Sometimes the most healing moment of a session involves the discovery of anger. I have worked with thousands of people over the years who claimed to be unable to love themselves. Who when we started a process said, “I fear I’m not lovable, I worry that I am not enough.” But when we get back to a wounding moment from their past where someone has treated them as though they were not lovable or not enough their response is not consistent with the response of someone who does not love themselves and believes they are not lovable and not enough.
Someone who truly believes they are not lovable, and I’ve worked with many, responds to unloving acts with resignation, grief, pain and sadness but not anger. They say to themselves or to me, “I deserve to be treated like this, I’m not worthy of being loved, there’s something wrong with me, I’m not good enough to be loved.”
When we get back to one of those painful memories in which someone close to the child says or does something that appears to be clearly unloving and often very hurtful and my client shares how angry it made it them, I get excited.
In poker when someone is bluffing and they wipe their brow or cough or glance at the floor or the ceiling in a nervous way, we call it a “tell”. In my healing process when a client gets angry and their professed belief calls for a sad resignation, the anger is a “tell”. The client is in essence bluffing.
They may say they don’t love themselves but their anger has just revealed their real truth. People who love themselves get angry when they are treated in what they perceive to be unloving ways. Anger is the appropriate self loving response to unloving behavior. The anger says “I love myself too much to be treated this way. I know I’m lovable and I won’t stand for this. I am worthy of better. I am good enough to deserve love”.
Anger reveals the truth and is a sign that the client is more healed then they realize.
Then how is it that the client has come to think that they don’t love themselves? In most cases they simply slid into a false belief that is not their own. They are believing a lie that they were told was true but that they never truly believed.
When we are little we try on our parents shoes and walk around the house pretending to be them. When we do this, we’re not just trying on their shoes. We try on their entire way of being. We try on their core beliefs and how they seem and judge themselves and the world.
If your mother or father or whoever raised you did not love themselves, then when you slipped into their shoes you tried on the idea that you were not lovable or that you could not love yourself.
When you try on a core belief it is like looking through colored glasses that make it impossible to see the world as it really is. Looking through a colored filter some colors are very pronounced and some are impossible to see. Experiencing the world through a core belief makes experiences that support the belief easy to spot and hides the experiences that prove the belief wrong.
When you slide your feet into someone else’s shoes and begin looking at the world through their eyes it becomes harder to see all the ways in which you are lovable, worthy, enough and instead you see where you fall short and why it is that you can not possibly love yourself.
When this is really not your belief just like wearing someone else’s shoe, the belief does not quite fit and the result is you try to believe it but when someone is unloving you get mad. The more angry you are the less you have bought into the lie. The less you believe there is something wrong with you and the more you see the truth that there is likely something wrong with whoever is being so unloving.
As my clients grow stronger in their ability to love themselves they often get angrier. Even the client who was resigned and felt deserving of unloving actions, as they heal and shift their core belief to “I am enough, I am lovable” will start experiencing more anger in their life.
The anger is a sign of the healing. Again the anger says, “I love myself too much to be treated like this.” The client will begin using the energy of that anger to create healthy boundaries, and speak their truth. The people who for years had grown used to no boundaries and a passive willingness to put up with unloving behavior become upset by the change.
The spouse might even say to me, “What have you done with my wife? She’s now so angry with me.”
This is part of the healing. It is as though the client is now awake and can see all the ways in which they’ve been putting up with hurtful unloving actions of others for years.
This is not the end of the healing. Some people get just this far and then come to see me because they can’t see to shake a constant state of anger and upset with an unloving world.
We can celebrate the willingness to love one’s self as demonstrated by the anger. Then it is time to take on the perception that the actions of the other are unloving.
Whenever we judge anyone or anything as unloving it doesn’t change how they are or what is, it only brings us grief. It’s like drinking a poison and waiting for the other person to get sick. It doesn’t work.
For our healing and learning to love ourselves we must go through this process of judging the other as unloving but then it’s time to see the greater truth. Hurt people hurt people. The actions we are judging as being unloving are not usually about us. We just happen to be the one present when the person acts from their pain.
Pain has a mind of it’s own. Pain wants to the entire world to feel how awful it feels if not worse. Pain will do whatever it takes to be seen and felt by others. Pain and fear trigger the bodies “fight or flight” response.
Blood flow slows to the cerebral cortex where we access the wisest most loving parts of who we are. The blood flows to our limbs so we can strike out and run away. In “fight or flight” we are in capable of behaving in the most loving ways. Our focus narrows to track the tiger chasing us and we can’t see the big picture. In the grips of pain and fear we can not see clearly how our actions are wounding others.
When we are two and we get into this “fight or flight” pain response and let the pain lash out it looks like a temper tantrum. The child may scream out “I hate you mommy” as he or she hits their little fists into the side of the parents legs and burst into tears.
When this happens we don’t get hurt, we don’t take the words to heart, we don’t take it seriously. Sometimes we can even smile amused by how adorable our little one is despite all this hurt and anger.
When an adult has a temper tantrum it’s harder to be amused or find it adorable. We have away of taking seriously the painful words the person is using and because the words are coming out of an adult body we often take them to heart. But should we?
The adult in a temper tantrum no more means what they are saying than the two year old. They too are not using their wise cerebral cortex and they are speaking their pain. Most adults will regret the words and actions that come out of this emotional melt down.
If the person is our beloved then we know from experience that they love us, that they don’t truly want us to hurt and that in this moment they’re just not being their wisest self. They are hurt. Hurt people hurt people.
If we reply in kind, and meet the wounded person with our own wounded self what will happen? Will anyone heal? Will the tantrumming adult suddenly come to their senses? Probably not. Things will probably get worse. The only path out is compassion and unconditional love.
The next phase of growth for the newly self loving client is to begin experiencing the unloving actions of others as not about them. It’s about finding compassion and unconditional love. It can mean using the Ho’oponopono Prayer or the Byron Katie work to turn around the negative energy and judgement. It can mean using Emotional Freedom Techniques to tap down the justified anger and let go of the idea that the unloving behavior is about the client.
Often times just asking, “If this were not about me, what would this be about” will help you see what else may be true and open your mind to the possibility that what you are experiencing is not a deliberately unloving act, but the actions of a deeply wounded human being.
To recap: If this were about you, then the most self loving response to an unloving act is anger. But it’s probably not about you. You can continue to love yourself and not find it necessary to get angry and can instead tap into your powerful unconditional love and compassion. You can wrap your arms around the two year old and love them until they stop crying. Or you can give the little one space to pound their fists into the floor and cry it all out and be there with a warm loving voice waiting patiently for it to be all over.
Comments
Post a Comment