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THE WEEL
Welcome to the well.
At the Well we meet spiritual adults, three times with each one.
Now we have our third and last meeting with Salme Blomster,
an author, therapist, editor and educator from Espoo.
Salme Blomster has written numerous books
dealing with sexuality, self-esteem and restoration.
Her latest book deals with human identity and
was published in 2008.
Salme Blomster has one child and one grandchild.
Welcome to the Well, Salme Blomster.
I think that we are going to talk about identity in this last meeting.
Last year you published a book dealing with identity.
Why did you write about such a subject?
Well, it actually brings together the themes of earlier books in the sense
that it describes release from a false understanding of oneself and
the steps to or the realization of a truthful understanding.
It is thus a suitable continuation.
In the field I have noticed that it is a subject area of constant interest.
Even among Christians there is a lot of uncertainty and
misconception about who and what we are.
When you speak about a false understanding of ourselves and
of who we are, we could certainly add one synonym:
weak or poor self-esteem, couldn't we?
Yes, indeed. Weak self-esteem is connected to
a false understanding of oneself. This can literally mean
a person only knows himself or herself poorly and
doesn't know the resources they possess.
Finnish people know the bad sides in their characters,
but not necessarily the other sides.
How often do you come across people suffering from weak self-esteem in your
talks at different meetings or in the feedback you get?
I would prefer to put it the other way: who really has a healthy self-esteem?
It is quite rare. But it's natural when I talk about subjects like these:
people who think they are healthy, or perhaps really are,
probably don't come to these meetings.
Since those who do attend are those who feel the subject
somehow concerns them, I come across people
with weak self-esteem more than the average person.
Since it is estimated that the percentage of healthy people is 2 %,
it's obvious that, to a greater or lesser extent,
we all have more or less problems with our self-esteem.
I was about to say that Americans have a healthy self-esteem,
but I won't now that you mentioned that percentage.
How does a weak or poor self-esteem manifest itself
if we think of a situation where it really is a burden?
It can express itself in many ways.
It manifests itself in a personality distorted by shame.
We have here a line with to ends.
At one end we have sacrificial behaviour -
the "Don't bother about me, just walk over me, I'm worthless" attitude.
At the other end we have brashness and dominance,
performance in a strong role, but it's not genuine,
it's just an act with which a person tries to hide his or her
own feeling of helplessness and unworthiness.
Today, it's also typical to try and earn a place in life by achievements.
But isn't it the spirit of our time -
somehow a call to be something more, more beautiful and better and slimmer?
The spirit of our time is very narcissistic and
actually favours these kinds of lies
and powerful, self-centred, even self-sufficient people.
To all this the message is added that you have to be 25, 35 years old,
beautiful and rich. And if you don't meet this ideal,
you'll do anything, starting from plastic surgery,
to satisfy these external criteria. This is sick.
A person can't feel well in such circumstances,
because it's not genuine.
Well, this spirit of our time certainly feeds the weak self-esteem,
but what do you think is the basic reason for this?
Surely a person can live in sick times
and in a sick society and still find internal integrity and health?
Yes, of course,
but it is actually quite a complex mechanism.
If I may straighten the curves,
I could say that the foundation of self-esteem is created very early on,
during the very first years, when the message that
I'm either OK or not OK comes into our internal file.
During the first months, the parents,
mainly the mother calls the child to life.
A child who experiences that the mother is her continuation,
begins to give shape to herself on the basis of her mother's eyes,
touch and use of voice, etc. And if there is carelessness, depression,
absence or something similar, even some quite natural reason
- without intending to make the parents feel guilty -
a little child experiences this as rejection.
Rejection does not necessarily always come from the parents.
It may come from the times we live in.
I think and feel that everybody has to go through
some kind of rejection, or what do you think?
Yes, it depends on how we define rejection.
Everyone has to experience disappointments in their lives.
This is quite certain -
i.e. disappointments in their relationships with other people.
But if you have a healthy self- esteem, you can endure
such disappointments. But if the self is based on insecurity
"I'm nothing, I'm not worthy, I'm not enough",
then rejection is experienced more totally
and even as a threat to the whole personality.
Some people experience it only as one pain among other pains.
How an individual relates to these things depends very much on
their psychological structure.
Our time is certainly an age of rejection in the sense that
unless you meet certain criteria, you can be quite coldly dismissed
or you are unable to get any work and so on. Also this is rejection.
What kind of processes have you gone through yourself
in the self-esteem area? Would you like to tell us a little about these?
To begin with I have started from trying to understand the kinds of
defenses I have constructed to pull through pain and distress.
We have not necessarily received any instructions in such things.
All the means to help us get through are learned and
if there is no model to help analyse these things correctly,
we measure them based on weak self-esteem.
The process is directed from the outside so that negative messages
are accumulated from the surrounding environment.
The first thing is to recognize this: just a moment,
am I inclined to always hear negative criticism.
Why don't I hear positive citicism.
