No One Is Evil, But This Doesn’t Mean We Should Try To Transcend Harm

Hello!

For the next few weeks, I am going to be exploring the topic of forgiveness, harm, boundaries and finding a healthy balance between empathy for others and the fact that everyone who is causing harm is doing so not from a place of evil but from a place of misunderstanding and pain, with the realization that we should never be expecting ourselves to be OK with abuse, harm or being treated as less than human.

In our world today, there are two pretty extreme viewpoints offered as ‘truth’ - one being that ANY time someone hurts us we should be setting up a boundary, kicking them out of our lives, labeling them as ‘toxic’ and generally judging them as unworthy of our love and care OR that we should be trying to be ‘spiritual’ beings who ‘rise above’ and see them in their light, see them as simply traumatized and therefore worthy of our unconditional love and presence. 

We are told that we should either be defending ourselves against all harm OR that we should be accepting abuse or harm as the spiritual high ground.

It’s my belief that both of these extremes are unhealthy, and that there’s a middle ground we need to find if we actually want to be people who are going to create a healthy system.

So how do we find that balance?

Let’s start our exploration and see how we go!

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Let’s normalize something.

Let’s normalize the understanding that ALL abusive/harmful/violent/‘evil’ people are acting from WOUNDING/misunderstanding/a limited perspective. 

100% of the time. 

NO ONE is CHOOSING to harm themselves or others from a place of sanity and their own center/humanity. From a true sense of awareness and connection to reality. 

When we cause harm, we are working AGAINST reality - and when we do this, we are going to notice that this always leads to self harm - even when the harm we are causing is an attempt to keep ourselves safe. That’s what’s so confusing about harm and being harmful - there are always going to be layers of consequence and effect - some of which are going to be positive and some of which are going to be negative. 

When we act in a way that causes harm to others, there are going to be SOME outcomes that serve to HELP us, improve our lives, get us something we want or that help us avoid something we don’t want. But at the same time, there will always be collateral damage - damage to others AND to ourselves because in reality you can’t oppose the structure without causing harm to yourself as PART of that structure.

Meaning no matter how beneficial our ways of harm may seem to be for US personally, there will always be aspects that we can look at and say ‘this isn’t ideal, this is harming me, this is taking me away from my humanity’. 

So why do we do it? Why do we cause harm to ourselves and others?

The short answer is again, we are working from conditioning, misunderstanding and instinct. We are working from a place of trying to keep ourselves safe and alive without fully understanding how reality works, and without having ACCESS to what would be ultimately beneficial for all involved in terms of getting our needs met and making sure the needs of everyone around us are met.

Sometimes we don’t have access to what would be ideal simply because we aren’t aware of it. Sometimes we are so locked in our programming and our conditioning that change doesn’t make any sense to us. Sometimes we DO have an awareness of what we could be doing differently, but we aren’t able to act on that awareness because our bodies/instincts are to stuck in pattern to allow that to happen. Sometimes ideal circumstances literally don’t exist and we are in situations where we are being antagonized or harmed in some way where the ideal option just can’t be taken. Sometimes it’s a combination of all of the above.

Whatever the reason, we need to understand that at our very core, none of us want to be ‘bad,’ None of us WANT to cause harm for harm's sake. We are all trying our best to survive and doing what we’ve been programmed to do. We are all adapting in the ways we can, and we’ve all been handed such wildly different circumstances that it makes sense that we see so much variety in terms of what people do and how they live.

I know it can be really hard to empathize with people who do horrific things, and it can feel like we are ‘letting people off the hook’ when we label everything as coming from a place of misunderstanding/conditioning instead of saying that some people are truly just evil and deserve punishment or hate. I know it can feel like we are justifying abuse or making it seem like it’s not so bad when we say that it comes from a place of innocence at it’s core - but I want you to know that this is NOT what we are actually saying here.

Rather, we are STARTING from the awareness that all harm is rooted in misunderstanding and conditioning, because when we are working with OURSELVES especially, it is SO important that we find COMPASSION for why we are the way we are and why we do the things we do, if we ever want to CHANGE and become more aware.

The whole self love path is about becoming aware of the fact that we are not actually shameful, guilty or ‘bad’ - but rather that everything we’re doing is coming from a place of innocence, self protection and us doing the best we know to do/have been conditioned to do. As harmful and ‘toxic’ as our actions and words may be, as we may be able to identify the negative consequences of our ways of being - when we can take a step back and see where everything we do and are CAME FROM, we are all going to come to see that again, what we are doing is rooted in just trying to keep ourselves safe, alive and happy.

From here, we can start to use the tools of compassion and curiosity to unpack where our patterns came from, where we learned what we did, how we can learn something new and how we can change our way of being to be more aligned with reality and what would be beneficial for all of us.

We change through GROWTH. We change through new awareness. We change through support, getting needs met in a new way, changed circumstances and better conditions that lead to us being able to have our needs met in more and more harmonious ways.

Change doesn’t come from being shamed, blamed and guilted into being different. 

When we understand this, we are then going to be able to be MUCH more effective in our personal growth - because we are going to be working from a place of self support instead of trying to fight AGAINST ourselves. The more we support ourselves, the more we are going to be able to open our perception to see what we need to see in order to grow, and the more our bodies and nervous systems are going to get on board with us doing something new.

