Salome
Our Struggle Between Emotion And Reason
Choosing Your Battles
Sister: every time you go postal, even mildly so, defending
yourself, you mark yourself as a child. And this is why men
relate to you the way they do. You can only nag someone but so
much before they build up a resistance to it, dismissing you as
a Nagger and, therefore, ignoring what you have to say. You
don’t have to win every battle or even fight every fight. Try
and keep paper trails—emails are an invaluable resource. Rather
than argue, I tend to send people copies of their own messages,
their own words, making the point that they were in the wrong.
Recognizing your own post-traumatic behavior—sisters becoming
agitated and defensive around black males—is difficult to do. It
requires reflection, introspection, rationality and reason. It
requires you to disconnect from your ego and allow yourself to
be vulnerable. Alone, in front of a mirror, turn off the radio.
Get the kids out of the house. Who Am I? Why Do I Get So
Defensive? What Am I So Angry About?
Every sister I encounter tells me her story without ever saying
a word: she’s been abused, emotionally, physically or sexually,
by some black man. It’s a black man because many of these same
women, who are such an enormous chore to deal with, are
paradoxically kind and outgoing to white males. This may be
because white males do not induce their PTSD but black males do.
I routinely encounter some level of hostility, even playful
hostility, from black women. I have personally observed these
same black women being incredibly nice, accessible and open to
white males. I encounter virtually no hostility from white
women, ever. Thus, without having said a word, sister has told
me her secret. I don’t know the specifics, but there is a
reflexive loathing, I presume, of black men in general, that
suggests something terrible has happened to this woman over her
lifetime.
I’d guess most brothers fail to consider her in any prayerful or
relevant manner, but instead react to her defensive hostility with
defensive hostility of their own. A lot of brothers I know
simply and routinely dismiss sisters as serious players in the
church or professional careers. I’ve been aghast at how some men
condescend to their wives and am even more aghast at the sisters
who believe this behavior is biblically appropriate if not
mandated, who vacillate between being his child and being his
mother. It is not biblical. It is not even reasonable.
Testing Your Brain
When a doctor hits your patella with a hammer, he is testing
your reflexes. You try not to move, but your leg reflexively
swings forward. The doctor is not testing your knee. He is
testing your brain. If your leg does not move, you have brain
damage. An impulse is not quite the same as a reflex. We often
feel a rush of emotion demanding we either lash out or defend
ourselves in some way. Failing to control this impulse limits
our ability to communicate and function. Virtually every woman
has been damaged in some way by some man over the course of her
lifetime, something as mild as a high school boyfriend dumping
her to matters much more traumatic. Because women are more
hormonal than men, those emotions are easier and quicker to
access, her emotions tend to be more on the surface because she
is roiling in emotion all day long. It is likely difficult if
not impossible for her to turn her emotion chip off. I believe
God rewards those who seek Him [Hebrews 11:6], which is to say nothing is
impossible for Him. In my lifetime I’ve met precious few women
who have admitted they are unreasonable if not irrational and
who have confessed that to God and sought more of His grace, of
His personality to control their lives. Even the count-to-ten
trick taught to me by child psychologists, when I was an angry
grade-schooler incapable of dealing with his emotions, is not
employed by any women I know. They just go off at will.
Sometimes politely, sometimes even playfully, but it is
aggression no matter which way you cut it.
Sister: you don’t have to always defend yourself. You don’t
always have to be on red alert. A gift, from you back to God,
would be granting a certain clemency, a certain number of
pardons, to, say, five people every day. By which I mean, just
take the hit. Don’t swing at every pitch, don’t get so dug in
that the larger objective gets lost in the petty bickering over
details. If I could share a wish with many of my Christian
sisters, it would be to make a sacrifice of rationality. Lord, I
give this one to You. The calmer and more rational you seem, the
more seriously you’ll be taken and the more you can accomplish.
Failing that, to at least be mature enough to admit, to yourself
and to God, that you lack self-control. That your entire life is
a series of turns taken because of your vanity, your neediness,
your loneliness. That you have failed to gain traction or follow
a throughline life narrative because your focus is routinely
hijacked by your passion. That, time and again, you lose the
battle between intellect and emotion. God has endowed us with
passion, sisters. He doesn’t want us to be slaves to it. It is,
functionally, a form of idolatry to make a god of your emotions.
Patience, on the other hand, comes form God [Galatians 5].
Self-control. Meekness. Quietness.
Luckily, I’ve discovered a unique truth: even if you’re not
terribly mature, pretending to be mature is just as good.
Appearing, on the surface, to be confident, rational and
reasonable is just as effective as actually being any of those
things.
Christopher J. Priest
25 September 2011
editor@praisenet.org
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