This article talks about work we do when we are ready to work on clearing the influence of betrayals from our minds and emotional systems. It is about recovering our feelings of safety in the world and moving forward to create better and happier lives. Those of us who are still battling our betrayers, still clarifying our feelings of outrage or still developing our self-defensive skills may feel outraged by the very idea of forgiving. And so they should. Forgiving is something we do “at our leisure,” later when we have the time to think about restoring our emotional systems to a pre-warzone state. Ultimately we want to be positive, creative, optimistic people — without ever forgetting the lessons we learned in our histories. This article is about what we do, when we’re ready to put it all behind us. — Kathy
“Forgiveness is a dangerous passage.” This is a quote from an unknown source on the white board on my office. It’s been there for years and every time I think about cleaning it off, I think “oh not yet.” The temptation to forgive for the wrong reasons is something I don’t want to forget.
In this tenth article of this series on recovering from traumatic relationships, we will discuss the process of forgiving. It is a bridge between the grieving/letting go and the rebuilding phases.
Why bother?
A lot of people have a lot of opinions on forgiveness. Most religious or spiritual disciplines will tell us that forgiving is essential to our spiritual health. On a more mundane level, we may we aware that our friends and supporters are losing patience with our extended healing process, or may be pressuring us to get over it. On a more personal level, we may want to reenter the world without all this emotional baggage that makes us so hyper-conscious of potential threats that we have a hard time seeing or taking advantage of opportunities for good experiences.
In my mind, the only reason to ever consider forgiving is that we want to free out minds of the residue of anger that hangs on after we grieve and let go. There are other benefits we get out of forgiveness, but the first motivation has to be to improve the “quality of life” in our own minds. It’s a matter of our relationship with ourselves.
In addition, I believe there are a few prerequisites to really forgiving anything. The most important of them is that our suffering is fading. (That doesn’t mean that we’re not still dealing with repercussions of some sort, but that the level of pain has diminished to the point where it’s less important than our desire to get over it.)
The other one is that we have the stability and presence of mind to know that we can forgive without getting back into the situation that caused us all this pain in the first place. If we’re still attracted to that situation or others like it, we’re leapfrogging ahead to forgiving before we’ve done the preliminary work of getting angry at our betrayers, developing defensive skills, and facing the fact that there are things we just cannot fix or change.
What is NOT a good reason for forgiving is some sort of social expediency, because we have to deal with our betrayers or with other people who are not sympathetic or pressuring us to get over it. There are other ways to handle that situation.
Here are some of the things we may be thinking as we approach forgiving:
• These angry or frightened feelings don’t have any place in my life anymore. I want to move on.
• I’m ready to find more interests than this bitterness
• I want to clean up my emotional system so I become more positive and optimistic
• I’m starting to remember how I felt before all this happened, and I want to recover some of that joy of life.
• This just isn’t worth the energy I’ve been giving it
But to forgive, we have to overcome one major obstacle. Fear. Forgiving is actually part of overcoming fear. But we have to face it head on too.
Fear and forgiveness
The progress of healing involves us becoming more and more real about what happened and how we feel about it. In anger, we get closer to recognizing our fear, but our reaction is to throw things at it — blame, threats, vengeance, work on fixing things so it never happens again. In grieving and letting go, we accept the specific losses that we have endured. While that is good work, it also clarifies our vulnerability to random events or to specific threats in the world. We may work on accepting that vulnerability, along with our other losses, but it doesn’t change the fact that it exists.
And so now, our increasing awareness of the costs of our vulnerability raises a new issue. How do we live with the fear?
This question makes sense of all we’ve been through to process the trauma. We may have dabbled with fear in our processing. Asking ourselves “what if” this or that. What if no one ever loves me again? What if I am really too stupid to live? But we never sat down to really look it hard in the eye.
Because fear is an extremely uncomfortable emotion. In fact, if we look at all the so-called negative emotions, including shame and guilt, and do enough digging down, we find fear at the bottom of them. Other than love, it is the most fundamental emotion. And it is the antithesis of love or connectedness. We literally can’t feel love and fear at the same time. One will overtake the other.
