A place of cleansing

A trip to the dump leads Natalie Garrett to consider the quality of confession.

Natalie Garrett

Natalie produces and narrates The Seen & Unseen Aloud podcast. She's an Anglican minister and a trained actor.

A recyling centre with numbered bays and high netting to catch wind-blown waste.

A household recycling centre -a dumping ground for the soul.

Djm-leighpark, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

I recently moved house. A process which rates highly on the stress-ometer. Not least because you see your life (as represented by the stuff of your life) packed up in boxes and taken away from your home to be reassembled somewhere else, in a strange ghost-version of your home.

To be organised, before we moved, I arranged for a clearance company to come and do the unimaginable – clear the loft. We had lived in our home for 13 years. My children had been born and grown up there. We had grown up as parents and as a family. To see all the plastic trophies of our children’s early lives being taken away to be rehoused was almost like seeing members of the family being taken away to be adopted into other families. But at the end of that process, I had thought that when we moved into the new house, we wouldn’t have too much by way of clutter. I was wrong.

And so, my relationship with the nearby Household Recycling Centre began. I have become almost obsessed with my weekly visit to the tip, which is located just outside town. The sense of catharsis and purging is verging on addictive.

At the tip, there is a range of different waste bins – wood, metal, large appliances etc – and a wonderfully ambiguous catch all, everything-else-that-can’t-be-recycled bin. There are places to leave what can be upcycled, there are places to leave dangerous chemicals. The tip is a welcoming place for those of us who recognise that we want to get rid of stuff that is taking up space in our life/home that isn’t helping us live well. It’s a place where a person is encouraged to acknowledge that we don’t need to hold onto what brought us joy in the past but only gets in the way in the present. What is now harmful to us can be taken away and dealt with by professionals.

Festering shame is one of the greatest poisons, one of the greatest risks to the flourishing of the human soul. It needs to be purged, not hidden.

Today, we are often told “never apologise”, “have no regrets”. But that’s really hard. Because most of us know, in some place in our being, that we’ve said, done or thought things that aren’t good. And that knowledge elicits feelings of guilt and shame. So what do we do with that? Ignoring and suppressing those feelings doesn’t mean they go away, instead they fester. Festering shame is one of the greatest poisons, one of the greatest risks to the flourishing of the human soul. It needs to be purged, not hidden.

And so, I return to the dump. At the dump, you aren’t judged for what you bring. There is a shared respect amongst visitors to the dump. Almost a greater respect for the person with the fullest car or the most fetid waste. Where can I go to leave my rotting conscience?

There is a spiritual discipline akin to my weekly tip trip. The discipline of confession. Confession is a spiritual gift that helps us unload the sometimes debilitating cargo of our psychological burdens. In the Christian tradition, the practice of confession can be a shared experience as part of a congregational worship service. Or it can be a more private moment, shared with a priest or trusted Christian friend.

Or confession can be done just me and God. Just you and God. We can honestly bring our mistakes, past or present, and be set free by God’s forgiveness. It doesn’t have to be in posh language, it just needs to be honest. We can just say sorry. We can say we just really wish we hadn’t done/said/thought … and we want to repent. Repentance means turning around and going a different way – so we can ask God to help us leave something behind, and learn how to go a different way.

Jesus invites you and me to bring our rubbish to the greatest spiritual waste centre, located outside town, outside time, at the foot of a cross on Calvary. His physical death was terrible. But the spiritual death was far more painful. He acted like a magnet to all the darkness of humanity and drew it into himself. So, out of love, he became the dumping ground for all that is worst about humanity. And it crushed him. But, Christians believe, he rose again three days later. He came out the other side and invites us to follow him there, too, into the light of forgiveness and freedom.

So next time I’m loading up my car with more (more!) cardboard and a few bulky leftovers from yesteryear, I’ll try to remember to do business with my burden of shame. Which we can dump at the cross of Christ, knowing that it will be dealt with. That it has been dealt with. And we can leave with an empty car. Lighter, hopeful, clearer-headed. Free

Column

Change

Character

Psychology

23 May 2024

4 min read

Look out for the outliers

Seeing the good qualities in others lifts them, benefits us, and makes the world better.