And then I have to go on; it's really hard work,
it's to push away lies and then take care of the self
that has been lacking something.
And for us Christians there is the wonderful thing that we are
really born again, in the sense that we gain a new self,
a new beginning and a new possibility.
I'd like to revert to the concept of rejection.
It can take place in early childhood,
but these days half of marriages end in divorce,
which, if anything, is a huge experience of being rejected.
Can a person be restored after such an experience?
Can a person be healed?
A person can be healed from everything.
To a great extent the issue here is: what way of thinking is characteristic
of the person rejected and the person rejecting.
What are their attitudes?
And above all, what kind of appreciation do you give yourself.
If you measure your worth only through the eyes ofothers,
then being rejected may be a question of life and death.
A person with weak self-esteem might consider rejection proves
that he or she is worth nothing and can't be loved.
This can turn into self-hate so that these rejected persons
continue the rejection model and ultimately reject themselves.
If you have a healthy self-esteem, you understand that there are two parties.
You begin to think of the things that went wrong:
what is my fault, what is the other party's fault.
these things are worth considering to try and find out what led to this
situation and what I don't want to repeat in the future
to prevent the situation from happening again.
This is to see and face the things and
not to try and escape them somewhere, for instance behind a role.
"You can be healed from everything."
How can a false, untruthful self-image be corrected? How can we recover?
You already gave some tools, but if we try to expand further on this?
Yes, it's not the simplest issue.
First we have to see what we really are.
We have to be compared to something.
Or start from our definition of a healthy self,
or our definition of healthy self-esteem.
We could say that a healthy self-esteem can withstand
life's disappointments, distress and rejection without losing the own self.
A weak self-esteem somehow melts or shrinks into nothing when threatened,
while a healthy self-esteem can't be broken despite distress.
If we think of Christians,
Christ should be at the centre of our identity. In other words
He should be the one who is strongest in us.
And if we set out to ascertain in which direction and
how we should grow, then we should begin to look for Jesus.
The paradox in the Christian therapy is that you must actually
find yourself first to be able to forget yourself.
Recovery is brought about by coming from the false self to the real self.
But the real self does not remain where it is in secular therapy,
but continues a step further and says that recovery is:
not I any more, but Christ in me.
It's a very amazing secret and
maybe a contrary message to that coming from the world.
By that I mean "I am not living any more, but Christ in me".
What does it mean in practice?
Do I take the Word in my hand and start reading or ??
There are actually many things. The first I mentioned earlier:
you must become aware of your own way of thinking.
How you think, do you think positively or negatively of yourself?
How you think directly influences your feelings.
And when we start taking care of the needy child in us
or our broken self, then we mainly talk about feelings,
because it's seldom there is something wrong with our brains,
unless we have some mental illness or something like that.
The spirit is healthy in itself. The spirit recognizes the spirit,
so when talking about these problems,
we are nearly always talking about emotional areas.
Then we have to face the very pain and feelings which haven't been
taken care of, those which haven't been settled.
Some people call these emotional locks or
psychological pains, etc.
But it is these that dictate our behaviour to a great extent.
We can realize that "just a moment, I myself behave repellently
when I'm afraid of other people.
This means making observations and we are often so blind
to ourselves that somebody else is needed, a very good friend or
even a therapist who serves as a mirror,
who actually says that "I don't know, but I see in that ingratiation
that you are probably angry."
"What do you mean - angry, anger has nothing to do with ingratiation."
Yes, it has, but the point is you don't know it yourself.
Somebody else has to give names to the feelings.
And after that, your own needs must be taken care of.
You must not reject yourself any more.
It's not our job to start looking for a new father and mother,
but to take care of our own inner child and say that OK,
maybe it has not been looked after in the best possible way,
but I'm going to take care of you. I won't let anybody reject you.
And this while sticking all the time to the image which
the Bible gives of us, of what we are in God's eyes.
Who are we in God's eyes? What have you found?
What kind of gems?
The Bible says that God created us to be His joy in His love.
At the beginning of the Bible, the Book of Genesis says
"let us make a human-being, let us make him in our image".
It is also said that God created us to be man and woman.
In all these there is a deep love.
God created us to be members of His family.
And if the event in Eden hadn't taken place -
if we hadn't disobeyed God's command,
and wanted to know more than we needed to know -
we would still be there in perfect love. There would be nothing for us to fear,
we would be in close interaction with God.
We would not feel falsely ashamed or guilty.
We would be worthy and we would know it.
But the snake came and said "has God really said..".
And today the snake says "is it quite certain that God loves you.
Listen you are so sinful - think of what you did only last week -
so certainly don't think that God really could love you".
The snake talks in just the same way as before.
And we fall for it in the same way.
How often is hatred for oneself connected to wrong self-image?
Always.
If I see myself in a distorted way and above all, if I see myself
negatively or even self-destructively, or through hatred,
then the same feelings are connected also towards God.
