David McElroy

Every single time you get outraged at something in the news media or something posted on social media, someone makes some money. These media companies have a vested interest in keeping you outraged — so you’ll keep watching and reading and angrily writing comments.

Although this is great for those companies, it’s terrible for the rest of us. It’s doing great damage to this society and it’s doing horrible psychological damage to us as individuals.

Isn’t it time that we considered whether Jesus might not have been onto some wisdom when he said we should gouge out an eye if it causes us to stumble? Shouldn’t we be removing things from our lives which are doing this sort of damage to all of us?

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The little boy in me fears punishment, so I have been very good.

Like an obedient robot — one who tightly follows an outwardly imposed order but who has no will of his own — I have followed a rigid path which I saw as good. I have followed my programming, even after my programmer was dead. And I still fear the dark desires of my heart which might lead to corruption or sin.

I was expected to be perfect. I believed I should be — and could be — perfect. I felt shame when I deviated from my script in any way. I felt happy only when I could point to my apparent perfection and say, “Please tell me what a good boy I am!”

I thought everyone who was decent was doing the same thing. Those who weren’t following the same perfect path — or desperately trying to — were bad people. I associated everything good as being of the mind and spirit. The physical desires of the body were bad. Those were the things that took people into sin. My childhood programming and my religious teaching agreed.

The flesh was evil. I had to resist it.

The inner conflict of my life has been between the “good” part of me striving to be without fault and the “bad” part of me which wanted to feed my sinful desires.

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When I’m scared or down or even humiliated by something in my life, there’s a defiant voice in me that says out loud — in a tone that sounds more like desperation — “I love you!”

I actually always include her name, but that’s not the point here. It’s not a conscious thing. It’s an unconscious pleading of some sort that I can’t explain. Some inner part of me that I don’t control turns to someone’s spirit or image in a child-like way, as though asking for shelter or love or understanding.

I don‘t know exactly when this started, but I asked a psychologist about it and she said she had never heard of anyone doing such a thing. We talked about it quite a bit over a period of weeks. She eventually had an opinion.

“You should listen to this voice,” she said in words that I’m obviously paraphrasing by now. “It seems to me that this is a primal or deep part of you that’s underneath the surface. Just like all of us, you have a lot of competing interests and voices inside — and this is the powerful, authentic voice that needs to be heard when you’re in need. You might not trust her, but you love her and you need her.”

And that was the beginning of my slow education about the competing voices inside me — and that you have inside yourself — which don’t necessarily want the same things.

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