Fear is designed to stop everything else until it is resolved. It generates the noises of anxiety and need for immediate relief, while blocking or compromising our ability to see into the future, our ability to fully recognize and enjoy what is around us, and our ability to take the normal risks involved in forward movement in our lives. It eats up our energy in a million ways and drives us toward behaviors that are about nothing but self-protection and relief from the mental noise.
This is why facing and acknowledging the fact that we are afraid can be such a powerfully transformative thing, all by itself. It is a form of clearing away all the intermediate structures of trauma-processing and getting down to the center of it in a totally authentic way. So we are no longer lying to ourselves or pretending. So that we are no longer trying to talk ourselves into irrational ideas about being stronger or safer than we are. So that we are finally clear about the fact that the universe whacked us and we don’t know when it will whack us again. It is out of our control.
This is tough stuff, the toughest of the entire grief process, and until we are ready for it, we can’t do it. Our minds won’t let us. We will slip and slide away into denial or bargaining or anger or another round of grieving and letting go, all the things that we know made us feel better than the stage before. And that is fine. Our minds have their own wisdom, and we face this issue when we have the structural underpinning in place to do this. It’s why the healing process is progressive.
But one way or another, when we come to think about forgiving, we’re going to run into this issue. How can I safely forgive if I really don’t know when I’m going to be facing the same thing again, or something worse? Or vice versa, how can I experience my fear if I’m relaxing my angry alert and protection systems by forgiving?
This trauma was nothing compared to the first one
The experience of trauma is built into our emotional histories. In a way, every trauma we experience is a replay of the primal trauma that every child experiences, the transition from life inside the womb to life out of it. It is the fundamental “expulsion from the Garden of Eden” which transfers us from a situation where we are fed, warmed, held, connected to our source to a new situation in which we are separate and dependent for our survival on things that are out of our control.
The developmental activities of the first four years are actually about the child navigating that separation to acquire certain basic intellectual perspectives and emotional skills necessary to healthy personality formation. It is our first experience of trauma processing. It occurs both on a macro level of gradual emotional acceptance of separation from the “source” and on a detail level of dealing with separate events that trigger fear, disappointment and uncertainty. If all goes well, we maintain steady bonds with our caretakers that allow us to ease into independence, self-soothing skills and the beginnings of empathy.
So we “know” what trauma means from a very early age. One way of describing trauma is that it is an unexpected breach of the rules we took for granted. Or the rules we depended on for our survival and sense of security in the world.
A whole series of emotional reactions to this breach are reasonable and normal. All the emotional stages we discuss in trauma processing, as well as others that we have not discussed in depth, such as feelings of betrayal, rejection or shame. If we go back to the nature of the first trauma, it makes sense that we would feel offended. One day our life is one thing; the next thing it’s another. What are we supposed to think? At minimum, it would be reasonable to think we are being unreasonably screwed with.
This brings us back to the primal argument. Because who, ultimately, is screwing with us? To cut a long discussion short, our big argument is not with any one persecutor in this world, not our parents, not our selfish lovers, not with the truck that hit us. It’s with God or the universe, or however we look at the overall intelligence that organizes this place. Because clearly that big intelligence has forgotten that we were previously important enough to have the suite at the center of the universe, and for reasons not made clear, we have been demoted to just one small, helpless life form in this place full things and life forms that clearly do not recognize our centrality.
Welcome to the first time we felt the fear of being vulnerable and alone. And to the basic human challenge of living with those feelings at the same time we experience love, trust, some kind of internal dignity, and the ability to risk moving forward with our lives.
There is no human being who has not been through this. And there is not one of us who doesn’t live with this challenge on a daily basis in some part of our consciousness.
It’s important to know this, because as we move forward with dealing with our own fear, we also know that some people have found ways of managing it more effectively than others.
The cost of doing business.
