I compulsively teased my little sister when I was a kid. Whatever she did, wherever she went, whoever she hung out with... it was a reason for me to tease her. It was a terrible thing. A few years ago I had the chance to confess my sin and to ask her for forgiveness. it was an emotional experience because of the pain that all my teasing had caused.
So when I came across a chapter about teasing in the book Orbiting the Giant Hairball by Gordon MacKenzie it really hit home. So I thought I would share with you a passage from his book...
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"I was once an alcoholic. My rehabilitation process included attending various support groups where, over time, I began to find out about some of the many lurking intricacies of addictive behavior. One especially valuable revelation for me was to learn about the powerful role shaming plays in the dynamic of any family cursed by an addiction-poisoned environment.
Addictive behavior does not damage just he addict, but the addict's family as well. In an effort to survive the insane behavior of the addicted one, other family members develop reciprocating insanities. And pretty soon, the whole tribe is participating in a jumbled web of addiction induced craziness. The craziness seduces every family member into compulsively controlling every other family member so that nobody gets any big ideas about breaking the web of madness in some rebellious effort to move toward healthier behavior.
This compulsion to control, engendered by the addiction, becomes a protector off the addiction. The controlling takes many forms, one of which is shaming.
We were discussing all this at group one evening when the guy sitting next to me observed, ‘Teasing is a disguised form of shaming.’
For as far back as I could remember, I had always been a frenzied teaser but had never looked at why. Now I knew. I teased to control. Why would I want to control? Because I am afraid. For whatever reason, I have had a long-standing fear of others. One way o dealing with this fear was to learn the skill of teasing. I learned it well, eventually walling myself of with a bristling armor of barbed banter designed to blunt the power of those countless people I felt threatened by. My teasing became a weapon intended to push others off balance and thus reduce, the sense of menace in my life.
I have a sinking felling that the teasing you bombarded your colleague with just now reflects a similar strategy [a reference to a previous story in the book]. I suspect that, when you teased this woman, it was an unconscious effort to control her by throwing her off balance – to stop her from risking, which she was most clearly beginning to do. Why would you want to do that? Well, when one of us finds the courage to risk to grow – to leave the status quo of the Hairball – that can be pretty threatening for the rest of us to witness. The threat is that we, too, might be expected to grow. And sometimes growing can be a frightening and painful experience. If we feel we have already suffered too much pain or are already frozen by a sense of menace, we are liable to do anything we can to avoid the pan or threat that often comes with the experience of growth. So we contrive to stop others in our loop who display a desire and willing to grow. One way to stop them is to shame them. But because we don’t want to admit to others or ourselves that we are trying to stop growth, we disguise our shaming as teasing – ‘all in the spirit of good fun.’ (Whatsa matter, can’tcha take a little joke?)
Powerful. I don’t think Jesus was a teaser.
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