Demystifying Deconstruction, The Hidden Gem of Personal Growth

Deconstruction is a HOT topic right now - especially for the faith community. But here’s the thing… it’s not as big of a deal as people are making it out to be.

In this episode, I give you a simple definition, share ways in which you are probably already DOING deconstruction, a few (of the many) clear benefits of it, and then some “bottom line” truths and expectations you can walk away and apply - today.

Time to Stand Tall and Own it.

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Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:02

You're listening to Stand Tall and Own It, a podcast for high-performing female leaders who are ready to make an impact by discovering the safety that comes from understanding their own values and exercising their own authority. I'm your host, Andrea Johnson, and I'm here to tell you it is time to just truly be you, my strong friend. It's time to stand tall and own it. Hey, welcome back to Stand Tall and Own It. I'm your host, Andrea Johnson, and I received some really good feedback on the last few episodes. So I'm gonna take a little bit of that and launch into a few episodes in the future of things that um are I think are very relevant to this feedback. And this tells you that when you speak, I listen. But I got some feedback on two episodes ago about um the thoughtful approach to making goals and resolutions, that it was really nice to hear that you could actually be a leader while you felt like you were just surviving. And I would like to share with you a few things that indicate or have given me the ability to lead while I survive, while I'm just in survival mode. But I also want to share a few things that kind of laid the groundwork for me to be able to do that. So that's going to be coming up in the next several episodes. They may not be necessarily sequential, but today's topic is something that I hope will resonate for you. If it doesn't, it's something I've wanted to talk about for a really long time because it is a hot topic, especially in evangelical circles or what we might call Christian circles. Um, depending on who's listening to me, I don't want to assume that you know exactly what all of those things mean. But today's topic of deconstruction is something that I've had on my list since I think back in the fall. And I as I walk through a few things this morning and share it with you, it it will you'll see maybe why I didn't share it early on. I'm not a hundred percent landed in a lot of areas, and I have no intention of telling you today what I deconstructed and how I did it and why I did it and where I'm going or what I believe now in any area. That's not the point. My whole point today is literally what the title of this podcast says. It's that I want to demystify it for you, and I want you to see that it really is this hidden gem of personal growth. And I'd also like you to see, I'm gonna bottom line it up front, that it is a big piece of personal growth, and that we do it whether or not we realize it. So now is the time for me to share this. I think it's right, and um, I've had a couple of other podcast interviews that are going to be interviewing me that said, Would you please talk about this? And I was like, Okay, um, I am not the world's expert on this, and these are my opinions, this is the way I see it, but I want you to hear that it doesn't need to be seen as something that's fearful or negative or anything like that. And um, so that's where we're going today. And I think this is, I mean, in talking with my friend and my best friend and podcast producer, she said, Yeah, I think you can do this without making it a really heavy or sad topic. I'm like, it's not a heavy topic, it's a great topic. It falls right into the intentional optimism tenet of curiosity, of courage, and um and the idea of being curious about everything. One of my few posts that went, I don't not viral, but was like one of the most popular posts is the thing that said, I'm terminally curious. And um, as long as we're curious, then we have we can find good answers, right? So that's what we're gonna do today is we're gonna look at this topic and this idea of deconstruction and what it means. So you know me, I'm gonna start with the definition. And I took the Webster's definition because I think that right now the the definition and the way the word or the concept of deconstruction is being used in our society is a little bit different. It's not quite this narrow. Um, but Webster's is very much based on the philosophical ideas of deconstructing literature and art and that kind of thing. But here's so I stuck it into Chat GPT, it's my friend, to make it simpler. And this is what they came up with, and I kind of like it. It says definition of deconstruction is a critical analysis approach. You know, I love my critical thinking, that focuses on the inner workings of language or conceptual systems, highlighting the relational nature of meaning and uncovering implicit assumptions within expressions. Now, yeah, that's still a little bit complicated. So here's here's what I take out of that definition. Deconstructing is basically taking a look at what we've got in a system of thinking, any kind of system of thinking, if it's philosophy or art or sociology or economics or um racial and ethnic relations or religion or politics, all of it, taking a look at what's in there and kind of highlighting the relational, that says highlighting the relational nature. What do these things mean? And what are the implicit assumptions? What are my A, B, Cs? What are my assumptions in there and my beliefs and my conditioning that have to do with all of it? So deconstructing is something that basically we do in personal growth all the