And then we are inclined to blame God for our own choices.
"How could You let me to do such a thing or
where were You when such a thing happened to me"?
Although it had been a choice of my own, I blame God.
I can't see that there is a law of cause and
consequences and that God has given us
in addition to freedom of choice
also a certain kind of responsibility for our choices.
In what way can the image of God be corrected?
In what way can we find the true God?
If we are now talking about weak self-esteem,
we are talking about a human- being who does not experience
that she is fully loved as she is now, but tries at least to earn that love.
Thus I think that the most important thing is to look for and
find that God is love. And only on the basis of this
can you gradually - while growing from a suckling child into adulthood -
begin to love the Holy God, i.e. the God who also is fierce.
But because God understands and knows our stages of growth,
He does not require a child to act like an adult.
That is love, to let growth take place in peace and
gradually in an atmosphere of security.
There's no need to live in constant fear that God will take revenge
if I do wrong, or that He is spying on the edge of a cloud
checking if I live fully according to His will.
This would be a very judgmental and frightening God.
The Bible says that there is no fear in love.
There is punishment in fear, but not in love,
and a person who fears has not become complete in love.
And therefore I think that the journey to restoration is a journey from
such rejection to an ability to love, from being rejected to being loved.
This is the journey.
What do you think, where is God actually calling us,
when he calls us into unity with Him?
To be his children, daughters, princesses and princes,
because we are members of the royal family.
Jesus is our brother. If we think metaphorically,
he calls us back into the unity into which he created us,
into the original unity.
How much is He calling us into growth from a baby Christian
into a more mature person, into adulthood?
I think that growth has nothing to do with God's approval of us
or His love for us. He loves us anyway.
He also loves babies, even if they remain babies for all their lives.
I think that He loves us so much that He wants us to grow.
In this case growth means to become more like Christ,
and this means to know God more.
Who would not wish their own children to come nearer
and get to know their parents better and there to be real interaction.
I would think that God is sad because we are so far from Him
and that he really would like us to be in such interaction with Him
where we hear Him and need Him and speak to each other.
"Who would not wish their own children to come nearer
and get to know their parents better?"
As regards our internal restoration and God's wish for our identity
to be fastened in Him and not in a lie,
how could we avoid life turning into attaching too much importance
to ourselves by staring at our own navels,
as God has not called us to do so?
This is a good question, because this is the very question
with which many people reject this self-analysis and growth,
by saying that it's very self-centred only to stare at your own navel.
It is very selfish not to take care of oneself.
Anyone who has not examined his or her feelings and
recovered from his or her pain lives under the conditions of these.
In other words, a person unconsciously lives according to
his emotional world and his pains.
He is for instance envious, comparing and spiritually poor,
because he has not examined his own motives.
Even David says "Search me, oh Lord, search my heart".
This means that we should not keep staring at our own navel,
but examine the reasons why we do so.
For instance, my inclination to become offended
leads me to get angry with people.
I have to analyse this and examine why this is and
try and find out what I could do about it.
And then I can put it behind me and continue on my journey.
Here again, we have the paradox that to be able to let go,
you must first find out what you have to let go of.
Or, to be able to give your will to God, you must first
find your own will, because a slave does not have a will.
If I'm not yet free, I'm still a slave.
Then my relationship to God is that of a slave or
I'm actually afraid of God.
I do everything even as a Christian out of duty and only to stop God
from punishing me or rejecting me, or because I wish God to reward me.
But a slave hates prison guards. The image of God is distorted
because the image of the human being is distorted.
How have you seen God's strength in your work when you travel around
and speak or at your seminars -
when you have seen that God takes people forward?
I must say that the most wonderful part of this work
is to see God act and commit Himself to restoring people.
It's very rewarding. Sometimes you can see it immediately
when there is a new light in somebody's eyes.
It's really as though a light had been turned on and the person says
"oh, now I understand".
Recently during the inner-child conference, I could see
that a woman went somewhere very deep,
to quite another place. Then she started crying very deeply and
said that although it's always said that God loves,
she has never understood it before.
But now she sees that it is true.
When someone finds something of this truth, it's immensely releasing.
I have always said that if we realized how much God loves us,
there would be nothing to fear.
God trusts us more than we trust Him.
And He is much more merciful to us than we are to ourselves.
This we don't quite understand. We are much stricter than God is.
Salme Blomster, the books you have written and the lectures you have given
have been born out of journeys and processes like these.
Do you think you still have many journeys to make and
many books to write?
Well, I hope that there will be many books, because
I intend to write as long as I can.
And I'll certainly travel, as others do, until I reach Heaven.
Heaven is the roof and I think God has told me that
I do have the deepest layers in me -
layers which have been experienced and touched to some degree,
but which are so delicate that they can withstand only
a small amount of touching at a time,
so I think that these will certainly be gone through
with Father several more times.
Salme, thank you for being my guest.
I wish God's abundant blessings on you.
Thank you. The same to you.