Episode 121 - Does Being Good Mean My Beliefs Shouldn't Change?

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[Music] our world is built with stories [Music] sometimes these stories cause suffering by pulling us apart from ourselves and each other the liturgist podcast helps people love more and suffer less by pulling apart the stories that pull us apart today's story being good means my beliefs shouldn't change this is the story of my life these past three years if you had asked me two years ago if it was bad to change beliefs i would have said yes because change of beliefs means compromise [Music] it's hard for me to go to the family church and not just pick apart everything they preach so i'm in the middle of a fake transition myself right now and i don't think that there is much bad about it honestly it's been a season of growth and love and peace and joy but i am worried that what for me is a step of fidelity and openness and growth in my relationship with god is going to be seen by my community as an act of unfaithfulness and betrayal it's mostly felt very unstable completely uprooted i don't feel like i have a framework for seeing the world anymore i have these internalized voices of the church my parents toxic version of god and i can't seem to let them go i don't really know what i believe anymore or if i believe in anything anymore so i feel a significant amount of of shame and fear that i'll get caught and lose my job so my beliefs have definitely changed i just don't know what to and i feel really guilty about that i feel like that's not something i can tell my friend i felt that i would lose the people closest to me i don't feel like i fit anywhere anymore i realized i couldn't hide anymore and the few people i have told have started to pull away from me yeah it's hard and there are relational consequences he doesn't know how it's going to work out if we're believing different things now especially with raising our three-year-old daughter and what are we gonna teach her and what's it gonna look like to her if mom and dad don't agree on certain things he told me that we could no longer be brothers this tension would form we would start filtering our words and i could feel that deep intimacy that was held together by some tribal sameness would slowly become unglued i felt a lot of shame for changing my beliefs it makes me feel shame that's just overwhelming shame and guilt shame guilt anxiety somehow broken or bad i definitely feel bad for the way that my beliefs have changed and you're always looking back at yourself am i doing the right thing am i saying the right thing am i changing too much am i not changing enough you know she married me under this understanding that we were gonna share a belief system and a way of looking at the world and at first yeah i would label it as bad but now i've seen the beauty and good from that change [Music] hi i'm hilary mcbride and i'm michael gunger today we're talking about how being good doesn't necessarily mean that our beliefs didn't change so just off the top mr michael gunger what comes up for you when you hear that statement being good means my beliefs shouldn't change yeah i think that's something that a lot of us feel some of these stories that we pull apart in the podcast like when you just ask them so boldly and plainly kind of like duh no but we feel that i mean i felt that there's a model of what a good person is lisa my wife actually used this example a couple nights ago she was we were talking with some friends she felt like she always had this kind of figurine of like what a good woman was or what a good girl was and it was kind of like this is what goodness is this is what a person should be and this is how this is what they believe and this is how they behave and there was kind of like this this model this construct in the head and trying to like align with that for a lot of us is the work right like we're trying to be what what we know we should be that person that that does that behaves in this way and doesn't get super angry at somebody when they cut get cut off in traffic and that that always smells good and always is kind and it's really funny and charming i like that you just threw that in there that the smelling good was along with being kind yeah well i mean like if i wasn't paying attention i would have been like yeah of course of course of course yeah but i mean it can go into physical things like i should have i should have a six pack i should be not bald i should be you know whatever i should weigh this much um even if again when you say those things out loud it can be kind of silly because who's going to say that i i i should not be bald but we feel like it i take propecia um you know because uh to keep my hair the hair falling out as slow as possible yeah i i i think of like being good that's a concept and the beliefs that i feel like i should have about the world is is often part of that model no i don't know if i would have ever said that because of course my beliefs are incomplete and i'm human and i i don't see everything clearly so hopefully i'm growing in my beliefs but there's that feeling that story that's somewhere down in there that's like careful if you're gonna start asking questions you're gonna start changing your beliefs because that could that could send you into being bad right what about you right yeah how about you how have you experienced that well i'm gonna i'm gonna go full therapist on this question i wrote it down and just as i was i was looking at the words uh therapist training in me really zeroed in on the word should like we've got this therapist joke that mostly just therapists laugh at um so buckle up but we say you like you shouldn't it's so it's so not funny it's just real low i'm really excited low ball low hanging fruit humor but the