We have these bodies. They have their own intelligence and they want to survive. Our spirituality has its intelligence. Our intellect has its intelligence. Our emotional system has its intelligence. (See Daniel Goleman’s books on various forms of intelligence for wonderful discussions of this topic.) They are all integrated and mutually supportive, but the body is the instrument and the house where it all plays out, and one of the body’s primary vocabulary words is fear.
We cannot get away from this, but we can decide what we’re going to do about it. And that is where forgiving comes in.
There are a lot of dictionary definitions of forgiving, but for our purposes in this article, we are going to experiment with a new one. That is, making a decision about how much energy we want give to a certain source of fear in our lives.
This is not about minimizing the damage or our struggle to get over it. It is not about condoning other people’s bad behavior or the real dangers we face in the world.
Rather it is about recognizing something about ourselves. We have done all reasonable work to identify the problem, to protect ourselves in the future, to let go of what we have discovered is now gone, and to face our fear. We know what we are afraid of. Now, we consider a decision about reclassifying the issue as something we may or may not run into, something that is (to some degree) out of our control. We begin to consider whether or not we are served by continuing to let fear of this thing drain resources that could be spent on positive forward movement.
Forgiving is not the same as denial, because we make this decision with full awareness of our losses and our future risks. It involves no forgetting. We respect all the information we have gathered, in case we need it again. We respect all the feelings we have gone through, because they are part of the truth of this experience. We just decide to start withdrawing our energy, turning off that faucet, and shifting our attention to other things.
What forgiving is and isn’t
Forgiving is a decision we make and then gradually follow through, adapting that decision to our own comfort level. It is a decision we make from a position of power over the one thing we truly have power over, our own choices. Especially that supreme choice of where we place our attention.
Forgiving is something we do, knowing that we cannot totally control fear, because our bodies have their own agendas and they will generate fear if they feel it is necessary. So it also involves a deal with our bodies that we will listen to their fear, that we will not become airy-fairy pseudo-Buddhists who try to stuff their fear because they think it’s unfashionable. But we make a deal with our bodies that it’s better for the entire organism if we manage our fear, reducing our investments in fear about things we already know about, and saving our big extravaganzas of fear and anxiety for the surprises.
Forgiving is about trust at two levels. First, trust that certain bad things will happen. We can look at this statistically, if we’re inclined. A certain fraction of people we meet will be destructive emotional cripples. A certain fraction of things we buy will turn out to be unusable junk. A certain number of conversations with our relatives will include uninvited comments about our choices, our characters or our weight. Trusting that these things will happen eliminates the surprise factor and enables us to plan around these statistical likelihoods.
Second, forgiving is also a kind of trophy we get for doing the work and coming out the other side of the trauma processing. In that sense, it is about renewed trust in ourselves and in the universe. What was once a huge deal is now fully digested and just a learning experience attached to some unpleasant memories. We are whole again and on generally good terms with the big intelligence that runs everything.
In all of this, you’ve probably noticed how little I’ve talked about the perpetrator. And I’m sure you understand why. Because this is really something between the various forms of intelligence in ourselves, and it is something between us and the big intelligence that runs everything.
But still we need to get down some practicalities too. So here is what forgiveness is NOT:
• It is not condoning or acceptance of anything we find hurtful, unethical, uncaring or anything else that is bad for us. (We may find ourselves releasing negative feelings about something, when we come to understand why it happened, but we don’t have to. This is not ultimately about them. It is whether we’re ready to move on.)
•It is not about compartmentalizing or denial. We are not “stuffing” it or pretending it never happened. We’re not trying to convince ourselves that we haven’t just been through a battle or deluding ourselves that we’re more powerful than we are. We are just gradually shifting our attention away from it, as we feel comfortable doing so. We are gradually reclaiming our interest in other things.
• It is not a reason for re-involving ourselves with people or situations that hurt us. We don’t forgive so we can jump into that pool again. The only reason we would do that is if we have evolved past the point of being hurt by what hurt us before (something that doesn’t often happen) or if the person or the situation has gone through some kind of cosmic surgery and is now something else. Remember, forgiving comes AFTER we have learned self-protection in the angry phase and let go of whatever got us into this situation. If we forgive because we want to do the same thing all over again ”¦ well, you don’t need me to tell you what you’re volunteering for.