This whole concept is really complex, and it goes beyond the scope of this article to explain all of it - but if you are following this work or part of the school, you will have a better idea of what I’m talking about!

This is all to say that at the end of the day, when we get to down it, every human is doing their best - even when we are causing harm and even when we are acting in ways that we aren’t proud of and that truly DO need to change if we want to live happy, healthy, productive lives.

All harm comes from misunderstanding and repetition of patterns born from misunderstanding. It comes from adapting to unideal circumstances and not having access to what would be ideal for all parties involved either intellectually, emotionally or circumstantially. 

This is the reality of harm every time.

But This Doesn’t ERASE Harm

With this, we have to understand that there is going to be a BIG difference in the way we approach and treat harm when it comes to working with OURSELVES, and when it comes to working with OTHERS.

There’s a big difference in how we are going to approach the idea that everything is truly rooted in innocence when we are looking at how WE respond to OURSELVES when we cause harm, and how we respond to others when they cause harm.

This is one of the major areas where a lot of people get tripped up in the self help and spirituality world especially, because we are taught to see the good and innocence in all people - which is a truly lovely thing to do - but at the same time if we aren’t balancing that with setting really good, healthy boundaries and if we aren’t balancing that with understanding that seeing someone’s innocence isn’t meant to be something we do in a way that ignores OUR humanity, then we are working from misunderstanding that is only going to lead to more chaos and harm.

Understanding that everyone is, at their core, innocent, that no one is actually WANTING to be harmful but is instead working from unprocessed wounds that then cause them to see attack where there isn’t one or to feel the need to dominate/overpower/victimize others in the ways they were victimized does NOT MEAN that we then don’t hold them accountable for their actions, don’t put up boundaries, don’t close doors, don’t walk away sometimes, don’t do what we need to do to protect ourselves from their harmful actions.

Maya Angelou said ‘When someone shows you who they are, believe them.’ What I would like to add to this is - when someone wounds you, attacks you, violates you, acts in ANY WAY that’s harmful - they aren’t showing you who ‘they’ are - they are showing you their TRAUMA. They are showing you the parts of themselves that were once victimized, abused, abandoned, made to be ‘evil’ because they got them rejected by their caregivers and thus were turned into an existential threat that became the unconscious, undeveloped shadow that they now carry around. They are showing you the places they have been deeply hurt and are now coping with that hurt.


Believe them when they tell you about their wounds, and believe them when they tell you which wounds they DON’T have mastery over, and will therefore inevitably use as a weapon against YOU at some point when you trigger them.

This is the difference when it comes to how we treat OURSELVES when we cause harm, and how we treat OTHERS who cause us harm/cause harm in general.

When we are looking at OURSELVES - the beings we have control over to a certain degree - we always want to work with compassion. We want to start with looking into WHY we have done what we’ve done, what our needs are, how we got indoctrinated that this way of being is the way to get our needs met, how we learned that what we are doing is the only way to keep ourselves safe, we want to look at how we were attacked, antagonized, abandoned and shamed that led us to living in ways that are harmful to ourselves and others. We want to spend a good amount of time realizing that we are not bad, wrong, shameful or evil, and that we are simply doing our best.

Then when we feel safe with ourselves, and when we can start to identify the true root causes of our behaviors - then and only then can we work on changing. Not from a place of ‘fixing’ ourselves or trying to remedy what’s ‘broken’ about us, but working from a place of true self support. Working from a place of learning to soothe the wounds that are there, working to understand what we want and need and how to get those needs met in better ways that cause less harm. Working to improve how we communicate and ask for what we want and need instead of acting out. Working to become less defensive, less reactive, less emotionally volatile as we work on better emotional processing. We learn how to ground our own nervous systems. How to center ourselves. How to change the things that are currently causing us harm in our realities so that we can be less harmful in response. 

It’s a process of growth that we take ourselves on, one that is rooted in the idea that we did not ‘choose’ to adopt our harmful ways of being - we took those on when we knew less, had less power, when we were children who didn’t know any better, when our bodies were bring programmed outside of our logical minds, when we were stuck in the codependent reality of our childhood homes where we couldn’t make healthy choices for ourselves if the choices of those around us were unhealthy and so on.

We handle ourselves with this automatic assumption of innocence, and this working towards self SUPPORT so that we can GROW. We work from the understanding that ‘it’s not my FAULT that I am this way, that I act this way, that I cause harm in these ways, but it’s my RESPONSIBILITY to change so that I can have a better life both for myself and others.’

We work with ourselves, we understand that we aren’t going to make HUGE leaps on our process, but rather that we will slowly shift how we do things over time - becoming better, safer places for ourselves and others as we do.

We understand that we are always doing our best, and work to improve what our best is over time, through LOVE, true self investigation and awareness, and kindness. It’s not about letting ourselves off the hook and saying ‘this isn’t my fault so there’s nothing I can do about it.’ Rather it’s about seeing that it isn’t our fault, but then taking our adult responsibility that now, in this present moment, we WANT something different, and that means doing our own inner work so that we are capable of being and doing differently in our lives.

This is how we handle OURSELVES as we cause pain.

But this is NOT how we handle OTHERS in their attacks and ways of causing harm.

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Let’s take a break here and come back next week for part two!

<3

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