This month I’ve had a couple of people I admire come down hard enough on me that I felt shamed. I was aware that it was stirring up emotions I felt as a child. Betty told me that I needed to find the open door inside me that gives people permission to shame me. Below is the wisdom she shared with me on how to get that door to being shamed closed.

Can you pause? You want to ask the Lord what it is in you that gives people permission to project their anger at weakness into you and then to let their anger out. I want you to think through that. Go back into tongues. When you go into tongues, it helps to ground you. Get focused into the Lord. I want you with your will, to will to send to the cross any anger that you’ve picked up from other people that you carry.

It’s bad enough for us to handle our own weakness. We cannot save people from their weakness. They’re projecting it out because they don’t want to deal with it. We’re not the savior of the world so it really belongs at the cross. They need to cry out to God for help, but in order to cry out to God for help, they have to own their own weakness and stop projecting it. The best way to get people to stop projecting it is not to open the door and carry it. When we open the door and carry it, aren’t we participating in the lie, namely that we are the savior? So we have to repent of the lie that we can save people wherever we allow it to get into us.

I think with X and Y, you put X on a pedestal. Whenever we put people on a pedestal, they will sooner or later fall off, so in some way we’re responsible for our own scandal. We are scandalized they fell off the pedestal, but we shouldn’t have had them up on a pedestal to begin with. So how do you stop it? I think one of the first things is you go to Jesus and ask him to help you to enter into the truth of what door you are allowing open that gives people permission to project whatever that’s negative into you. This time it’s weakness, but they can project other stuff into you. For example, if they’re feeling clumsy, then your clumsiness will be irritating to them. It depends on where they are.

When you get in a place of peace, then ask the Lord to show you where that door is. You can’t close the door until you’re honest and open it. First say, “Lord help me get out of denial and really face the door I’ve opened that allows people to project their hatred of weakness into me.”

Ask the Lord to show you what door you opened. If you’re ready to be unkind and unmerciful to yourself, is that the door you might be opening so that if others happen to be in that place, it gives them permission to be unkind and unmerciful to you because you started it? You’re beating your own self up. You have to have a door open. So that’s what you’re really looking for. What’s your open door? In what way do you cooperate?

I told her what I thought might be the open door. She said, Hold that up to the Lord. What is it that you want the Lord to do for you? Go back into tongues. There is the little dramatist in you. Are any of your kids acting out what they unconsciously pick up in you? Parents are the role models for their kids so when you pray for the healing of this little dramatist in you, pray for the healing of it in your kids as well. It’s that part that wants to slam all the doors and lock them. It’s like “Oh, cool it.” You have to take charge of the dramatist in you whenever it shows itself.  

Your mentors are still good role models for you, but they aren’t God and they will make mistakes. Ok, that’s life. Let’s move on. Part of maturity is to realize that regardless what a gift a human being who God puts in our life turns out to be, we have to give them room to be human and make mistakes. If we can’t handle that, it speaks more to our immaturity than to how terrible they are. They’re just human.

There’s a part of you that hates weakness and you’re angry at the tears coming up so that’s the open door. You’re projecting their anger of weakness out of your anger of weakness. This is complicated. So we have 3 people who are angry at weakness so there’s your open door.

You don’t want to make mistakes, but mistakes are all part of life. We are creatures. We aren’t God. “Hello—that part that wants to be perfect. I’m not God. Can you lay off and cool it?” Remember “nobody gets your goat, unless you have a goat in there to get?” I think we’re dealing with where all your goats are kind of running into each other. When you have a person on a pedestal, it’s hard, because you’d rather not think of them as having a goat, but we all have goats.

The real world has a lot of blemishes. You have a lot of companions, people who aren’t perfect around you. It is not as lonely as that world of the people who want to see everyone as perfect. That’s kind of a lonely world.

We’ve learned that they’re not the only ones angry with imperfection. You’ve discovered that you are angry with yourself. That’s good so we are set free from that judgment. Can you say, “Lord, help me get out of all these projections? Help me to release others from my judgments. I’m not perfect so what gives me the right to insist others are perfect.” We’re angry at our own imperfection yet we’re demanding everyone else be perfect. Accept yourself and then maybe you can accept them.

Can you say to the Lord, “Lord, please heal me in the area where I opened the door that I’m shamed. Teach me how to handle that.” With Jesus, they tried hard to shame him, but he never took it in. Let Jesus be your role model on how to stay strong when you sense someone attempting to shame you.

I get an image of you as a child and X is very angry with you. You felt shamed by him on a number of occasions. Ask Jesus to go with you. What makes God so different from us is that every happening we ever had in our whole life is open before Him. He does not live in the past or future so can you say, “Lord, I want to open all the doors when my little girl was exposed to X’s anxiety and impatience when I wasn’t processing his direction as he desired. I want to give you all the shame I put on myself that I wasn’t handling what he was saying to his satisfaction.”

The shame you placed on yourself is the open door. You couldn’t process things fast enough and so X got impatient. He got anxious and yelled more. I feel you really have to open all those doors in your memory where you still keep that unhealed voice of anxious X screaming at you to do this and do that. Open the door wide and ask Jesus to take all that anxiety, that feeling of terror that’s still stored within you from when X was in those shaming places.

Can you say, “Lord Jesus, I really need to get stronger and not go into my anxious little girl when I feel I’m being pushed beyond what I can handle in the moment. You are my hope for healing in this whole area.  

I see Mary coming and she reaches out her hand and she’s taking you over to St. Joseph. St. Joseph was a very strong, but gentle man. Your little girl needs to go to Nazareth. Take her there to be by Joseph’s side and to gradually let all these areas be healed from the anxiety and impatience that your little girl carries in her memory from the times X was in a bad place. There’s a lot of bruising inside your little girl so that’s why you should bring your child to Nazareth so she can get stronger so when people go into their human weakness it doesn’t rattle you. You can look at it like they’re having a bad day.  

Betty ended by asking that we pray for all the people we discussed that they receive whatever healing they can receive from the work we did. Whenever I pray with her, we pray that any family member or person we are praying about receive healing. We also pray that my whole generational line be healed in that area.