• Likewise, it is not a social cure. If we’re forgiving because we’re embarrassed about being such a bore, or because our bad feelings are alienating our families, or because we want to get along better with people who just don’t get it, we victimizing ourselves all over again. We’re giving away our authority over our own feelings, and trying to force ourselves to feel something we don’t, in order to be accepted. If it’s really important that we not communicate the full force of the outrage or grief we’re dealing with – like in a work situation or in court — we can do that. We can selectively choose where, when and how much we share, while we continue to work through our trauma privately. The ability to do this — letting some people in and keeping others out — is good practice in developing the skills of conditional trust.
• There is no reason that we have to forgive people to their faces or even let them know about it. In fact, if we’re really ready to stop wasting energy, we probably won’t. We don’t just stop bothering with them in our heads; we stop bothering with them in real life. We avoid engagement. If we have to spend energy on some kind of mop-up or dealing with continuing drama from their side, we handle it with an eye toward ending all of it, because we want to be done with it.
Finally, forgiving is not an all-or-nothing thing. Nor is it a carved-in-stone solution. We don’t say, “Oh, I’ve decided it’s not worth caring anymore about what he (or she) did to me, and now I have to not care about the new thing he (or she) is doing to me.” It doesn’t work that way. Forgiving is a way of allocating our own resources. If new circumstances require us to grab a sword and slay a few dragons before dinner, then we do it. After we come home and shower, we can decide whether we’re ready to forgive the loss of our afternoon, or if we need to spend more time processing that little irritation.
And if we absolutely feel like we must announce our decision to forgive to the sociopath, here’s a suggested forgiveness note:
I’ve decided not to give you any more attention. I’m not going to track you down, hire a hit man or sue you for theft or mental suffering. I’ve dealt with my losses by myself. But don’t confuse this with weakness. The next time you show up, it won’t be such a pleasant or profitable experience for you. I also advise you to you grow up, for your own sake. Not everyone is as forgiving as me. As Henry the XV said to a murderous friend, “I pardon you, but I also pardon whoever kills you.”
In the next article, we begin on the wonderful topic of becoming who we want to be.
Namaste. The wise emotional accountant in me salutes the wise emotional accountant in you.
Kathy
Rune, Leah, Kathy – touché’ & ditto! You folks all implied (and inferred) correctly. And no, Kathy, you are not snarky or flippant. I agree about finding the humor in all of this. I have to search very hard sometimes – but I usually find it. It is, usually, only here on LF that I (still) speak of it at such great length. To most of the “outside” world I have moved forward.
Regarding “Child Services” – and this is very important – to the “outside world” – my ex is not some raving lunatic that is drooling and smoking a bong with my step-son on the front porch. We live in a very affluent area, and, she has a job that pays well. She is quite beautiful and presents herself as if she is “regular” & “normal.”
She is smart enough and cunning enough to hide the drug dealing and every other nefarious action from authorities. When one contributor to LF wrote of her ex (a Physician) who was, “…charming and had everybody snowballed” — I screamed, “THAT IS SHERRI, EXACTLY!”
BTW, Kathy, believe me, if there was any way that I could get out of here I would. However, my situation is not so egregious that I will just walk away and live with the homeless people under a bridge. I will not give up a $400K home that I have paid a mortgage on for 15 years (today I could not give it away ”“ much less sell it for a profit). Even though (as Rune implied) her toxicity has a “karma” like pervasiveness that permeates our entire community (and seems to cast a pall over my home and life) – it is not bad enough that I will abandon the one (and only) thing that I have left after our (financially devastating) divorce.
I feel as if you folks are like family to me. I must leave work – more later.