Roger Bretherton

Roger is a Clinical and Coaching Psychologist.

A office worker wearing headphones looks out of a hectic and loud office space around which people are moving

Nick Jones/Midjourney.ai

I was talking to someone the other day. She is a website developer and she’s just changed jobs. She is not a loud person, but anyone who meets her knows she is a person of quality, of depth and presence. She emanates a humble confidence. In her old job, she worked in a quiet, fairly sedate, office where she was given the space and the time to bring all her creativity to bear on whatever brief she was given. She was known and appreciated.

But her new job – the job she started last week – is a bit different. Her new colleagues are loud and outspoken. Silence is unknown in their office. They like to work to a soundtrack. The drum and bass keep thumping, and the banter never stops flowing. She’s finding it hard to fit in with her new team. And things weren’t made any easier when, after a few days, her new boss took her aside for a pep talk.

What was the problem? She was ‘too quiet’.

It hurt to hear that. It broke my heart to think that anyone could be so blind. How shortsighted do you have to be, to view the grace and peace someone carries as a problem to be solved? In a world of distressing noise and clamour, she is precisely the kind of person every office needs to temper the insanity.

I’m not worried about her. She’s bright and innovative. She’ll work it out. Either her new boss will see sense, or she’ll leave. And if she does, the queue of employers looking for someone just like her stretches round the block. She’ll be okay.

But it got me thinking about the kind of psychology I study. In my research, she would be called an outlier. One of those people in a team or a family who don’t quite fit in. Not because they are weird or awkward, but because they possess some positive quality the rest of the gang don’t have. They are the creative exuberant in a team who prefer doing things by the book. The hilarious joker in a pack who like to take things seriously. The conscientious worker trying to get on with the job in an office that would rather play now and work later. The kind one in a family of cutthroat competitors.

At the top of the list of reasons for wanting to leave work are the words: I am not appreciated.

The thing is we all have a unique contribution to make to the world, a one-off fingerprint of strengths and abilities never to be repeated in anyone else. In research these have been called Signature Strengths, the unique combination of positive qualities that make you you. And the weird thing is that we don’t have to try that hard to be them. If you are naturally kind, or wise, or grateful, or disciplined you won’t be able to stop yourself being that way. They come effortlessly to us. And if someone tries to stop us being the loving thoughtful faithful person we know ourselves to be, it is like losing a limb. If we find ourselves in a context where the most beautiful things about us are unwelcome – like my friend the website developer – it is like being rejected, right to the core.

But here’s the cool thing. If we can live by our Signature Strengths – if we can wake up each morning and ask the question, how can I use my unique positive qualities in a new way today? – it leads to remarkable improvements in wellbeing. Multiple studies have shown that those who live like this, thinking about how they can bring what is best in them to the opportunities and obstacles of each day, report increased happiness in living. Not only that, but they also show reduced anxiety, stress and depression. It turns out being good is good for us. Who knew.

That’s not the whole story though. To really be our best, we need other people to spot these strengths in us. If they don’t, we feel confined, unable to be ourselves in some way. When I ask people what it is like not to be able to bring their best qualities to the people around them, they come up with some pretty dark images. It is lonely, isolating, a desert, a fog, a prison, like being trapped in a cage. And when researchers ask people why they consider leaving their current job, their answers often reflect something like this. Work-life balance and salary are no doubt important, but often, at the top of the list of reasons for wanting to leave work are the words: I am not appreciated. Something good we wanted to give has not been received. We feel unseen.

So that’s why I say: look out for the outliers. Who is it in your family, your workplace, your neighbourhood, who goes underappreciated? Who do you know who has something good to give, but needs some help to give it? Because if we can learn to see those invisible beautiful qualities in the people around us, we not only give them the joy of being known, we also invite more light and flavour into the world. Life becomes a little less grey.

I just hope my friend’s new boss can learn this while he still has the chance. It is tough for her to feel so misunderstood, but it’s worse for him. She can move on, but he has to remain in an office deprived of the humble compassion she would have brought to it. It’s a question worth asking. What gift of beauty and goodness are we excluding from the world because we failed to see past the packaging?