Deconstructing Fred

Listen: “Demons” Imagine Dragons

Caveat: I will be sharing my story from my perspective. I realize that some of you may have been disappointed or even deeply hurt by my actions. If this is the case for you, I truly seek your forgiveness and would encourage you to reach out to a professional therapist to process those issues. If you and your therapist think it would be helpful, I would be willing to make personal amends.

I was a mega-church pastor of one of the fastest growing churches in America and I felt utterly lost (read my description in “What is a Prodigal Pastor?”). I had worked hard at being a good Christian: not that I didn’t understand grace. Grace was the hallmark of my preaching. I knew I was saved by grace (Ephesians 2:8-9) and that everything was grace, but I also knew that we need to participate—that is, work out our salvation with fear and trembling (Philippians 2:12). So I prayed long hours every day; I studied scripture, earned graduate degrees, started a church, pastored a growing church, helped start churches (wrote a doctoral dissertation on this topic) and spoke at conferences around the world, and led people to Jesus. I enjoyed much of it, but my soul wasn’t entirely healthy. (Listen to my soon to be released series “What Happened to Fred? An Anatomy of an Epic Failure.”) After founding and pastoring a church faithfully for almost 28 years, I found myself headed to rehab in Georgia in November of 2018. The life I had lived with God had collapsed around me. In 2019, I would lose my 37-year marriage, my vocation as pastor, my church community that I loved and labored over for decades, and in some ways I had lost my faith. (Read The Second Mountain by David Brooks for some perspective.)

As my life collapsed around me, I wandered in darkness for months. My divorce proceedings were speeding ahead while I helped a startup medical marijuana company in Missouri. (I was trying to get away from the pastor identity and just ended up being the MMJ Pastor.) I finally got serious about some work on my own soul. After my divorce was finalized in July of 2019, I started attending various recovery groups and regularly seeing two therapists. This was an emotionally dark time. I woke up every morning hating my life and hoping I was in one long horrible nightmare. I didn’t feel or sense God’s presence, and I was having some serious doubts about his/her/its existence. I didn’t even want to read which had always been one of my main spiritual habits for growth. (I did learn an enormous amount about MMJ in Missouri.) My life felt devoid of all purpose and joy.

I did have a thought to contact an acquaintance of mine, Stan Kroenigsfeld. I had met him at the National Prayer Breakfast through one of my board members. I called Stan and we met and talked. He sent me a book by Richard Rohr which proved to be a lifeline to my faltering faith. It didn’t erase my doubts and questions and dark struggles, but it did give me some hope (Falling Upward is the book). Maybe something redemptive could emerge out of all my darkness? It sparked a fresh hunger and I started reading voraciously again.

Through my experience in rehab and therapy, I had become interested in some therapy models—Family Systems developed by Dr. Richard Schwartz, AEDP by Dr. Diana Fosha, The Change Triangle by Hilary Jacob Hendel, and DBT by Dr. Marsha Linehan. My work in therapy helped me sort out core emotions, inhibitory emotions (like a lifetime of shame, guilt, and anxiety), and the need for radical acceptance and change. But Richard Rohr challenged me with what he calls “shadowboxing.”

Every great spiritual tradition has a form of shadow work under different names. They are not necessarily identical in concepts, but their presence does point to the universal nature of this struggle. In the Hebrew tradition you have the “yetzer hara” and the “yetzer hatov.” The Christian tradition talks about the old nature before Christ and the new nature in Christ. In my preaching I spoke about the gap we have between our ideal self (what we want to be based on our highest values) and where we actually are. We all have a gap between the two. Rohr talks about the True Self and the False Self. (He credits Carl Jung and Thomas Merton for many of his insights along these lines. Jung and other spiritual teachers speak of ego and self.)

Rohr talks about our shadow self which is connected to our persona (meaning “stage mask” in Greek). He says, “Your stage mask is not bad, evil, or necessarily egocentric; it is not ‘true.’ It is manufactured and sustained unconsciously by your mind; but it can and will die, as all fictions must die. Your shadow is what you refuse to see about yourself, and what you do not want others to see.” Rohr believes that the more you have lived out of your persona, the more shadow work or “shadowboxing” you will have to do. Our shadow self makes us all into hypocrites on some level—the gap. Hypocrite is a Greek word which means “actor,” someone playing a role rather than being “real.” Rohr believes our true self is who you are “hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3). Or what the Zen masters call “the face you had before you were born.”

We have to face our shadow self with radical acceptance, love, and grace. This has been hard work for me. I had a public persona which completely collapsed and I had an enormous amount of shame, guilt, embarrassment, and self-hatred. This process of shadowboxing starts with brutal honesty (so does recovery, step one in AA is about honesty). The challenging part for me has been not just focusing on a couple of symptomatic behaviors, but dealing with root issues, core emotions, inhibitory emotions, and defensive behaviors. Sorting out anxiety, shame, and guilt and how these are rooted in my childhood, and how I carried these emotions into my marriage and ministry was challenging for me. One aspect of my “mask” was being an endurance athlete—I believed I could power my way through anything. Just keep peddling, but the peddles fell off. This kind of emotional work proved exhausting, but vitally important.

Mental health is part of the journey to wholeness. Your true self emerges when you get honest with your shadow self. In a sense, you have to embrace your core emotions as they relate to your shadow self and listen to those emotions. Let them speak. They begin to tell a story of who you are. I had to let my shame speak, my guilt speak, my anxiety speak. They are my travelling companions which I ignored, avoided, or suppressed for the most part. I’ve never really treated my false self or my negative emotions with grace. I never let them speak. I always tried to beat them into submission. It didn’t work in the long run.

Let me close with a couple of more quotes that resonated with me: 

An inevitable though often ignored dimension of the quest for ‘wholeness’ is that we must embrace what we dislike or find shameful about ourselves as well as what we are confident and proud of.—Parker Palmer

But this person [a spiritual guide] did not tell me that the path to humility, for some of us at least, goes through humiliation, where we are brought low, rendered powerless, stripped of pretense and defenses, and useless—a humiliation that allows us to regrow our lives from the ground up, from the humus of common ground.—Parker Palmer

One of the great surprises is that humans come to full consciousness precisely by shadowboxing, and making friends with their own mistakes and failings. People who have had no inner struggles are invariably both superficial and uninteresting. Shadow work is almost another name for falling upward. Lady Julian put it best of all: “First there is the fall, and then we recover from the fall. Both are the mercy of God!”—Richard Rohr

So I am on a new journey—one of grace and compassion with my shadow self and one of finding and embracing my true self. It’s a journey we are all on whether we realized it or not. I hope you’ll join me as we grow together.

©realfredherron 2020