idea is that like you we we use the word should as a kind of behavioral and cognitive control that either some people imposed on us or that we imposed on ourselves and we call this on yourself you're all over the place like this that's pretty good that's pretty good being generous i wouldn't like suggest you go to the the comedy store and like try it out but yeah yeah okay i'll work on my material but but the the shoulds are are really restrictive and the hack that we often suggest to people is just switch it to could like someone's saying like oh i you know i'm so bad because i should be this at my at this point in my life by now where i should have done all the vacuuming today or i should have been a better friend or i should have whatever and and the should is really closely tied with shame like it's because there's an expectation that something must look a certain way that we then feel guilt and shame because we're not within the confines of that expected behavior or thinking oh i just remembered another one uh must we say don't musterbate nah together the that's the the second low-hanging fruit therapist joke that usually makes its rounds blue therapy yeah yeah that's right so we like we create these or we're given these shoulds or musts and and those are really where the problem is like what would happen if uh if we changed it to could right like i could vacuum today i could be a better friend i could have shown up for that person in that way that is one of the options but could implies that there's a whole bunch of options or should implies that things have to look a certain way and so when we're thinking about language and how we use language even simply changing the words to give us just a little bit more freedom all of a sudden yeah there's some more options if if we're not thinking about should in the same way [Music] it's normal at so many different points in our life to feel like something is getting in the way of being present or happy something stopping us from achieving the goals that we have for ourselves or feeling connected to the people that we love betterhelp will assess your needs and match you with your own licensed professional therapist to help you work on all those things you 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health again it's betterhelp h-e-l-p-com liturgists i think the problem with with the idea that being good being something related to action and something related to the way we behave or the way that we think implies a kind of conditionality on our goodness and i just on a fundamental level really oppose that i don't think that you can earn goodness and i don't think it can be taken away from you by changing your ideas and i think that we're inherently good i think that we can also behave in disrespectful unhelpful non-pro-social ways but i think that as as beings as life it's fundamentally good i think we're i think we're good and i i know that as i say that there are people in their minds who are thinking well what about hitler and like what about the mass shooters and you know it really helps us i think feel okay about ourselves if we say we're good because we're we're behaving this way but those people are bad because they're behaving that way and it makes us feel separate from them but i think there's i think the logic is flawed to say that behavior makes us good or bad on a fundamental level because then who gets who gets to decide that yeah is that something that's internally created is that something that we we use our feelings to assess is that something that is mediated by people who have power outside of us and what happens if they're corrupt but if we're following what they say are we still good even if they're bad like we we start to pull it apart it's um there's a lot of flaws in the idea that we could be good based on our behavior or our thinking so when we think about this question i i think i don't i don't know if being good is anything other than being yeah and that maybe we have these social structures that uh impose on us a value system about our thinking or our behavior but but maybe however you think wouldn't make you good or bad what if that was true what if your beliefs could change or not change and it had nothing to do with your goodness what then that's what comes up for me yeah that's powerful that's powerful i think that i think i mean that's a revolutionary idea for so many so many of us and so much of religion is based upon the fundamental premise that you are bad right yeah and you need you know all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of god and so it's only god's grace that makes it's not you that's good it's god's it's god's grace in you that's good and that it that's on the surface when you're in that it can sound kind of humble or um you know trusting of god and his goodness and and it's it's i'm not so prideful and narcissistic as to think that i'm good it's god that's good but it's so destructive because yeah what you're saying like if if i am fundamentally bad if i'm not fundamentally good just because i am if being itself is flawed right uh then yeah what ground do you have to say that anything is good what ground do you have to say that god is good that love is good that anything is good because it's coming out of muddy it's coming out of poisoned waters if fundamentally it's bad then it's all bad right that's the source right but if fundamentally source where we're coming from being is good and that gets filtered into ways and channeled energetically into ways that are maybe less helpful or less less skillful less you know concerned about the the larger picture and and so they become destructive in ways it's a much firmer philosophical story to to be operating from that this is all fundamentally you get down to the bottom of it it's good but it can