Ken
Hi everyone,
How do you forgive when there is hurt and injustice around every corner? I thought that things were beginning to turn around for me, ( foolish idea! ) when I learned that I have two days to get my house out of foreclosure. I had a brief moment when I thought that that house would be out of foreclosure and that a couple I know would buy it. I also learned that I might be able to purchase the house I built while I was in my first marriage and was a Bed and Breakfast, if I got the equity from the house now in question.
I drove four hours to get to the home that I am trying to save, I go in and find that my soon to be ex N/P stole all of the stainless appliances and some other items from the house.
I immediately call my attorney to see what can be done. I was told by his secretary to wait there in case the sheriff needed to come out to the house. That was five hours ago. I just got home and still no call or email from the attorney.
The bad news about the house that I am trying to save (besides the missing appliances, etc. ) is that the mortgage co. should have been working with me all along and didn’t because of (Mr. N/P).
The money tied up in this house is all of the savings that I have. I am back from feeling hopeful to feeling terribly depressed and helpless. Why does he keep getting away with the things that he does. Why does he keep doing things to try destroy me when all I want is to rid of him and his toxic self. I believe that he derives great pleasure out of destroying peoples lives. I hope that one day I can get to the point that I can forgive, but right now it is difficult to even contemplate.
Kathleen,
Great essay. I’ll probably need to read this one over again to assimilate the wisdom.
I don’t know if I can emphatically say that I have forgiven the destructive, selfish people from my past. I seem to switch back and forth, from fury to indifference when contemplating my experiences with them.
Maybe I become furious because I contemplate these people altogether. As one big lump of misery dished out to me for my entire life. When I analyze them as one diabolical entity, I am angry. And disgusted. And scornful.
But I feel the fury much, much less than the indifference. But by visiting LF and reading the personal, brave stories of survivors, that righteous fury is stirred up all over again.
I don’t consider it to be detrimental to my healing to be furious with PDIs and the tremendous pain they cause their victims. I’m concentrating that fury towards the perpetrators of the sweet folks on here, not towards my own personal destructive forces.
As I said, I am indifferent most of the time regarding the PDIs I’ve been intimate with. I literally and figuratively shrug off the negative influences they’ve had on me, confronted and accepted it for what it is and moved on.
It’s true what you wrote saying..”Welcome to the first time we felt the fear of being vulnerable and alone. And to the basic human challenge of living with those feelings at the same time we experience love, trust, some kind of internal dignity, and the ability to risk moving forward with our lives.
There is no human being who has not been through this. And there is not one of us who doesn’t live with this challenge on a daily basis in some part of our consciousness.”
See, I remind myself daily, minutely that there ain’t no way I’m exclusive in living what I’ve lived or felt what I’ve felt. That there are maybe thousands of women and men who haven’t been as fortunate as I have been. That have suffered unimaginable abuse and suffering the likes of which would cause me to curl up in a little ball in the corner, terrified and so damn small.
I know it is going to take me years to finally forgive and let go of that anger, resentment, and contempt. I’m still trying to grow up, to be a mature responsible adult and it’s obvious to me, I’m just not there yet.
I look forward to seeing who I become as I seek to enrich my mind, my heart and my essential spiritual self. Maybe then I will have finally attained that profound serenity I wish for.
I’m sorry to hear about the your parents, Rune. That was my saving grace – that my family did stand by me. I believe that (family turning against him) was the final straw with the friend and colleague I had who did not make it. I guess it’s all relative. I seem to be quoting Oxy a lot 🙂 ..But I did find some value in her suggestion some time back to another LFer to look at Man’s Search for Meaning by Victor Frankel. You may also find it of interest.
I don’t want to sound like I’m poor-meing as I do realize quite well how much worse it could have been. I’m just want the mess behind me.
Ken,
Wow, I read your post about the people you know who introduce you to others while including your heartbreaking, traumatizing involvement with your x wife.
I consider their words to be incredibly insensitive to your pain. I would never callously discuss the personal, intimate details of a friend of mine or even an aquaintance, even if they gave me the OK sign. No way!
