the story behind the song

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Like an invisible pair of glasses, the events of our lives become a lens through which we view reality. Traumatic events often become massively thick lens that distort our view of reality so heavily that we have lots of difficulties in our relationships. These lenses leave us living in a world very different from what others see. 

The American Psychological Association defines a blindspot as “a lack of insight or awareness—often persistent—about a specific area of one’s behavior or personality, typically because recognition of one’s true feelings and motives would be painful.” 

This song is about those issues we all have, the one’s we can’t see but someone else can. 

I saw a married couple who was stuck in a difficult relationship issue. The husband believed things about his wife that were simply not true. She was a faithful, honest, committed wife. She met her husband in her church. In a street ministry he had turned his back on gangs, drugs and crime and believed on Jesus to forgive his sins and give him a new start. His testimony and the changes in his life were dramatic.

After 2 years of marriage and a child, her husband began to deeply believe that his wife was either cheating on him or at least trying to start up an affair somehow. She found these accusations deeply hurtful.This had caused a lot of arguing and fighting. They had reached a stalemate in counseling. The “evidence” he had for his suspicions was one little thing. His wife wore elastic waist sweat pants and shirt around the house all day. He was certain that her motive for wearing the loose clothing was so she could easily disrobe, have an affair, then put her clothes back on quickly. This was an issue he had come to believe was true with other women in his promiscuous life as a gang member. She explained that the Bargain Store sweat suits were comfortable and cheap. She didn’t see the need to spend more on clothing. Her life as a stay at home Mom involved a lot of baby spit-up.

My lifelong best friend Jeff (who is also a counselor) and I were discussing this phenomenon of blindspots we all have. I briefly described this couple and their lack of progress  and he replied, “Some people are just prisoners of their own perspective.” I thought for a moment, hung up the phone and wrote this song. 

So what was the “lens” on this man’s eyes that convinced him that his wife was cheating? His mother was sexually promiscuous.  She had 3 children from 3 different fathers, all outside of marriage. His mother’s friends were also not monogamous. The girls he dated in high school were promiscuous, all having sex before marriage. He verbalized his view of women to me when he said, “All women cheat.” This was his life experience and over time he defaulted back to this view. On an intellectual level he knew that all women don’t cheat, but on the level of his own experience, it seemed very true. He believed I was not a very good counselor, because I couldn’t see the “obvious” signs of a cheating woman.

Because of his unchurched background he felt inadequate around the folks who grew up in church. When he compared the marriages of his wife’s parents to his parents, he again felt great shame. He had some deep seated fears that the truth about his mother’s promiscuity would be simply more shame than he could bear. So he would avoid that pain by viewing all women as cheaters. 

Things that happen over and over can also become a lens of tradition. I know of a family of 3 girls with no mother. The father was seldom home, and the girls essentially raised themselves. They were so angry with each other that they stopped flushing the toilet after they used it. It was a passive/aggressive way to express their anger at each other. The tradition in that house was to flush the toilet before you use it, not afterwards. The only exception to this family rule was when one of the grandparents came over. So if one of the girls saw the toilet with clean water, they would expect a knock at the door any minute. If they went into a friend’s house and the toilet had been flushed, they assumed it was because they too were expecting company. 

One of the sisters was in marriage counseling, and this issue was a constant source of conflict with her husband. She had learned on an intellectual level that she should flush the toilet after she used it, but on a much deeper experiential level, it felt right not to flush it. So most of the time she defaulted to what seemed right to her as she viewed life through the lens of her upbringing. It was that very powerful and painful feeling of shame she was avoiding, that kept her viewing life through the lens of the past.

It is not only the way we view others’ behavior that gets effected by our trauma. What we hear others saying can be affected as well. Speech that passes through the language processing part of our brain must pass through these lenses of trauma, distorting what we hear, and interjecting words and meanings that were never really there. I’ll give you an example.

In 2015 my wife and I owned a coin-operated laundry. Two customers were there washing their clothes. One man noticed that the top loading washer he was using did not fill up completely on the first rinse cycle. He called me over to report the problem. I explained to him that new government regulations were in effect on the newer machines, which required them to use less water. Therefore Whirlpool decided to only fill the 1st rinse cycle about 2/3 full, instead of filling to the top as the older machines do. He said, “That’s a shame, but that’s government for you." I just said “Yep, I guess so,” and went back to cleaning. 

Later that day a friend of mine called me and told me to look on Facebook at a conversation someone claimed to have overheard me having with the customer I just mentioned. The man and I were standing about 3 feet apart discussing the water level, but standing about 15’ from us was a woman who had 3 washing machines running. The man had 2 running. So over the noise of 5 washing machines, at a distance of 15 feet, this lady “heard” us discussing President Obama, the sitting president at that time. She claimed we were angry with him, blaming him for the washing machine malfunction. She also claimed to have heard us using the N word in reference to the President. This was all typed out on her Facebook page. 