get misdirected is so much better um and ineffective i think in in creating a life and creating meaning and and living out of a a full place then the fundamental story that goodness has to be injected from some being out there i the story i think i i remember hearing in church was it was because of our badness that we needed god and consequently it was because of god's goodness in light of our badness that we worshipped god yeah and the more that that changed for me and the more that i saw like well no no no i think as richard rohr says um genesis 1 comes before genesis 3. like it was always good first it was always always always good first and my my ideas and beliefs started to align with that more i actually felt more interested in being this uh what you might call like worship or awe or wonder place because everything around me was a mark of god's goodness and was a mark of being and goodness and god itself like i there was nowhere that i could look where i didn't see like wow look at this all happening isn't this all beautiful isn't this all all of it some something to be in wonder at to see this this whole thing unfolding so i i for me it didn't it didn't hold up to say we needed to be bad in order to worship god in order to be in a worshipful state which to me is like maybe the language i would use now is awe and wonder and like this kind of jaw-dropping ability to to stand back and see life happening as it is but i think like the if i think about it now my idea is not that like that still we need to be saved by christ by by the christ but it's it's from our ideas about ourselves not from our badness it's actually that christ is coming to save us from the story that we were bad yeah come come join me i want you to see you as i see you like see what's really happening here yeah you need to be saved for sure but not from your badness but from the story that you were bad that was never my story for you that was never what was going on here so join me in seeing things as they really are and wake up like wake up and and maybe the language that i would use when i think about therapy is unbecoming like oh unbecome all of those things that you thought you had to be to be loved that to me feels like what we might call salvation or awakening or enlightenment the unbecoming pull back those stories the stories you believed about how you had to be good that's your salvation is when you get when you believe and know genesis 1 comes before genesis 3. that yeah so the i mean what what's coming up for you as i say that or like what's oh i love it i was i was funny enough i had a i had a image of playing a video game okay pop up for me okay let's hear it just in the practical like the practical moment to moment like what are you more likely how are you more likely to behave in ways that are positive and constructive versus like destructive uh and i was thinking about playing a video game where like in some role playing games or something where you part of the part of the character that you're deciding is like whether they're good or bad and like they get extra powers based on if you really go good or you really go bad or whatever and if you want what are you more likely like if you walk into the the bar as the good character somebody you believe like you walk in with the narrative i am the good guy here i am good i am fundamentally a good person or you walk in with i am the villain i am fundamentally a bad character in this game to me i played the game differently based on that like i am less likely to start a shootout if i'm the good guy if in that narrative i am thinking of myself as fundamentally good my behavior tends to follow that narrative and if i'm operating in the world as though i am fundamentally bad yeah and i need some grace from somewhere else to cover up that badness i think i'm more prone to act in the ways that i would consider bad i think if i consider myself to be fundamentally good to be fundamentally made of love and made of wonder and joy and like if the fruits of the spirit that we talk about in the bible are are not like things that you have to strive for that are foreign to your actual nature but if if those are more the ways that you are when you're unencumbered from these harmful stories of of should and must and ought and and love and joy and peace and patience and kindness and goodness and jealousy these are if these are more like the natural way that we are right we're not so bogged down right i just think they're more than i think we're more likely to flow in those ways to live in those ways to live from those ways that i'm so glad you said that because i think i think for a lot of people um certainly certainly people i've had conversations with about understanding epigenetics the interpersonal trauma as they're related to what an old construct of sin if we see sin as like your individual fault and this something you need to be saved from it doesn't it doesn't uh highlight the interconnectedness between us all that just what you were saying reminded me of how how helpful it was for me to really pull apart this idea of individual sin because it reminded me that some of the reasons that i act the way that i act or other people have the pain that they have and the way they express it well some people might call it sin it might it might be that we were hurt that someone gave us a version of the story that said you're not good and all of our ways of coping with that pull us further away from the knowing that we're we are good right so if you're abused as a kid it's pretty normal for there to be mental health issues it's pretty normal for there to be addiction and some kind of coping or self-harm and yet if we look at that person in isolation some faith context would say that's sin your addiction that's sin but what if we looked at that as a