People pleasing is fear based

Received an email early this week that set in motion my posts about people pleasing.

I had another couple of thoughts on your post about the ten commandments of dysfunctional families. I was just thinking about the analogy with totalitarian regimes and how their rule is based on fear. I remembered you posting something once about a fear-based life so perhaps there's another connection there. Another point you made also made me think of the Pharisees at the time of Jesus and how they're were also obsessed with looking perfect and whiter-than-white but Jesus called them whitewashed graves because they had so many skeletons in their closets.  From K

To bring readers up to speed. 

Ten commandments of dysfunctional families:

http://weareone-ruth.blogspot.com/2012/08/patterns.html

Fear based life:

http://weareone-ruth.blogspot.com/2012/05/what-to-do.html

http://weareone-ruth.blogspot.com/2010/11/fear-vs-faith.html

http://weareone-ruth.blogspot.com/2012/01/how-did-i-get-here.html

People pleasing is fear based.

Service is love based.

I wrote the post about people pleasing to prepare for this post.  A fear based life means every choice is based on 'what if something bad happens...' If I didn't do what I was asked then... they won't love me any more, I will be left alone, I will be selfish, I am ungrateful, I will make my mother sick, I will be disobedient, and disobedience leads to death and endless damnation.  Not small stuff for a kid.

This evening as part of the Olympics a brief history of the raise of Nazi Germany and their assault on England was shown.  Years ago I studied Hitlers treatise on the Big Lie.  His own writing on propaganda and the lies needed to turn a nation into his own personal war machine.  One of the books KavinCoach had me read was "Man's Search for Meaning" a book written by Viktor Frankl, a survivor of the Holocaust.  KavinCoach used this book as the final book in a series of increasing levels of abuse to see if I would react.  This was the book that after I read it I told KavinCoach, "What do you want me to learn from this, is not the right answer."  He compared my childhood to survivors of a concentration camp.  Pointing out my total lack of surprise that humans would treat each other with such a total disregard for human decency.  Indeed the functioning of Nazi Germany were based on the same 10 commandments of a dysfunctional family. 

This same imagery was pushed into how I was taught about God.  Images of a wrathful God holding humans over an abyss of eternal damnation, a single wrong move plummet the person into a fiery eternal destruction.  Every choice, decision, or move is based on doing that which keeps me from being punished, fear based.  I believe that Christ came to change all that.  Christ disliked the Pharisees and the way they set themselves up to point out the errors of other people while ignoring the filthiness of their own behavior.  Pharisees were called hypocrites.  The entire chapter of Matthew 23 is Christ's tirade on the scribes and Pharisees. The particular scripture referred to in the comment above:

 Matthew 23:27 Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanness.

As described in the post "Patterns," the most important things was to keep the dirty secrets of the family within the family.  I learned this from a young age.  I once mentioned to someone outside the family that my brothers hit me.  When we got home I was pulled a side and lectured on not telling these things to strangers; they wouldn't understand.  I felt confused because the person I told I knew but they were not a family member.  I remember as a teenager a friend telling me how lucky I was to have such a wonderful family.  I lied and agreed.  Choosing counseling, choosing truth I chose to discard the lies.  Not a popular decision, but I was not trying to please someone else.  I was standing up to years of hiding in fear, the truth of my own existence.  My life wasn't all bad.  I focused on the good parts but like Christ's description of the sepulchers my life looked good from the outside but the terrible memories of my real life was kept hidden.  Counseling gave me an opportunity to clean up my life on the inside as well as the outside.  Christ made it possible for me to do this.  His admonition of Love the Lord thy God and my neighbor as myself was revolutionary in His time and still today.  A loved base life begins when I can love myself so I have room in my heart to love my neighbor and my God.