Coping and Congruence

For the month of April, we have been covering the topic of coping. So many people are struggling with anxiety, depression and other mental health issues and many of them come back to the inability a lot of us have of to be able to cope with the challenges life sends our way. One of the key pieces of the puzzle, though, is something called congruence and it may just be the piece you are missing. Stick around as we dive into coping and congruence!

So, what is congruence? Definitionally, congruence is agreement, harmony, conformance or correspondence. It happens when you have 2 or more different pieces of something all working together as they were intended; it’s a well-oiled machine, the engine of a vintage muscle car purring like a kitten, or all of the ingredients in your favorite recipe coming together to create the perfect meal. As human beings, we experience peace when everything is working as it should and it’s when things begin to happen that shouldn’t or that we didn’t expect, our peace begins to dematerialize with each passing moment.

The concept of congruence is not foreign to our world today, either. All across our country, people are being encouraged and prompted to try to find out who they really are. The idea that who you are on the inside is separate and distinct from who you appear to be outside is our culture’s attempt to pacify the discomfort and distress that we feel as we try to navigate life and the world around us. The idea is that you will never be comfortable, happy or at peace until you can adjust the external persona to come into alignment with the internal being. Unfortunately, this doesn’t exactly work out the way that it’s supposed to and as people keep trying different methods in order to self-actualize, they experience temporary relief but before long the distress and discomfort return. Step 2, then, of the cultures plan to deal with the issue of incongruence is to externalize the issue. I can do everything in my power to harmonize who I believe myself to be with my outside way of living, but that doesn’t mean that anyone else is going to go along with it. Now, the source of my incongruence is everyone around me who doesn’t affirm my reordered presentation. So, to protect the mental and emotional wellbeing of the individual, our culture has to pressure other people into affirming someone else’s internal identity, regardless of what they think or believe about it.

There are a few obvious examples in our culture where this approach has been taken, but this video isn’t about bashing or harping on any one issue. With this video, I want to help people who are genuinely struggling to cope with the challenges of life but seem to be stuck in a hopeless cycle that they can’t seem to get out of. Other examples you might not have thought of, but where this way of dealing with incongruence is happening are in schools – in our own city, one district has instituted a no fail policy which pushes students along before they have mastered a subject so that they don’t get discouraged by failing and being held back. This was started as a way to help students who were struggling academically not to have to deal with the added pressure of shame that comes with failing a grade or subject. The motive was noble. The problem is that now, as this model has been in place for a few years, we are seeing many of the students who were initially supposed benefit from this model fall even further behind as they do not have the skills needed to work through and master the new levels they are being placed in. On top of that, other students who weren’t struggling as much before are now falling into failing and near failing grades as the teachers are having to spend more time focusing on catching those behind up and are unable to give enough attention to the kids in the middle. For the most part, the kids who were doing well before are continuing to do well now because they have the outside supports they’ve had all along and don’t need as much in-class instruction to understand and master the subjects, which means rather than bridging the gap and helping the lower achieving students move up where the higher level students are, the gap is just getting wider and more people are getting left behind than before. This, in turn, makes the issues of anxiety, depression, and hopelessness these students were already facing worse, rather than better. Again, school is just one of the places where a misguided attempt to help others attain congruence has actually caused far more harm than good, but what is the right answer and why do these methods fail?

Well, the answer lies in understanding that congruence is not merely internal and external. It is not just me and the natural world around me. There are multiple levels of congruence within the material world, but there are also transcendent levels of congruence in the metaphysical or spiritual world, as well, and we all have some understanding of this fact. This is why the child who fails upward in school is not being emotionally supported properly, because they know that sure, they might be allowed to technically graduate with their peers, but they won’t be given the same allowances to fail upward in the adult world without major consequence. In school, failure translates to bad grades, but if the bad grades don’t carry any weight of consequence, then they really don’t mean a whole lot. In life, failure in your job can mean anything from costing your company money, creating an unsafe work environment because you don’t follow proper procedures or even putting the lives of the people around you in danger. This, again, is being shown to us in real time as certain airlines have been celebrated or excoriated in the realm of public opinion for prioritizing diversity, equity and inclusion in the hiring process over the merits of skill, ability and proficiency alone. Eventually, though, there is a level where either you will not be allowed to continue on your path if what is externally true about your abilities is not congruent with who or what you think or say that you are. This is all dealing in the natural sense of congruence, however, and you can be completely in congruence with your understanding of yourself, your desires and even attain the placement and prestige that you are seeking in and from the world, but if your spirit is not in congruence, then you will still only have a temporary peace.

It’s like we all have this internal compass which directs us in our lives. If we ignore the compass, we can wander off in any direction and be completely lost in our lives. If we fix our heading based off of our internal compass, however, we will feel a sense of purpose, direction and meaning in our lives, but what if your compass is wrong? What if there are external super magnets which are invisibly pulling our needles and directing us to a false north? This is the reality that many people are living in. “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick, who can understand it?” That’s Jeremiah 17:9. Our hearts are easily misguided and, before we realize it, we can be so far off track that we wouldn’t even recognize true north if there was a sign point directly towards it. Spiritual congruence, then, must be rooted in that which is transcendent. When we use subjective markers like feelings, thoughts, and popular opinions of our time, we can only ever hope to experience temporary peace, and living like this is going to keep us constantly hungry and thirsting for something more because this temporary, material world was never meant to satisfy.

God is our true north. He has to be! If there is a transcendent law that governs us, the way that gravity governs a compass, then there must be a transcendent Law Giver in the same way that there is gravity. C. S. Lewis came to the same conclusion this way: “If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probably explanation is that we were made for another world.” The constant nagging discomfort and distress that we feel is meant to show us that something is not right. It’s like we’ve been following the compass of our hearts all our lives, but it has been pulled by an unseen force and is guiding us in the wrong direction. Eventually, we feel a growing suspicion that something is off and it is there that we have the opportunity to make a change. God sets other signs in our path, some large and some small, to get our attention and point us to the right way. We might think we have the proper heading, but we know that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, so either the sun is wrong or our compass can’t be trusted. Materialistic, internal congruence will shout at the sun and tell it it’s orbit is out of whack. Transcendent congruence will humble itself and recognize that it’s our own compass that is off track. Using the sun, we can start to make our way in the right direction, and it won’t feel good because our compass will still be telling us to go in the opposite way until we have moved far enough beyond the range of the magnet that it can reorient itself to true north. It is when our internal compass is in alignment with reality and what is fundamentally and transcendentally true that we will experience the peace that comes with true congruence. This is the peace spoken about in Philippians 4:7, which surpasses all understanding. It is this peace with which Jesus not only calmed the storms, but walked upon the raging waters. When our peace is secured in He who is truth, we will know what true peace really is.