[4 minute read]
Earlier in this series:
“People who hurt you deserve blame for hurting you, but they do NOT deserve blame for causing you to hurt them back.” [2]
“It’s not even necessarily that I see it and deny seeing it, it’s that my mechanisms for protecting myself from seeing certain aspects of myself are so effective that I’m blind to them.” [3]
You have already grown weary of telling your loved one(s) that they are hurting you, and they keep doing it anyway. It seems pointlessly exhausting for you to keep telling them, and the natural human fear of vulnerability becomes too much to bear. So you retaliate in secretive and/or manipulative ways, because your vocalized defenses, protests, and even retaliations are fruitless. In fact, one form of these retaliations is withdrawal from relating to your loved ones. Distancing. Protection.
They repeatedly hurt you, so the protection must get stronger. It cannot be your fault that they repeatedly hurt you, so you blame them, justifiably. But you cannot blame *them* for dragging *you* down to their level. That descent is not something you do involuntarily. You stoop to that level purposely.
Besides your repeated offender, is anyone else hurting you?
Are you hurting your own self by scoring secret retaliations?
Your psyche flees from that question. That is a very deep dive into your own imperfect heart and soul. It is not something done easily or quickly. Many never do it in a lifetime. Sadly, you know this unconsciously. You do. It is certain. That knowledge emerges from the junction where full self-awareness meets your subconscious. This junction is the battlefield within you where you feel the value of honesty missing in relationships, and inside your own self. It’s the interface of your ego and soul, and its width measures shame.
A loved one hurts you, so you hurt them back because you feel powerless to otherwise stop them from hurting you. You have become a hypocrite in its darkest sense. In desperation, an eye for an eye is the only answer—-and we desperately need an answer. The answer cannot be that everyone hurts everyone, and everyone is hurt by everyone. We can’t stomach the answer that bidirectional hurt is absolutely and undeniably inevitable. That reality is too dark to abide.
Repetitive secret retaliation is how resentment and contempt take root and evolve, in the tragic ecosystem (egosystem) of shame.
This seeming complexity is why loving your enemy (anyone who hurts you) — not performing loving actions toward your enemies — seems like such an intractable ideal [To believe you are a loving person (HONESTY part 1 of 5)]. I believe very deeply that the only classroom for John Doe to learn these lessons is exclusively inside the soul of John Doe.
John can easily live a lifetime of delusion if he thinks that a merely cerebral understanding of these things is sufficient. John has a monumental library of textbooks on all of these topics. But he keeps it behind a monumental wall, opens the door occasionally, looks inside, thinks about stepping over that threshold, has gotten help from a therapist to do that, but everything about that metaphor will fail to fulfill John.
By this metaphor, John must not only step into that library; he must demolish the wall.
Do I think it impossible for imperfect mortals to be ever-conscious of their potential to hurt another? Yes. I do.
John Doe wants and needs a stark answer to the question of what he wants “done unto himself.”
- When he is an enemy, he wants to be loved.
- When he hurts another, he wants to be lovingly forgiven.
- When he hurts himself, he wants to lovingly forgive himself.
There is no other doorway to love: John cannot forgive himself if John cannot confess his transgressions to himself. The more he does that, the more porous the junction, the interface, the barrier between awareness and the unconscious. The more honest Self-talk flows from the soul to comfort the ego without threat, without triggering defenses like dishonesty, denial, suppresssion.
Like every mortal, when he peers into his unconscious, he will find a mixture. In that mix is certainly darkness, his own imperfection, hypocrisy, mountains of secrets, shame, and resentment. He must face that mixture if he is to see within it his true self. Raw reality. Not as he wishes it to be, but as it is. He cannot avert his eyes.
We all hold real love in high esteem, so why don’t we consider it — readily EXPECT it to be — enormously difficult? Have you heard the aphorisms about courage not being the suspension or absence of fear, but acting in the full light of one’s fear? What can possibly require more courage than looking honestly at the person we know best?
This is NOT a place of psychic comfort! We are most conscious and aware of realities with which we have become comfortable. Psychotherapy and psyche-ology are therapies for the soul, not the ego; therapy NEVER makes you comfortable at first. It if one’s ego doesn’t let its soul love it, the Self never feels comfortable, ever. We become more aware of real reality — the home of the True Self — when we learn to be comfortable with the messy mixture of who we really are.
Real love has to come from a place of comfort if it is to be real. From the full true self, not a dishonest persona. The unmasked ego must stand naked, in its soul’s embrace.
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Index of this 5-part HONESTY series
Next: There’s only 1 real sin? (HONESTY part 5 of 5). Preview:
One must face reality to learn how to be comfortable within it. Step one: Face the real you. To do so demands that you learn about your inner self, and *seek* exposition of your darkest flaws…Whom did Yeshua chastise openly? The ones who were, ostensibly, morally superior, but who were secretly hypocrites.
Feel with Neil 