Letting Go of Our Hang-Ups

Ages ago, I used to think the word “hang-ups” referred only to a person’s petty insecurities, say, a manager’s being annoyed by a subordinate’s brilliance or a feeling of uneasiness and discomfort about the life of the party. But through the years, I’ve learned that hang-ups could involve attitudes that are chiefly rooted in lack of trust in God. Merriam Webster’s dictionary defines “hang-up” as “a source of mental or emotional difficulty.”

A Common Problem

Self-doubt is a common hang-up. I remember an episode of the award-winning drama series LA Law in the 1980s in which newly promoted Judge Grace van Owen (played by Susan Dey) confides in a long-time colleague and asks her how to hand down judgment regarding a 16-year-old boy who shot and killed two people.

Her colleague says, “Well…you struggle with it…you beat yourself up…but you set the rules… you make that room your courtroom, and you make your judgment within the bounds of the law.” Bottom line: tell yourself you can do a good job and concentrate on your God-given talents.

Help Someone

Writing for Reader’s Digest, Norman Vincent Peale, a famous minister and renowned Christian psychiatrist, urged his patients with self-doubt to “choose one episode in their lives where they excelled, then relive it as vividly as they can until the image of themselves as a victorious person burns bright again.”

He says he tells them the best way to forget their own problems is to help someone else solve his. This reminds me of the late Princess Diana’s way of forgetting about her troubled marriage to Prince Charles and then her divorce: she embarked on a mission to get landmines out of the ground in Angola and undertook pioneering charity work by reaching out to landmine and AIDS victims. She also pursued efforts to support care for the dying.

Forgive

Resentment is another form of hang-up. In this writing business, I’ve been criticized a couple of times for taking certain views, often not popular, but, I’ve managed to shrug my shoulders (instead of sending my critics scathing, nasty emails). But I just take them all in stride and realize that it comes with the territory. Instead of lashing out, I rest in the pleasant discovery that someone actually reads what I write!

Peale says that the only permanent answer to resentment is forgiveness. Remember what Jesus told Peter about the number of times one has to forgive his enemies? The Lord said, “Seventy times seven.” Peale says this effort takes time because he believes the Lord “knew that in some cases, it might take 490 separate efforts before the grudge could be eliminated.”

Stop Worrying

Worrying is what most of us of do when things don’t go as we expect them to. We worry about everything – how we can get in on time to the office, how we can get by on our measly salaries, how we can stay in shape and in good health, even whether we can live to 100.

We worry about disasters which likely will not happen. We even worry about how our loved ones will do when we’re gone. (By the way, that’s God’s business! They will manage, and they will probably be better off without us!)

Peale says worrying about them does nothing. His advice: “Deliberately distract yourself – play a game, take a walk, see a movie, chop wood, dig in the garden, paint a fence…anything except sit and brood….”

The worriers among us can find comfort in the words of Padre Pio (St. Pio of Pietrelcina): “Pray, hope and don’t worry.” Indeed, it is when things go wrong that we need to trust the Lord the most.

Brotherly Love

The most damaging of all hang-ups is envy, which is selfish sadness at someone else’s good fortune, says Joseph A. Costello, S.M. (Catholic Encyclopedia). He says one way to understand envy is to compare it to hatred:

Envy differs from hate because of its special selfishness. When we hate someone, we do not like to see him have a good thing because we wish him evil things. When we envy someone, we begrudge him the good thing because we want the good thing for ourselves. Our neighbor’s gain is seen as our loss. His being in the limelight is seen as our being in the shadow. His good is seen as evil because it is not our good.

Costello explains the good thing may not necessarily be material – it can be one’s good reputation, glory, fame… etc., but it is worse to envy our neighbor for his virtue, for example, than to envy him his money.

Here is my two cents’ worth: the virtue of brotherly love, the antidote to envy, ought to be in the picture.  Each day we need to say thanks so that our unhappiness will never overlook our blessings – it’s a sure step toward letting go of our hang-ups.