time. So that's my first demystifying piece is that we do it all the time. There are other words that people will use and that I will use interchangeably, and I've found that I've used them interchangeably, and one of them is critical thinking. So being willing to take a look at what you're thinking about or what you're taking in, and maybe I mean, if you go back to my um my episode on critical thinking, you can kind of hear a better idea of what I mean by all of that. But to be able to take that idea or this belief system that I have in any area and say, where did all this come from, right? What is all of it? Be able to break it down and say, okay, I'm gonna stick with that, or I'm not gonna stick with this piece, right? I'm gonna hold on to a piece of it and not another. Another term that I have used and that I have realized lately, especially, and I'll go into this a little bit later, is um we talk about becoming more healthy, meet more emotionally, physically, of course, um, relationally, spiritually, philosophically, mentally, becoming more healthy in all of these areas, personal growth, becoming healthy is for me, has been a process of deconstruction, deconstruction. Deconstructing the things that I no longer need, right? So, in talking about this with my podcast producer, she said, Oh my gosh, this is just like taking that furniture from your family when you go out to your first apartment. And it is, and I did the same thing. If you did not have family, like if you didn't move into your first apartment, this may not work for you, but most of us, when we left home, if you went to college, if you just moved out on your own, you know, most of us took furniture or um, like my grandmother gave me stuff. I still have cast iron skillets that my grandmother gave me. And um, I inherited sofas or a table and chairs, and I still have my grandmother's table and chairs. It's out of my screen porch. There are things we inherit that we might not keep. When my husband and I were first married, we were in seminary in Fort Worth and we were poor. I mean, poor, poor, poor. I think it was really, really, really hard for us to pay $250 in rent every month. And, you know, part of it was he was a youth minister. We were both in school, we were paying for school, I worked at the the seminary, and so we didn't have a lot. And people, we were so excited when um we got a an L-shaped couch for our 600 square foot little duplex. And I recovered that puppy. But um, it was free. And then another couple in our church offered us a couch that was a pullout sofa that we put in the office area that we were able to use. And our our bedroom was so small that if we if we wanted to open the sofa up from like my sister and brother-in-law came to stay with us, and in order to open the bed so that they could actually go to bed, we had to shut the door and open the bed, and then in order to get out, they had so they couldn't go to the bathroom in the middle of the night if they wanted to, um, unless they left the door open. So that's how little all this was. But these were the things that we had that that was really helpful for us. We did not move that furniture with us when we moved to Baltimore for my husband's first pastorate outside when we left seminary. And we did not, we didn't take any of that with us. Some people, though, have furniture that they've inherited that they kept for sentimental reasons that they really liked or that, you know, it works. Why should I get rid of it? But at some point, you might look around and go, why am I keeping this? I've done that. I know I'm pretty sure we all have. Is it for sentimental reasons? Is it for is it is it just because I don't have the money? You know, if I don't have the money to replace the furniture, that's fine. But a lot of times we'll look around and go, Oh, I think it's time to get rid of that couch. Um, the little L-shaped couch that we had. We got it free from our friends and in seminary. And my husband said, I think this came from a frat house in Alabama. And it smelled bad. We had to febreeze it multiple times. Um, and then of course I recovered it and it was so much better. And we did move that when we went to Baltimore because I recovered it. I mean, I literally I worked in my fingers off to do it, but it was not a couch that we kept long term, and we did end up replacing it. But this is an idea of kind of how we land in certain areas in our lives and belief systems and things that in any area that we might want to deconstruct, right? Because we might look around and say, Yeah, I don't need that vase anymore. I don't need, gosh, I don't need that couch anymore, or none of this furniture in my house, or none of these clothes in my closet really represent me anymore. I've changed. Who, how can I deconstruct and then reconstruct? What is my new house going to look like? So how do I use deconstruction? Well, like I just kind of shared, I use it everywhere. Now, historically, the term I think in modern philosophy was coined by the philosopher, the I think he's Algerian French Jacques Derrida, who described it as a turnaway from Platonism's idea of true forms and essences. And if you know anything about Plato, it was and his philosophy is very much the seen world versus the unseen world, the things that you can know versus the things you can't know. And if you look around the United States, especially today, you're gonna see a whole lot of this thinking. It's like this is right and this is wrong. These are the things we can know, these are the things we can't know. These are the if you if you align with this, you're good, if you align with that, you're bad. That's very what we would call platonic thought. And Derrida was actually saying, yeah, we're as we kind of start looking at things