That behavior is simply inconsiderate, improper social etiquette. It also reveals lack of good breeding, imo.
It just seems so cruel to me.
Welcome jfog1.
So sorry to hear about your situation concerning your property. Something we all learn sooner or later about these type of people is how they never and please allow me to repeat that never “play fair”. Because you do have a attorney I hope some of this lost can be recapture through the courts. We have a member Matt who know about the law being a lawyer himself. Please expect the unexpectable whenever we deal with anyone that show strong sociopathic traits. Good luck and thanks again for sharing!
Thank you James.
I have read yours and so many other horror stories on the “Love Fraud” Blog, and I feel for each and every one who has written and had to deal with these monsters. I read some and I feel guilty for even writing about my own problems as they seem small compared to everyone elses.
Still, I am glad that I have people who understand to write to and vent to, because no one can understand what it is like to be victimized by an (N/P) except those of us who have had the misfortune of being the victim.
I don’t know how much more of this I can take. I am still dealing with my first husband, who was, and still is emotionally abusive to me and our grown sons. He is a substance abuser and is a (N). I had been out of that marriage for a year when I met my (N/P) husband. Between the two of them, I feel quite defeated, and I am not easily defeated! I stayed with my first husband for 24 years trying to help him, although mostly because I did not want him or his mother to be alone with the boys.
I became so depressed toward the end when I knew that he wouldn’t stop the cocaine and drinking, and then the other women, that I didn’t care if I lived or not. Somehow I managed to get the strength to get help, and after over a year, divorce was the only option. Then, I was targeted by the man who would be my next husband. Even though I know that I was targeted, it doesn’t change what is happening.
They are emotional terrorists.
Thanks for all the comments. And I wish it were different for all of us.
I need to clarify a point about what I’m writing here, and how I view my role as one of the contributors to LoveFraud.
First, none of this is what anyone is “supposed” to do. I’m describing my vision of the path of recovery. That’s all. Every station on that path has its importance, and benefits to us. If anyone doesn’t know how they can forgive, it’s not the right time for it.
Every single part of this path is about getting better at something. They’re like practicing a piece of music on the violin and piano. We practice until it is second nature, and we don’t have to practice it anymore. Then we move on to something a little more challenging.
Virtually everyone here can remember — and we have lots of evidence with the new people who come here — how hard it was to get angry. Not just hard. We couldn’t see it. We weren’t there yet.
And then we all stay with anger for a long time. There’s a reason for that — both personally and culturally. On the personal level, none of us would have gotten involved with the sociopaths if we were good at anger. Anger is the natural reaction to anything that threatens us — from our physical safety to our emotional equilibrium. It doesn’t have to be throw-the-dishes anger. It can just be as little as a red flag popping up, but it’s red for a reason and if we take these alerts seriously, we would put taking care of ourselves in front of every other consideration.
On a cultural level, we are trained to absorb abuse. I’m not going to get into a major rant here, but I could. We are taught to allow disrespectful behavior toward us. We are taught to not interfere when we see it happening to someone else. The laws are structured to protect property rights more than people. Social and religious structures tend, all too much, to blame the victims or glorify suffering. I’ll leave it there.
What we are learning here — to protect and take care of ourselves — is a kind of personal revolution. Something really meaningful, as the people who have traveled a way down the path keep saying. And part of the revolution is getting comfortable with the fact that we are allowed to be angry, and that it is a key to not only protecting ourselves, but taking care of ourselves in the future, and healing our pasts.
So if you’re still feeling angry, it means you’re not finished with feeling angry about something. Anger is not some monolithic thing that once you feel it, it’s over. And if I’m giving that impression, I’m not writing this well enough. Every single trigger for anger may come up again and again until we figure out how to resolve it.
That doesn’t mean we physically have to do something about it, though we might. It does mean that we have to recognize it as an assault on our wellbeing. And sometimes, it’s enough to acknowledge our own feelings, to say that we really hate that this happened to us and we wish it had been different. This may sound wishy-washy, but it’s a signal to the part of us that creates the anger that we got the message.
