a lot of people wondering how to deal with spiritual disappointment. The question comes from those who have been kicked out of their churches, those who can’t find an affirming church near them, and those who have remained in their church but find that more often than not they aren’t getting their needs met.

They are desperate to hear the Gospel, the Good News, that will meet them where they are and give them a bit of hope to hold on to and too often they leave services feeling empty and alone. The desire to feel connected to the holy isn’t a selfish one. I would argue that it’s a primal need. We all long to be connected to the mystery of life, the universe, the community of our fellow human beings. For many of us we seek this connection in churches or other faith communities. But what happens when we feel consistently disappointed spiritually? What happens when the services leave us cold, or even worse, when they leave us wounded? How do we deal?

Over the years I have bounced from tradition to tradition. I have taken my faith apart completely and built it up again. I have had times of spiritual dryness and times of spiritual fire. I am well acquainted with spiritual disappointment. I don’t have a sure fire solution, but I do have one main thought:

You have to learn to feed yourself.

You have to learn to meet your own spiritual needs, outside of established communities. You have to find ways to learn what you need to know, to connect to the holy, to have rituals that feed you apart from the church.

It sucks and it’s not fair. It’s not fair that, as marginalized people, we also have to do the heavy lifting in order to keep our faith in tact. I wish I had a different answer for you, but I don’t. The truth is that in a world where you are marginalized you have to do your own work. No one will do it for you and the only way to keep your faith from collapsing completely or from stagnating where it is right now is to do the work yourself.

What does that look like? Seek out books that will feed and grow your faith. Build times of prayer and quiet into your daily routine. Seek out other people to connect with (whether online or in person). Listen to music that speaks to your spirit and makes your soul soar. Try out different faith communities and keep trying until you find one that you can invest in. Serve other people by volunteering places, doing nice things for your neighbors, or giving money away. You have to work our your faith and find ways to keep growing.

Ideally we’d all be able to walk into any church on any weekend and be spiritually fed. We’d be able to hear a word from God and feel connected to the holy. But since that’s not reality, we have to put in the work. That’s the only way to keep ourselves from getting worn down by spiritual disappointment.

It’s hard, but the work is worth it.

I was a freshman in college and as far as I knew I had never met a gay or lesbian person before. (I don’t think I knew transgender people even existed.)

I was in the very beginning stages of coming out to myself but I was still super angsty about it. I felt like there was no one in the world who understood me.

I met two women who were a year or so ahead of me and we hit it off. They were funny and kind. They made me laugh harder than I thought I could. And they were affectionate with each other.

I craved that kind of connection. Someone to be affectionate with who wouldn’t look at me with disgust. It wasn’t even sexual, it was just that, as a visibly gender queer person, every time I tried to display affection it was seen as suspect.

Two weeks later these women got kicked out of my Christian college and I never saw them again. I was scared and I was lonely.

I didn’t know how to connect with other people. I didn’t know how to find other queer folks. I had no idea who I could talk to and who I could trust. And I didn’t know anyone else like me.

Throughout the years people would come into my life and seem to move out of it just as quickly. I longed for a community of queer and trans folks that wasn’t a club on the weekends and wasn’t a support group. (Both of those places and spaces are vital and I’m not knocking them, it just wasn’t what I was longing for at the time.)

It took years to build those connections and they often happened by accident, but they have been vital to my own sense of self and my mental health.

The internet has been instrumental in allowing me to connect with people all over the world. It allows me to Skype with Brian once a week. It allows me to tweet with folks from all over about our struggles and our triumphs. It allows us to reach out to one another via email when we need an ear to listen or a virtual hand to hold.

But even as great as the internet is it can be difficult to find people who share the same interests and concerns. It can be hard to find other queer Christians. And when you find them, those relationships and conversations can be scattered and hard to sustain. It can be difficult to have in- depth conversations about the Bible, our faith, and our unique experiences with the available tools.

That’s why I’m so excited about Sanctuary Collective, the new online community from Queer Theology. It’s a space to make connections with other queer and trans identified Christians and our supporters. It’s accessible (you can join for as little as $1 a month) and you get access to Queer Theology’s premium content and to the community.

We all need community for support, encouragement, and strength, and now with Sanctuary Collective, it’s a little easier to find each other.