4.3

Beyond the threshold of knowledge

Isaiah’s identity was with his people. He was one with them as a nation. His identity was also confirmed by his people who knew his name, characteristics and the different roles he had with family and community. But when God appeared to Isaiah, he saw his life and all it contained in their ultimate relation to God. He saw a holy God in relation to himself and his people, who were not holy. All that he was and relied on, all that he valued and gave him value were reordered by their relation to God, reoriented by God’s purpose in him. Isaiah had reached the limit of his knowledge and found God beyond its threshold, waiting to be his reference for all he knew, redefining him from the knower to the known

All change requires the end of things that are familiar and known, to make way for the new and unknown. Whether for better or worse, the process of change exchanges the familiar for the new and the known for the unknown. Transformation is a special kind of change that uses the currency of life, the give and take between life and death. Isaiah’s revelation of God ended the life he knew for one that is known by God. His security in knowing became a security in being known. The knowledge Isaiah had through his self and senses was rendered inoperative in the presence of his unknowable God

New and old, gain and loss make up the equation of change. Change is the motive force in psychotherapy which can be defined as personal healing and growth through positive change. Therapy’s process consists of supports and strategies that encourage positive change. One of therapy’s most commonly used means for change is called exposure and response prevention (ERP). ERP describes a simple and powerful dynamic. Stimuli that are typically avoided are approached. Intentional avoidance is replaced by intentional exposure, and avoidance responses are stopped. For example, a person who fears heights naturally avoids heights. ERP treats that fear by exposing it to heights wherever they can be found: near windows at the top floor of tall buildings; on bridges high above water; along the edges of deep canyons; on planes over clouds of the sky. The more a fear of heights is regularly exposed to heights, the less control that fear has and the more readily it can dissipate. The more any phobia or fear is exposed to its stimulus, the less gripping that fear becomes

The dynamics of ERP is central not only in treating phobias but in nearly all aspects of therapy work. Exposure is the first step to learning how to modulate and relate well to our emotions, thoughts, experiences and memories. Talk therapy’s benefit begins with talking about subjects that are typically avoided, exposing and giving attention to neglected areas of life. Exposure to avoided situations, whether they are internal or in our circumstances, is essential to therapy’s ability to heal. Positive change requires that exposure occur in safe relationships. The importance of safe relationships as the necessary context for living well is the subject of a later chapter

ERP is effective because it enables a kind of learning that is experiential. Standing by a window at the top floor of a tall building teaches fear of heights to be less persuaded by itself, not with words of reasoned explanations but with experience that can be internalized with practice. With repeated experience, the reality of safety in heights becomes more convincing than fear’s imagined threats. With practice, the weight of reality displaces the far less substantial threat of danger from imagination and misperception. Repeated exposure relaxes fear’s rigid thoughts and focus on potential dangers, and experience redefines that fear in reality. Surviving each exposure encourages entering avoided places and learning in those places as only life can teach. The personal shape of one’s life is no longer drawn around avoided places but is instead enlarged by including them. This is one of ERP’s most positive benefits, the opportunities it gives to accept and integrate more of a person’s life and resources

ERP underscores the importance of being more present for more life. No problem can be resolved unless it is first approached and engaged. This is why exposure is so essential to therapy. Paradoxically, the effectiveness of ERP depends on habituation, a process where avoidance is once again reestablished. Habituation is the developing of habitual ways that more consistently copes well with life. The success of ERP is most often measured by how well a person has habituated to avoided situations. The more habitual our coping, the less conscious attention we need to give it. Exposure’s effect of making habits comes from the human drive to know, to have stability and security in knowing what we know to cope with life. Knowing holds the promise that we have some control of what is and can make of life what we want and need it to be

Exposure to the new expands our experiences and grows our knowing. But habituation is always nipping at exposure’s heels, drawing us into the security of knowing where we are less receptive to what lies beyond our knowing. Why risk the unknown when it would most likely disturb the security of the known? So we guard our habituated knowing from the immediacy of life that would threaten its stability and security. Habituation’s road leads to the hardened blindness God spoke against Israel. It is the same spiritual blindness we all have of God, until He shows our blindness of Him

Isaiah was a man just like any other Israelite in his time, and like any of us today. But God showed him how little he knew of God and himself. Only when Isaiah came out of the secure hiding places inside himself could he be exposed to the true grandeur of God, before whose glory he had no place to hide. At the same time he saw his blindness, he also saw the One who gives sight. What a wonder it was for Isaiah when he saw that not only were all his hiding places exposed, but there was no longer any need for them, for he saw the glory of God’s goodness. Isaiah saw God’s good to him