If we feel we really need to do something about it, but don’t have any ideas or options now, we can consciously put it on the shelf until an opportunity opens up. I have several things like that, situations I’m waiting for the opportunity to rectify. The truth is, as I get further down the road, I get less interested in maintaining the determination to get even. But if the day ever comes that I decide to let it go, it will be because it’s right for me, not because I’m being generous or kind.
So, please, if you’re still angry, that’s where you’re supposed to be. There’s no need to apologize or try to leave it prematurely or think that you’re “less than” in any way. You’re not. You doing good work, important work, and the only caveat I would place on that is that it’s important to pace yourself. Anger eats a lot of energy and it leaves a lot of chemical residue in your body. Just like you wouldn’t lift weights all day or run into burning houses to rescue people from the time to get up to the time you go to sleep; don’t overdo anger. People become sick with anger when they don’t balance it with restful or happy-making things in their lives.
Finally, about my role here. Donna asked become a contributor because she was interested in the spiritual undertones in my writing, and she thought it might be an interesting addition here. The path I’m describing is one that describes the inner processes that ultimately bring us to emotional freedom, true compassion, a dynamic connection with our inner God spark and a life that expresses all those qualities.
Not everyone has a vision of going so far. Which is why I say that anywhere after anger is a reasonable stopping point for processing this particular trauma. We will have more challenges in our lives. Our first responses to trauma tend to be shaped by how far we got with the last big one. If we get to grieving and letting go, it will be easier for us to jump quickly to that stage the next time we face a major challenge. So we’re changing the rest of our lives by wherever we accomplish with this one.
I’m laying out this whole path for myself, to get it down for future reference, and for anyone else who’s interested in moving on to the next thing they haven’t done yet. My words may help them visualize in a concrete fashion something that’s just floating around in their minds.
In personal development, we can typically understand a stage that is one step ahead of where we are, even if we haven’t yet gotten into it yet. Beyond that, things seem inexplicable, sometimes off-putting or just weird. This can put you and me in a peculiar position. If you look at me as a trusted person, and I’m presenting something that you cannot relate to, what are you supposed to with this? And what does it mean about your relationship with me?
Here is what I suggest. It’s the same advice I would give about dealing with a sociopath or anything else. If you don’t understand something, if you’re getting information that doesn’t make sense or confuses you, ask for a better explanation. And if that doesn’t work, walk away. You don’t have to judge it as being bad, just as not for you.
I have books and music in my house that have literally be waiting decades for me to be able to focus on them. I picked them up because I knew I would want them someday. At least a third of what I read now has been waiting a long time for my brain to get ready for it.
Any part of this path that you don’t relate to now will be waiting when you get interested in it. We all have a lot of work to do on a lot of different threads of experience. Wherever we are, whatever our vision of our best possible outcome, is right. We are made to heal and made to uncover our true potential. It’s something we can trust.
As always, I am so grateful that you read me and find anything for yourselves here. We are all together in this.
Namaste.
Kathy
My anger for me now is a monitor and a meter and something I feel at the moment. It allows me to express what I am feeling at the time. But guess what? This same anger has some deep roots. Let me explain it like this:
I get mad over some small thing like not be able to found my keys.
Then I feel/think why am I getting so annoyed over something so simple?
So I feel/think because I so stress over blank.
What can I do to lessen this stress over blank?
If I can do something then I will try too and if I can’t then I tell myself that and try to let it go for now and allow my self the freedom to deal with it later.
Okay first I had anger over something simply right?
Wrong, I was annoyed over something deeper but I wasn’t acknowledging it just yet. My anger had to be explore deeper to see the real problem and source of my irritation.
I know this is a very simple way of looking at it but it’s shows me how I must work through my anger in stages and then finally see the real problem(s) and then deal with that..
Okay now where did I put those damn keys anyway??…LOL>>
jfog1
“They are emotional terrorists.”
Couldn’t agree more and like any know terrorist cowards to the bitter end!