Deconstructing Fred - Revisited
Listen: “Demons” by Imagine Dragons
I was a megachurch pastor of one of the fastest growing churches in America and I felt utterly lost.
I had worked hard at being a faithful Christian pastor: I prayed long hours every day; I studied scripture, earned graduate degrees, started a church, pastored said church, helped start more churches—wrote a doctoral dissertation on this topic—spoke at conferences around the world, and led people to Jesus. I enjoyed much of it, but my soul wasn’t entirely healthy.
After 29 years of faithful work, I found myself headed to rehab in Georgia in November of 2018. The life I had lived had collapsed around me. In 2019, I would lose my 37-year marriage, my vocation as pastor, the church community that I loved and labored over for decades, and, in some ways, I lost my faith.
As my life collapsed around me, I wandered in darkness. 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. After the divorce was finalized in July of 2019, I started attending various recovery groups and regularly seeing two therapists. The darkness was all consuming. 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. My life felt devoid of all purpose and joy.
I reached out to an acquaintance of mine, Stan Kroenigsfeld. We’d met at the National Prayer Breakfast. I called Stan and we met and talked. He sent me Falling Upward 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. Maybe something redemptive could emerge from all my darkness? It sparked a fresh hunger and I started reading voraciously again.
Through my experience in rehab and therapy, I became interested in some therapy models—Internal 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 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. 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 as does the process of 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 beyond difficult for me to face. One aspect of my “mask” was being an endurance athlete—I believed I could power my way through anything. Just keep pedaling…but the pedals fell off. This kind of emotional work is exhausting, but vitally important.
Mental health is part of the journey to wholeness. Our true self emerges when we get honest with our shadow self. We have to embrace our core emotions as they relate to our shadow selves and listen to those emotions. Let them speak. They begin to tell a story of who we are. I had to let my shame speak, my guilt speak, my anxiety speak. They are my traveling 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.
Parker Palmer and Richard Rohr both share insights that really resonate with me on this journey:
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, 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 2025