natural response for someone who was given a story about their not goodness and how painful that is and all the ways that they tried to get away from that pain like maybe the things that we do that we might point to that say yeah that person's not good are actually the result of that story having been spoken over them early on and it it was so painful to get away from their true nature that right that they things started to kind of break down that maybe that it's not proof that the person is not good but maybe it's proof that the story about not being good is the thing that gets in the way that being treated is not good and not having that mirrored back to us is the problem not the ways of coping with it because i had for so long people wonder like how can you self-identify as a christian as a person of faith and have this eating disorder like wow how can you have how can you have depression and anxiety and ocd how can you have this long list of diagnoses and still claim that you have faith and for me the idea is that or what that communicated to me was that i that somehow my ways of coping with the story that i was given about my not goodness further reinforced my not goodness and my distance from god instead of seeing them as natural ways that when we're not shown goodness we we have no other way of being besides what people told us about ourselves wow and you like you said something about the the behaving in not good ways that made me think about what teachers say about kids in school like if you if a kid let's just say a kid behaves in a challenging way and you label that kid as the bad kid and you keep looking for reasons why they're the bad kid like they can't fight that at some point and they become the bad kid not necessarily because they're actually bad but because the system is so turned against them that the only way for them to survive is either to submit to that story or to keep pushing against that system in a way that makes them appear more challenging that the stories that we tell about ourselves actually in some ways become self-fulfilling prophecies or yeah or feel true [Music] here are some things that are true you are good you have always been good [Music] right from the beginning and i'm sorry if anyone told you otherwise breath these hands [Music] those feet [Music] that smile those ears that heart this heart this beating heart this breath [Music] this breath this breath is good it's all good so so so good [Music] you're loved you are so loved you are lovable you have been working so hard i don't have to know how to know that it's true you are precious you are not a mistake you are very on purpose you are not broken you never were i'm sorry that you might have thought that i'm sorry anyone made you think that that wasn't about you but you you are enough you are totally enough you don't have to earn your enoughness you don't have to grovel for value for love for goodness you already have it you already are it you are loved you are loved and you you are good so so good [Music] [Music] i could imagine kind of a fearful response to fully accepting myself is good because of the implication does that does that mean those people that hurt me those people that i'm afraid of that they're fundamentally good yeah it's a scary thing there's there's a really comforting yeah and socially powerful thing about believing that we're the good guys yes yes that they're the bad guys yes and you know if we take that really strong division fundamental like existential division away from that if people if being is fundamentally good including all the people that do all the really shitty things and believe all the really harmful just you know stories how are we not turning into trump that says you know there's some decent people there like what what are we risking yes by by believing in fundamental goodness do you have any thoughts about that yeah i think that if we can believe that fundamental goodness is distinct from whether behavior is healthy or not then it makes that a little bit easier to rest in that tension you can be good and still do bad things still still do hurtful things um but the reason why i think it's so important to believe in fundamental goodness is because it it dissolves the idea of conditional goodness because if if the only thing that separates me from them is that they're doing hurtful things well what do i say about the things that i've done that are hurtful what what happens if one day i accidentally fill in the blank or i hurt someone that i love and i don't know that i hurt them like who gets to decide where that line is where you you become bad because you did some things that hurt some other people because the truth is that we all hurt other people and we all hurt other people all the time and most of us will never even know that most of us won't even understand the impact of it so i think we we help ourselves out and i don't just mean our view of other people but really help ourselves out by saying that goodness is unconditional because that means that there's still goodness for me even if i make mistakes and it's believing that goodness is for me that brings us back home to ourselves brings us back home to what we might say is like the true the true nature of who we are and resting in that in a way that translates into our behavior i think it it's trying to cover up the pain of the badness that we feel like we are that really is how we start to do some wild social and individual and psychological things yeah it demands it seems like it demands a level of of wisdom and nuance even like by being able to distinguish harmful behaviors and um and harmful beliefs in a way that's not so simplistic that's not just well they're bad we're good um it can feel messy and dangerous and because it kind of is like if we think less simplistically