The Transcendental: The Church Project

Pride is not cute.

March 15, 2024

I said the topic was for later, and so here's the page for that. People who are ashamed of getting assistance or support. I think there are people who find that cute and admirable, be like, 'Aw, they are entitled to the support but they won't take it.'

That's actually either pride or self-esteem issues and drama.

I know people are fond of stories where they could go, 'Aw, aw, so cute.' or 'Aw, that's sad.' but in community work, I don't want people getting blindsided by cuteness and the drama of it. 'Cause drama has this way of making it difficult to reach people and have them cooperate with community workers. When there's pride or self-esteem issues, there's drama, and this is not to say we tell people who are ashamed of getting assistance or support that they're being dramatic. Of course not, but pride and self-esteem issues are not cute. That tells us a different story and it's that of other people's unkindness and lack of empathy that drove these people to be emotionally guarded when it comes to receiving support or assistance from others.

People need support and assistance from time to time. That's what neighborhoods, sisterhoods, brotherhoods are for. Some people need others to cook for them, to build sheds and houses with them, to assist them in healing themselves or assist them to recovery or rehabilitation of some sort. And we won't have community workers if we don't have people who know this thing. Community workers are well-versed in conversations about recovery and rehabilitation. And they know that it is community work, it's people joining hands to build something. And it could be just restoration work or development work.

People can be unkind and just display lack of empathy. By lack of empathy, lack of understanding or knowledge about difficulties, struggles, adversities. But those who do community work, they do have experiences of these things, and they had been guided towards the proper way of transcending or overcoming difficulties and that's how they gained understanding and knowledge. Those who lack it, they might have had experienced difficulties but the approach had been different, it was misguided. But that's a topic for another page. For now, we talk about those who have trauma responses like pride and self-esteem issue responses to receiving support and assistance in times of struggles and difficulties.

There are community workers who are good when it comes to dealing with trauma responses. But first, they don't find it cute. Brene Brown is a community worker and she would talk about shame. Shame is a trauma response. The trauma source are people who lack empathy and therefore weren't able to display empathy and were just unkind to people in a time of difficulty or struggle. And as a community worker, people like Brene, they make these spaces available for conversations about how to get rid of the trauma response and having a healthy response.

What is a healthy response to being offered assistance or support? You have to be open and ready to receive.

When people have pride as a trauma response, they feel insulted when offered assistance or support. They look at the hand offered to them, and they will push that aside and say they don't need it, they can do it, they're not all these things that other people call others having the difficulty or struggle because of their lack of empathy. They push community workers away.

When people have self-esteem issues, they have a different trauma response. They don't feel entitled to the service that's being offered to them, it's like they feel they have to earn that assistance or support because most likely, they have experiences where they feel they have to earn kindness or love or support from other people. They have had people around them who made them feel they have to work hard to receive kindness or just to be treated properly. They have been abandoned and withheld support from.

But both people have somewhat of a trust issue. And they just don't have that confidence in other people in that they can't believe that there are good people in the community because they've lived in bad communities where people were unkind to them. They know they need support, but that trauma makes it hard for community workers to reach them. And the community workers need to reach them to make community work possible, to make service provision possible.

When you're experiencing a difficulty, when you're struggling, you are entitled to community service, you are entitled to a helping hand to assist you in rebuilding. But that's just a fact of life - people struggle or experience difficulties or down times in one way, shape, or form. When people have trauma, they block the work. It's like leaving a tray of food for a person who's sick, and that person pushes the tray aside and wastes the work or leaves it there for it to spoil. People who don't have trauma, they will appreciate it, they will appreciate the work behind it, the empathy - the logic behind it, the person's logic.

But I really don't like putting a dramatic spin on community work because that's also why people kind of go: Just wait when you struggle yourself and you know what it feels like. It's just really a fact of life. But struggles don't last and actually, if you were not to get dramatic about it, it really doesn't last. And you would just see that divinity of man shining through, you will see how wonderful God's work is in man. The logical man. The reasonable man.

Other people experience difficulties and struggles and they come out unreasonable and unkind but then there are others who come out with empathy and because they dealt with the difficulty properly. It is a wonderful spiritual experience, working with community service providers. 'Cause these people, they're behind functional communities, healthy spaces. When you have a community worker - whether they identify themselves as a social worker or just a neighbor or a stranger - know that that person's been in your shoes before, they have experienced that difficulty and that's why they're offering you that hand. They also received that hand and that's what they've been offering to you.