I picked up the shattered pieces of my reputation and drove into town to find her. (Ah, the advantages of a small town.) I told her she was mistaken, then went over the actual conversation I’d had with the male customer. Defensively she replied, “I know what I heard”. I knew she was biracial, so I asked her if she had experienced harassment growing up? She offered, “I’m biracial and I’ve never felt like I was accepted in the white or black community.” I said, “I’m sorry,” then I paused just to give her time to look in my eyes to see that I was sincere. A tear formed in her eye. I asked, “Do you think maybe all that hurt you’ve experienced in your life could have affected what you thought you heard?” Through her tears she nodded in agreement. I went on to tell her that I love our customers, and consider our laundry as a ministry to the community. I explained that I am a Christian, and I never use the N word.

By this time her lens had shattered. Her defensiveness was gone. She saw how her hurt had shaped words and formed sentences to create a narrative in her mind very different from what truly happened. She apologized to me, and immediately took the Facebook post down.

I’ve led over 10,000 hours of group counseling in my life for drug addiction, juvenile delinquency, anger management, parenting and marriage issues. Blind spots was a reoccurring topic I addressed in every group. One response I got repeatedly was this, “I don’t have any blindspots.” I’d chuckle to myself and say, “Well, if you did, you would’t know it would you?”

In a residential facility where the clients live together and see each other all day, that lack of awareness we all have becomes obvious among the other clients. My job as a therapist was simply to compare how a person views their own behavior with what the group sees. Defensiveness, denial, sensitive outbursts are there for all to see. For this reason, many professionals say group therapy is more effective than individual therapy. When your peer group sees your blindspot, that is usually more effective. (The same thing can happen in any type of small group, i.e. church led small groups, Weight Watchers, AA, NA, OA….) 

Some of our blindspots have nothing to do with trauma. Sometimes we just have a deficit of knowledge. We are missing a fact or a truth we need to keep from saying or doing something dumb. Take the guy who noticed that people stopped being friendly after he got his car windows tinted. They no longer waved and smiled at him leading him to think they were jealous of the new tint job.  He needed to know people could no longer identify his face through the dark windows.   

I have a relative who posted a funny saying on Facebook. It read:

“Someone just criticized me on Facebook, and I changed my mind- said NO ONE ever.” 

This made me laugh. Then it made me think. I looked back over all the exhausting discussing/arguing I’d done regarding politics on social media. I couldn’t think of a single time someone heard my point and changed their mind. Nor could I remember someone changing my mind. So I changed my approach. I admit it.  I accidentally get sucked into a few scrapes, but as a general rule, I don’t engage in political discussions, because no one is there to learn. We are all there to change others, yet we don’t see our own need to change.

“Why do you notice the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own?” Matthew 7:3 NASB

We are all good at something, and we are all bad at something. I don’t know what you are good at, but I can almost guarantee that you are bad at recognizing your own bias. This is the truth Jesus was alluding to in the above verse. To keep growing spiritually, intellectually, emotionally, and in our relationships, we have to get comfortable with the idea that we can be wrong, we can be clueless, we can be biased, we can be shortsighted, we can come across as arrogant, proud, stupid, condescending, superior, angry, mean, unloving… AND NEVER KNOW IT!  

We can group ourselves with others who share our own blindspots, and create an echo chamber where we build impenetrable walls around them. That way we can hang onto them for life. This happens in political parties, our circle of friends, clubs, even denominations. If we all followed the New Testament example of churches, there would only be one church per town. It would be called the Church of Birmingham, or fill in your city. Any differences we had, we’d pray until there was unity. Sadly, it’s much easier to divide ourselves into “likeminded” groups than it is to soberly look at our own blindspots.   

So what is the takeaway? Here it is—WE NEED EACH OTHER. You can stop reading now if you’d like, but I’m almost done. We cannot be growing, transparent, honest, genuine well-rounded people unless we are in relationships with others who love us unconditionally enough to tell us the truth, instead of what we want to hear. We have to take cues from others about potential blindspots, and be open enough to really hear someone else talking to us about ours.

No one has a God-like view of reality.  We need each other to see ourselves clearly, because we are not God. Someone said, “There is always a thread of truth in the fabric of criticism.” If you are so wounded that you simply cannot allow anyone to say anything negative about you, get some help. We have to make it our mission to look for our own blindspots. That requires you to have friends who love you enough to tell you the truth, rather than what you want to hear. Get comfortable with the phrase, “I might be wrong”, because you just might be. There is a strong chance. Be brave, go ahead and experience the momentary pain of admitting the truth you might have been hiding from, so you can experience deliverance from your pain. Then you can see past the lens, and know how your past is distorting your vision. You can have deep, meaningful relationships. Most importantly, you can: 

“…Walk in the light as he Himself is in the light, and have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus His Son cleanses us fro all our sin.” 1 John 1:7

This whole issue of blindspots is what the song is all about.

And that’s the story behind the song.