about uh you know criminal justice for example and yeah and we can't just think of those people as animals to be put in cages it just makes it it makes it more complicated so what do we do with them yes you know yeah uh so it just it demands more of us yeah but i think in the long run it it's so much better it humanizes us and calls us to greater connection and understanding and love and effectiveness yeah rather than just the simple the simple tools of scapegoating and and broad brush strokes of good guys and bad guys that end up with things like you know uh nazi germany right um and all the worst parts of humanity are generally based on those happen because of these really simple like yeah these people are bad right right we should wipe them out right um and the more sophisticated and nuanced we get with like nobody's bad uh nobody's worth putting in right in any sort of extermination camps no there's not a person you know but there are destruct there are behaviors and beliefs that are destructive and it's it's it's uh it's more complicated yeah but it's it's so much healthier yeah yeah well said [Music] this is jamie lee finch purpose yourself to become perfect at failing so you can remember that you are never actually any of your own names so you can remember that you're free [Music] you are no more and no less than every single one of your rebirths and you can't be afraid to light it all on fire i started to realize how hypocritical it was for me to stand on a stage and preach this exclusive american gospel to people so i ended up actually quitting that position a few months ago and i felt so free for the first time in so many years but with that comes a great deal of loneliness i always saw myself getting married and have a husband and kids and serve god with all my heart and i really believed that until i fell in love with a woman and that changed everything i started to adopt god and myself i was very confused about things but then the way i see god and the way i i live my spirituality grew so much and i'm very happy that that happened and i'm really happy of how my life is now i think that changed and saved my life my belief change cost me a dear community in relationships but but this change is good and inevitable this is who i was always heading towards being and i think to run from this would have been disastrous it's just opened me up to be able to talk to more people and to love more people and hopefully you know in the end just know that that i was love so changing your views is scary but it's all a part of the growth this change it's i don't think i can go back i don't think i can re-believe certain things but i know that i am just as concerned and caring for the world as i've ever been and maybe more so more cognitively aware of my desire to help others like my belief in god and jesus hasn't gotten away but it's become more personal in a way and it's kind of become something that just is evolving and not can't be contained inside just the religion of christianity and it's beautiful and i'm starting to become okay with that which is really cool part of me wishes that i could put the veil back over myself and keep pretending so i could protect my kids by their lives remaining unchanged and yet i still feel a bit of pride knowing that i stood up and stepped into the most honest version of myself it's been amazing to now identify as you know some essence of a queer monk witch artist and it's like the walls have just transformed into an ecosystem and into something where all life is sacred not one particular kind of life and all spirit is sacred it's been a long journey but i'm really proud of where i am now well it's exciting now because i feel like i'm exploring the world in a new way and i have a newfound curiosity and excitement about life [Music] okay we've hit being good we've hit should let's think about this for a few moments being good means my belief shouldn't change is it is it okay for beliefs to change is that is it possible that maybe that that itself even is good i want to hear what you think that change itself is good or yeah believe change in beliefs is good perhaps as opposed to something that gets in the way of the goodness i mean you've said before on the podcast that like if you that if you're believing the same thing at 20 as you were at 10 yeah uh maybe that's not maybe that's not healthy you know yeah there are stages of development and it just it takes embracing that is is uh again a little bit more messy because then you get you can't just have one stagnant model of what a correct belief is you you have to embrace relativity on some level where it's like uh at some at some stages of development training wheels are good yeah and then if you want to be a really great bicyclist eventually take them off yeah um but that doesn't mean they were bad in the first place the the good maybe good and bad is not always the best metric to talk about beliefs with um effective might be a good you know healthy for that moment and for that level of development even between my two girls one is five one is nine i'm realizing i i don't speak to them in the same ways i don't use all the same language and i certainly don't speak to them in the same way that i speak to lisa or that i speak to podcast listeners or like to be effective in communicating um we all do this all the time like you know who you're talking to and you adjust accordingly and the better you are at that the more effective of a communicator you are i think that beliefs in my experience are related to that in some way like at some point uh a big loving guy in the sky might be a really helpful construct for somebody that's feeling alone and afraid and there's like but there's an all-powerful king in the sky who's with you and watching you and within love but then at some