If you are angry at someone, and find you cannot forgive
them, it is because you cannot see the pain they are in. You cannot see the
pain inside them that led them to act in a way that hurt you. When you see the
pain inside them, you will see the truth of them. You will witness the truth of
their pain, you will be filled with a tremendous sadness. Your heart will open,
and you will experience compassion. In this moment you will find forgiveness
and your anger will dissipate. You will no longer want to make them understand
what they did to you, and you will know longer want to retaliate. You will love
them and set them free. The truth shall set you free. You will experience
relief from your own anxiety created by your resentment, as well as the pain
they inflicted upon you.
Not that seeing the origin of their motivation excuses it,
for it is still an unacceptable way to live, but you will find forgiveness.
Most importantly, you will be at peace.
What is so freeing about seeing the negative beliefs someone
is acting from is that you know it’s not
true. You know they are lovable, or whatever the positive version of their
negative belief is. And that is the sadness: seeing that someone is walking
through their life carrying such a painful thought inside themselves that is a
lie. To you, their painful belief is clearly untrue. They got it stuck in their
heads way back somewhere when they were just a little boy or girl, when someone
did something out of their own pain and the child thought it was about them,
and formed this belief about who they are. Or aren’t. So when you are at peace
again, it is your job to hold them only in the light of what you know is true
about them: release them from their painful belief by forgiving them, otherwise
you hold them there with your resentment, and reflect to them the love that
they truly are and you have for them.
What will the truth look like? It will take the form of an underlying
belief that they carry. This belief will be a variation of one of the many
self-negating things we say to ourselves. In relationships, it often looks like
“I do not believe you truly love me.” Underneath that is a belief that has
nothing to do with you, but just about them, like “I am not loveable, worth
loving, or deserving of love.” Out of this belief, things that happen that
bring up the pain of this belief will be turned into a victim vignette, about
how “you did something to me”.
The truth will look something like this: “When you got mad
at me and called me names, what is true is that when I did not meet you at the
time I said I would, you took this as evidence that I do not love you, which is
a fear that you carry all the time, because you do not really believe that I
could love you, because you do not believe that you are worth loving. That makes me very sad, so I love you and forgive you.”
When someone hurts you, it is impossible in the moment to
not be hurt by them. That is, if you are in any kind of love connection with
them, where your heart is open to them, especially for nurturance, then you
will be vulnerable to their attack. This is the nature of relationship. You
cannot be open to receiving love (in the form of tender words and physical
contact, validation, encouragement) and be immune from their devaluations of
you (physical and verbal attacks, dismissiveness, bullying). This is how it is.
Do no seek to be immune from anyone in your life who loves you.
Here is what you can do: breathe, slow down, feel the pain,
don’t respond. You have just been hurt. As soon as you can, find the peace of
mind to see the pain they are in. That means that you say to yourself “here is
the truth”, and then speak to yourself the truth of what is going on inside
them at the level of the painful beliefs they carry. Forget about for the
moment what their aggression brought up in you. First you must release them
from your anger and resentment and bring you to a calm place. Then you can look
inwards and see how their aggression hooked to some painful belief in yourself.
When you see what it is, speak to yourself the truth of your painful beliefs.
Then speak the truth of not the lie of your painful belief, but the truth of
who you are, the love that you truly are. And speak it of the person that hurt
you too. Then you will be free.
Note the difference between acting the victim and being
victimized. The first is a lie created to blame others for your pain, while the
second is the truth about how you have been subject to another’s violence. When
someone acts with violence towards you you are victim. You really have been
hurt. Your heart or body was open and therefore vulnerable, and you got hurt.
It may be true also that they dug into an old wound of yours, but that does not
deny the violence you experienced, only intensifies it. The lie arises when
acts that are not violent bring up old feelings of pain in you, with associated
painful beliefs, and you say that someone has just hurt you---when you are
playing the victim, you cannot distinguish between someone else acting out
their pain resulting in violence towards you, or your own pain that arises
because you are already in pain. That
is key: when you are playing the victim, it is because you are already in pain,
and you interpret non-violent acts through the vision of your pain. When you
are victimized, it is someone elses pain raining down upon you.
When someone is hurting you, they are acting from the part of them that was hurt by someone else, likely a long, long time ago. Set them free by speaking the truth---at first to yourself, so that you can find forgiveness and peace. And then you will find you can act from the truth and love them in the way they deserve, and may have been waiting for their whole life.