from a different angle, we're walking away from some of that Platonic thinking. Um, you see this in art, right? You see it in um very famous ones like uh Picasso and all the uh what is the movement, the modernist um, I've forgotten. Now it's all out of my head. I had an art history class that I could have just told you in it just a second ago, but it Picasso is a really great example where he moved from very realistic to very abstract, maybe the abstract is what I'm looking for, but very abstract art in and ways of depicting people that don't really look like people. They might have four chins or five ears or three eyes, but it's a way of looking at things that is kind of pulled away from what we consider to be quote unquote reality. And that goes back to the definition that I shared a minute ago of it's taking the inherent meanings or what is the meaning of something and actually pulling that out and saying the meaning of this is a little different than what appears on the surface, right? So we see that in literature, a lot of deconstructing in literature, we see it in philosophy, we see it in politics, a lot of it in religion right now. And to give you a little bit of an understanding of where it started for me, I actually thought that it started with politics or my own Christian traditions. And I thought it started there, but actually it started when I went into a 12-week impatient program when I was 20 for bulimia and depression, where I was told you actually get to think for yourself, or I was told you actually get to decide other things for yourself. That's where it all began. Because I started saying, wait a minute, why do I think this? Why do I believe this? What is it about this idea of the way I'm supposed to dress every day, or the fact that I'm supposed to wear makeup every day? Where did that come from? So that's actually not about politics or religion. And right now it's just so it's such a hot button, third rail issue. Like when I went to Google the definition of deconstruction, I cannot tell you how many hits came up coming from conservative Christian blogs and ministries and sites. Like, what is deconstruction anyway? And what does it mean to deconstruct your faith? It's like, yeah, it's finally just hitting that maybe we don't all just take whatever it is that we've been given, shoveled into our mouths all of our lives, and we move forward. And for me, it didn't start there. It started way back when I finally said, you know what, I don't want, I see the trajectory I'm on, and I don't want to go there. So how am I going to change that? And it, you know, when you look at it that way, it doesn't have a lot of fear associated with it. But right now in our culture, the term deconstruction for many people is just so front-loaded with absolute terror. Terror of being ostracized, terror of being kicked out, terror of not belonging, terror and just absolute desperation for making sure that you say the right things and are in the right place to be accepted with the right people. When all we really need to do is just be willing to stand on our own and stand tall and own it, if you will, and just say, This is who I am. I'll bet I am not alone on this planet in thinking this way. And it it I'm not gonna lie to you, I had days when I went through some serious deconstruction of my own personal evangelical Christian faith that and it really, I look back on it, it really was never my faith. It was really the traditions surrounding my faith that I was on the floor in tears. So I'm not gonna tell you that this isn't that doesn't have hard aspects to it. I'm telling you the fear can be real. But here's the deal: this is what I learned, right? Even and I even had one woman, I said, if if I change this, my family's gonna abandon me. I mean, I really thought that, which is so far from reality and so far from the truth, but that tells you how this way of thinking can get in our minds, that um this conditioning and our assumptions can get in there, and we just don't realize that we actually have the ability to change or be ourselves. But here's what I on the other side of some of that, and if you you know, contact me yourself if you really want to talk about this. I am happy to help you walk through something like this. This is part of what I do in coaching. But I walked away from some of these major deconstruction journeys because they're not, you don't just do one and done. There's it's constant, it's everything. Nobody really cares what I believe, and nobody really cares what you believe. The people who love you love you, not what you believe. And that's I think beautiful. I find that so encouraging. And if I'm gonna give anybody credit for this aspect of my learning, it's my sister who reached out to me and because I've had just gone like run silent, run deep on all of this stuff. Because I just was terrified that nobody in my circle would understand and they would all assume the worst of me. And she just reached out and she goes, Are you okay? And I'm like, No. And we actually started talking. And she and I don't always agree on everything. My husband and I don't agree on everything. My best friend and I don't agree on everything. Here's the beautiful piece. They love me for me. They don't love me for what I believe. Because here's the deal if somebody else doesn't love you because of what you believe, they probably didn't love you in the first place. This is an opportunity for you to get clear on who's in your circle and who really matters in your life, who your real friends are, who your real family is. And there's always fear of the unknown. I mean, I gave myself permission to completely walk away from some things. And I still do. I still like I'm there are many areas in my life that I used to be very landed