point that like wait there's a big king in the sky might become more ominous and more shamed filled and like well we can adjust that metaphor a little bit because it's not literally a king in the sky uh if that's not helpful anymore you could think of it more as like the ground of being you can switch metaphors you can switch language and make it uh more helpful for where you're at and what you're dealing with what you're trying to accomplish because that's what i mean i think sometimes we lose sight that beliefs are tools like that our words and our language like we they're invented for a reason yeah we we invented words to accomplish something we're trying to get something done uh you know we're trying to part cooperate on getting food together or something if we don't have a concept of food how can i work with you to make sure we all have food so these concepts and belief structures and systems and all that we have are all tools for us and there's no tool that's appropriate for all circumstances a hammer is a great tool it's not very useful for editing this podcast it's just not i don't need it in fact if i try to employ it if i try to use the hammer by cutting apart these wav files in pro tools uh i'm gonna do nothing but cause destruction yeah yeah i think that's that's so well said that like change change is part of life change is inherent in in our psychosocial development and even in our framework of how we see the world and how we see god how we understand god is a part of how we see the world i think for me there was a long time where i thought that that how i saw god should inform how i see everything else but that that isn't super empirically valid that's actually not how our brains work that how we see god and the story of god is situated within all of our other cognitive activity which is a result of all of our lived experiences up until this point that the reason that you might think god is one way or another way is probably because that idea was made available to you or or you were encouraged or not encouraged to think a certain way and it's it's really hard for us to see just how connected and interdependent we are with the world around us when a lot of us want to think we're original we want to think that we're we're the only one thinking this way or we've got it the right way it's really like a tough pill to swallow to realize what we think and how we think including the rigidity or the flexibility is is a result of the messages we've been given yeah and what's been praised in us but i i think right as you were mentioning before that it's really important that we make room for our beliefs to change because that's actually a really healthy developmental step and if that's not allowed like if the boundaries on thinking are not allowed to change and we're told that is related in some ways to our our sense of conditional goodness it that's going to really um that's not going to hold up very long it actually gets in the way of the natural process of how life works like if you know if i'm wearing a pair of shoes at eight and i'm told these are the best and most beautiful shoes at some point my feet are gonna bust out of them if i'm 35 like my feet are not going to and are not supposed to fit in shoes that fit at eight years old and that's good and okay and the longer the longer my feet are in those eight-year-old shoes the more my feet are gonna hurt and the more the shoes are gonna fall apart so i think we need to make room to see that change is part of the goodness of how we're created trees when they're healthy are not meant to stay the same size yeah right human bodies when they're healthy are not meant to stay the same shape or size right even i mean i'm i'm going to soapbox temporarily but the idea of bouncing back following pregnancy having a pre-pregnancy body is like trying to keep yourself in eight-year-old shoes and the world just does this to us in so many ways like stay young stay thin stay useful stay right wrinkle free that's not how life goes and it's not how it goes with our bodies or our faith or our right our relationships with other people so i think that we could even flip this and say if we're seeing that that all of this is good that life itself is good that the unfolding and the process of aging and maturity and development is good that we could also say that change is good and change in beliefs is good and instead of um you know being good means my beliefs won't change we could say instead you're already good and one of the things that might happen in your goodness is that your beliefs will change at some point and that will be beautiful and good and healthy and uncomfortable and all of that can be true at the same time yeah i love that you included uncomfortable in there because yeah i mean our natural like you can we can feel the discomfort yeah of change and and read into that and like make a story out of that like well this should be let's put in more shoulds if i was going in the right direction this should be easier than this like if i was actually growing why why is this so painful but i think the more that we can understand that any growth always is going to include some level of uncomfortable yeah uh depends growing pains that's part of it um yeah we can start to be less reactive i think to the to the uncomfort and welcome it mm-hmm so so michael is be just being good not true if you've listened this far and you're not sure what we think we'll make it really clear being good does not necessarily mean your beliefs shouldn't change so not not true yeah not true it's a lie okay we'll stamp it let's stamp on it yep stamped debunked debunked yep pulled apart yeah [Music] well thanks for joining us today as always we'd love to invite you to join us in talking about 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