The Harms of Teaching Women Not to Trust Themselves

I am the product of years of teaching about the wickedness of the human heart. I deeply believed that my desires must not only be suppressed but denied. Putting everyone else first was the rule of my life. This resulted in a denial of my needs and a disconnection from my soul.

Many of us come from a similar background: An overemphasis on Jesus’s invitation to deny ourselves, take up our crosses, and follow him. A belief that our hearts were utterly and always wicked and could not be trusted. A focus on the needs of others without acknowledging our own. The result? A person in fragments, left vulnerable to the will of others and even to abuse.

The belief that we must leave our desires at the door and disregard our own hearts leads to making decisions that eliminate ourselves. You cannot deny a self that you never had. Teaching that mistakenly draws the conclusion that we can never trust our own hearts or our own discernment — that, in fact, we shouldn’t — eliminates the strengthening of our discernment muscle. We quickly move to a destructive belief that what we need and what we want, our desires, are diametrically opposed. This is particularly dangerous for women who already carry a deep sense of obligation and responsibility for the people around us. We can make decisions that don’t feel right for us because we believe they “must be” what is best. We get trapped in a kind of twisted logic. “If I desire something, it must be bad.” This way of living has devastating consequences.

I am not saying that we need everything we want or should trust everything we feel. We need discernment and a heart of surrender to God. What I am discussing here is an extreme idea that can disconnect us from our souls. I have seen this present in many of the women in my life.

One of the ways this idea is strengthened is by a suspicion of desire itself. A huge “forbidden” sign is on the door of our hearts and, instead of acknowledging our desires and surrendering them, we simply ignore them and pretend they aren’t there. We become unintegrated and disconnected persons in the process.

We don’t need to indulge every desire, but we do need to acknowledge them. Ignoring desires doesn’t make them go away. Rather, they get buried alive, or they get replaced by the desires of others.

In an article on the literary trope of the angel/bad boy romance, Sophie Gilbert describes the danger of a woman’s desires being replaced by a man’s. She quotes cultural-studies scholar Janice Radway:

Before women were allowed to acknowledge having desires of their own, they had to be “overcome” by dominant and even predatory alpha heroes, to avoid being seen sacrificing any of their own virtue. A heroine who’s angelic and self-effacing enough might succeed in softening the hero’s cruder edges, but her desires will always be supplementary to his, never authentic (emphasis mine).[1]

There is a great cost to making our desires supplementary to a man’s. How many women throughout history have surrendered their authentic desires because they simply didn’t think they could have them? I would imagine the number is too high to count. Likewise, how many of us have lived with inauthentic desires and have allowed our own to become supplementary, if we have even allowed them at all?

Let’s look at the concepts and the Scriptures most often referenced to teach us to distrust our own hearts:

We have desperately wicked hearts.

Jeremiah 17:9–10 KJV says, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it? I the Lord search the heart, I try the reins, even to give every man according to his ways, and according to the fruit of his doings.”

The NIV translation of this verse says that the heart is “beyond cure.”

These two verses, taken out of context, have shaped theology as much as the doctrines of the cross and resurrection! Taken at face value, we read that our hearts are hopeless. At their core lies deceit and desperate wickedness. It’s not a stretch to see that many have interpreted this verse to mean that we cannot trust ourselves.

We often understand this verse to mean that every individual heart is in a dark state of evil, even a redeemed heart that has placed its faith in Jesus. I believe that we have taken these verses completely out of their context! A key hermeneutical principle is to ask where the verses are located in a passage, where that passage is located in a book, and where that book is located in the whole of Scripture. The verses that precede this passage say, “But blessed is the one who trusts in the Lord, whose confidence is in him. They will be like a tree planted by the water that sends out its roots by the stream. It does not fear when heat comes; its leaves are always green. It has no worries in a year of drought and never fails to bear fruit” (Jeremiah 17:7–8, NIV).

This chapter addresses the sins of injustice in Judah, sins which distorted the hearts of the people. Verse 1 says, “Judah’s sin is engraved with an iron tool, inscribed with a flint point, on the tablets of their hearts and on the horns of their altars” (italics mine). The passage goes on to explain how useless it is to trust in people, rather than God, the Deliverer. The sin of ignoring the God of justice has distorted the hearts of the people.

What is the cure for this sickness in the heart? Verse 14: “Heal me, Lord, and I will be healed; save me and I will be saved, for you are the one I praise.” Jeremiah goes on later in the book to promise that God will put new hearts in his people:

“The days are coming,” declares the Lord,

“when I will make a new covenant

with the people of Israel

and with the people of Judah.

It will not be like the covenant

I made with their ancestors

when I took them by the hand

to lead them out of Egypt,

because they broke my covenant,

though I was a husband to them,”

declares the Lord.

“This is the covenant I will make with the people of Israel

after that time,” declares the Lord.

“I will put my law in their minds

and write it on their hearts.

I will be their God,

and they will be my people.

No longer will they teach their neighbor,

or say to one another, ‘Know the Lord,’

because they will all know me,

from the least of them to the greatest,”

declares the Lord.

“For I will forgive their wickedness

and will remember their sins no more.”

Jeremiah 31:31–34

The laws, God’s good requirements, would soon be written on the hearts of God’s people. Hearts would be healed and therefore completely transformed! No longer would desperately wicked hearts reside in God’s people. A heart of flesh, engraved with the good ways of God, would now dwell in their midst. A God-transformed heart is a beautiful heart.

Does this mean that we can always trust our redeemed, transformed hearts? No, not always. But this is where discernment comes in, trusting the Spirit that speaks to us. Where does he often speak to us? In our hearts.

Another key theological concept that can confuse us is the call to self-denial.

We are called to deny ourselves.

Then Jesus said to his disciples, “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it. What good will it be for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul? Or what can anyone give in exchange for their soul? For the Son of Man is going to come in his Father’s glory with his angels, and then he will reward each person according to what they have done. (Matthew 16:24–27)

Again, let’s look at the context. Prior to this statement of Jesus’s, the disciples were objecting to his approaching suffering and death. Jesus says that rather than escape such suffering, it was actually his purpose. The same kind of dedication to the will of God would be required of his followers. He is speaking of being willing to physically die on a cross as Peter did or through martyrdom as ten of the other disciples did. He is also speaking of the loss of status and position, being willing to go where the oppressed and marginalized go. It was not the wealthy and the privileged and the pleasers of Rome who were crucified. It was the oppressed and marginalized.

What happens is that we as Christians take this verse and build a faulty praxis on it. We say that since Jesus said to deny ourselves, that means that all of myself must be eliminated. That means that any time I want something, I must say no, and that it means that everyone else’s needs should always come first.

But this is a distortion. Even Jesus said “No” to people sometimes. Even Jesus took time away to pray and to rest on mountainsides because he needed to and because his needs mattered. Jesus was listening to his body and the needs of his inner person when he did this. Jesus begged God to spare him on the eve of his suffering. Jesus did not eliminate himself. He surrendered himself.

Friends, we are not called to be eliminated. Women, you are not called to disappear behind the desires of a man. You are called to bring all that you are into surrender to God, and that involves honestly listening to your own desires and then letting the Spirit guide you in what to do with them. Living in denial is not the same thing as denying yourself!

God desires our souls to find freedom. Freedom is found in honesty and truth. Rather than pretending our desires don’t exist and always putting ourselves last, let’s bring our whole selves to God, just as we are, desires and all. Let’s acknowledge what is actually in our hearts, rather than pretend it is not there. Let’s exercise our muscles of discernment. Let’s follow Jesus with all that we are, not playing a role, but bringing our full selves to walk with him. He calls us to nothing less.