on. I had very clear political, economic, um, racial, um, which I thought I had racial beliefs, what I had was conditioning, um, faith tradition. I've I had all of these things very kind of wrapped up in a bow. And the problem was that it just didn't resonate with me anymore because looking around in my house full of furniture, that just didn't work. Um, but the fear of the unknown is what holds many of us back. So it's very real. The fear of ostracization is real, but you just need to know that the rest of us or those of us outside of whatever deconstruction journey you feel yourself pulled toward, even if it's just one on economic thought or the way you show up like physically, or you know, because I went through a a phase where in my personal growth journey where I wore like no makeup. And the very first day I was like, because my counselor told me to do it. And I was like, my mother is gonna have a cow. And what was real was that my mother looked at me and said, You're different. I'm like, Well, I'm not wearing any makeup. She goes, No, I know, but you seem more at peace. And here's here's the other thing is that the people who love you will see you, they will see you for who you are. So while that fear of the unknown is huge, when you step into it, it's no longer unknown, right? It's like the only way to make something unknown is to actually figure out what it is and to get curious about it. But the big other fear of other people rejecting you is only real if they aren't your people. And I know that sounds very trite, and I know that sounds very, I don't know. If somebody had said that to me when I was on the floor in tears, I would not have been, I mean, I would have given mental assent to it. I would have said, okay, yeah, I understand that, but my heart would have still been like ripped open. And there are times this I felt like that some of the things I went through, and some of them were my own doing, were like ripping my heart open. But the beauty of it is that now I I am in such a better place. I have grown so much. Just being willing to know who I am, to know what I believe and why I believe it, which is what I'm just gonna say my definition of deconstruction is. Um that has given me the peace and the confidence to stand in a way that I never had before. Absolutely never. So let me run through what I think some of the benefits might be of deconstructing in any area. The benefits, number one, is you know why you believe and what you believe. Or excuse me, I'm gonna restate that. You know what you believe and why you believe it. This is especially true in the area of religion. This is especially true in the area of politics or economics, or um gosh, I keep calming to those those are like the big big ones, but or education or um, I don't know, social standing. Like I don't worry about keeping up with the Joneses, right? I mean, um, but when I know what I believe and why I believe it, then I don't even feel defensive anymore. Even if I'm in a situation where I'm the only person who believes that, and it's very clear, I don't feel the need to defend myself. I don't feel the need to even pull out my sword and say, you guys are after me because you don't believe like me. Whereas I used to. When I didn't own my own beliefs and I didn't own my own understanding of things, then I did feel the need to defend it because it wasn't mine. It was an armor that I was wearing or a hat that I was wearing that was gonna get knocked off real easy, right? So the benefits include knowing what you believe and why you believe it, which gives you confidence. Number two, you align yourself with what you believe. When you deconstruct and you say, oh my gosh, all those things that I said I believed before, I actually didn't. And that's why I felt so quote modern parlance, coaching, you know, whatever. It's like out of alignment. I I don't want to be out of alignment. I want to be in alignment with who I am and what I believe. Going back to the A, B, Cs and your core values. All of these things go together, my friend. So you can't do one without the other. So it helps you get there, being willing to say, I'm gonna deconstruct this, right? Helps you align yourself with what you believe. It also helps you honor how you were created and who you were created to be. Now, this is where, you know, I said I I didn't deconstruct my Christian faith. I didn't walk away from my Christian faith. It has all been re reconstructed in In a way with in and around my understanding of my faith traditions, what I have jettisoned, and what I have kept. And there are things that are still in my quote living room that eventually will not be. There are plans for those things to not be in my living room any longer. But it's that way in politics. It's that way in um even in how I raise my son, all of those things. But I now get to honor who I am. So when I start talking to people, they have a better understanding of me and they're more drawn to me because I'm more authentic. And the last piece, because a lot of times the biggest criticism of deconstruction, and the biggest criticism, especially from the faith community, is that it makes it all about you. Is that it makes it about you being true to you. And you're not supposed to do that because you're supposed to want to be true to either a higher understanding or Christian doctrine or um or even the community, etc. But here's the deal, my friend. When you start deconstructing all the things that you have been handed and are not sure are yours, you actually start seeing a new perspective here and a new perspective there, and another one over here. And all of a sudden, going all the way back to the first episode of this year, talking about leaders have no business leading if they can't see other people's perspectives. When you can see all the other perspectives, it just opens you up to be more conscious of what the needs are in your community, how you can better align yourself with, let's say, the goals or the values of your organization, your employer, or your institution. It can give you the ability to more positively and more intentionally engage with the tenets of whatever faith system you've decided to have. So the benefits, I think, far outweigh, especially even the criticisms of what deconstruction might be. So the bottom line for me is that, and I read this this morning in um my daily reading that I read Sky Gitani, he's a author and former pastor and stuff, but he's talking about um, he gave us a quote from Van Gogh. I'm gonna stick with art here today, um, Picasso and Van Gogh. And one of the things that Van Gogh said, because they were moving away from realism, is that he wanted to disentangle what was really there and the essence of what was really there from what we perceive it to be. And I think that disentangling perceptions from reality is very important. We've got to know what our perceptions are. That's where that assumptions, beliefs, and conditioning comes in, right? So the bottom line is I think it's disentangling. I thought that was so perfect that it came this morning when I knew I was going to record this. Number two, it's critical thinking. You were given a brain and you get to think. Nobody gets to tell you what to think. Nobody gets to tell you how to think, and nobody gets to tell you you have to agree with them. You just don't. So if you need somebody to give you permission to think critically and to be your own, I give you permission. As my coach says, here's your permission slip. And the third bottom line is this is all about personal growth and health. So much of what I consider to be my deconstruction is me, when I look back across the journey of the last 20 to 30 years, was me actually becoming a healthier Andrea, becoming a healthier Enagram Six Wing Seven, becoming a healthier intentional optimist. All of those things are really what deconstruction is. It's not a betrayal. It's not um if anybody tells you, so here's the other bottom line. If you feel called or drawn to do some sort of deconstruction, and you have people in your life telling you that any kind of deconstruction, especially in the area of faith, will only lead you to hell, please run away. You can run to me, run to somebody else, run to a different organization, or just get alone with your thoughts and your prayer or whatever you do, because anybody that tells you that is more afraid for them than they are for you. And they're they may even phrase it in a way that says, I love you, therefore I'm telling you, don't do this. They haven't done it either, and they're clearly afraid of the unknown as well. So just love them, but run away. And my invitation to you would be to become terminally curious. There's absolutely nothing wrong with curiosity. It's a beautiful thing. C.S. Lewis brought that up. It's like curiosity is what is is what is bred out of this understanding, this new understanding of who we are. Um, if you are a Christian, if you're somebody of a person of faith, it's it's that whole what if? What if I'm wrong about this? What if I'm right about this? What if there's 10 ways to see it? What if there's a middle way, right? And I'm inviting you, again, constantly inviting you into critical thinking. Whose furniture are you using, my friend? What furniture is in your house? Is it yours? If not, do you want to keep it? I have a dresser in our bedroom that doesn't match any of my other furniture, but it's a beautiful mahogany dresser that was my husband's grandparents, and we choose to keep it. It's not ours, we inherited it, but we choose to keep it. I have one in my guest bedroom that is a beautiful dressing table, this lovely maple, um, that my mother used to get ready at when she would go out on dates with my father. And I don't keep it just for sentimental reasons. I keep it because it's a beautiful piece of kind of mid-century modern furniture. But I don't keep everything. I don't keep it all. So what are you keeping? What is it that is yours and what isn't? Where also I invite you to look, are you already doing this and you didn't realize it? Where are you actually doing deconstruction where you've called it personal growth or you've called it um awareness, right? These are terms that are interchangeable and they're all a process. And I cannot wait to hear. I hope this is helpful to you. Um, it is something that I've wanted to share with you for a really long time, and I am eager to hear from you to hear how this is either giving you permission or allaying your fears, or I don't know, Andrea, you're wrong. It's okay. I don't need to be right all the time. This is my experience, this is how I see it, this is the perspective that I've gained. Let me know. Take the um the post that is out there for this particular episode on social media, share it to your stories, or um hit reply and let me know what you think. And um, and I just I'm excited to hear from you. If you personally need somebody to hold your hand and just to give you a little bit of encouragement to walk you down this road, email me, Andrea at the Intentional Optimist. I am available to you. If you're watching on YouTube, please subscribe um the more and then share this with somebody. If you have a friend or somebody that you know is walking this road or is kind of being drawn down this road but is afraid, share this with them. And let's start the conversation. Because here's the deal together we can do this, y'all. We can do it well. So let's all stand tall and own it, knowing what you believe and why. And we will talk next time.