
Hello again!
In case you haven’t already, please do go read:
Of this series.
Today we are wrapping up our nuanced conversation about harm, forgiveness, what it means to have a spiritual perspective of harm, what it means to actually acknowledge and validate our humanity while also holding a spiritual perspective, why our negative emotions aren’t the ‘cause’ of our suffering when we are being harmed, and why using our negative emotions to HELP US find NEW WAYS of being is SO vital.
This is a DEEP DIVE, and I am really excited to explore.
Let’s talk all things true forgiveness, rehabilitation, the spiritual perspective of harm and how we can balance all of this with our lived humanity.
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Walking Away When It’s Too Much
From here, it must be stated that sometimes the HEALTHIEST thing we are going to do is realize that the harm is too much, that the pattern is to ingrained, that the other person simply isn’t in a place to do their work and to heal - and that in order to REALLY be honoring our humanity, we have to walk away. Or at the very least we need to dramatically shift how we are interacting with the person we are looking at.
Whether this be a family member, a coworker or boss, a friend, a lover or partner - we should NEVER be in a situation where we are perpetually facing abuse and harm only to see no change in behavior and no growth on the part of the other person.
When we have done our due-diligence to see where we are playing our role in the dynamic, when we have looked at where we can change or shift ourselves in the ways WE can and the abuse/harm is still happening - this is when we may need to realize that a boundary/walking away is the only solution.
It may be that the answer is that we simply need to admit that this relationship is not healthy, it’s not safe and it’s not one where we can reasonably expect to be ok, to be seen, to be valued and to be given what we need - and in this it’s important that we are able to set those boundaries and walk away.
In the spirituality and self help world, a lot of the time this is considered being unforgiving. A lot of the time this is considered being ‘unspiritual’ or wrong in some way. Much of the time there is a judgment that those who are really ‘awake’ and in their mastery, can learn to bring peace/be peace/bring forgiveness no matter what the situation is and no matter how much harm is being done.
There is a narrative that we are supposed to be ones who love others so deeply, that our love ‘heals’ them of their toxicity. That we are supposed to just stick it out with people for as long as it takes for them to see that they are just acting from wounds and as long as it takes for them to grow into that higher version of themselves.
I want to make sure that I state this as directly as possible - this is bullshit.
This narrative is deeply unhealthy, and it’s one that leads a LOT of people to a state of causing themselves undue harm, and it’s one that leads to cycles of codependency/enabling toxic behavior.
You see, there's a MASSIVE difference between holding space for someone who is genuinely doing the work to grow and change, and simply enabling abuse and sacrificing our own humanity along the way.
YES there are times and places where being loving, being forgiving, holding someone in their light and offering forgiveness in the form of staying in the dynamic because we know that the other person is just hurting and needs some love and support to grow - while we are also able to make changes in the dynamic all along the way that serve to make us safer - and simply staying in a toxic dynamic where we are expected to tie ourselves in knots trying to accommodate the other person/predict their behavior/not upset them/clean up the messes that are constantly being made by their abusive behavior.
If we are being asked to make ourselves into beings that are fully having to adjust ourselves to the wants, needs and habits of another, if we aren’t free to be ourselves, if we aren’t free to express when we are being hurt and having that expression met with understanding and growth on the other side - it may be time to say that this is not where we should be.
That our love isn’t going to be the thing that changes the dynamic,
That we should not be in a state of perpetually having to sacrifice our humanity, safety, sanity or freedom in the hopes that someone else is going to change.
If the other party isn’t doing their work, if it’s all on us, if it’s just perpetual cycles of the same abuse and harm over and over - then staying isn’t an act of love - it’s an act of self betrayal AND an act of ENABLING the cycle to continue.
As hard as this may be to accept, the reality is we need to be realistic and honest that this dynamic isn’t getting better, and us staying in it isn’t actually a healthy move. For us or for the other person.
It is NEVER our job as adults to ‘love’ people into a state of healing.
It is never our responsibility to stay, to support someone, to love someone through their stuff - unless that is something we genuinely WANT to do and something we can do WITHOUT putting ourselves in the way of undue harm.
It’s NEVER our job to be ultimately loving in terms of putting up with any and all behavior, and in terms of tolerating any and all growth paths.
We are humans, we are not people’s therapists, caregivers or Gods.
Again, it can’t be overstated - when we stay in toxic dynamics that aren’t changing, when we are constantly having to shift ourselves in order to try to navigate an impossible situation, when we are perpetually being harmed and no change is happening - we aren’t actually serving as love - we are enabling both ourselves and the other person to stay in toxicity and this isn’t actually love for anyone.
In these cases, walking away or setting a heavy boundary IS the most loving thing to do. It is the most spiritual thing to do. It’s the most life- honoring thing to do.
It’s never our job to stay in a toxic or harmful dynamic - no matter WHO the other person is - a parent, a dear family member, a partner, a coworker, a friend - unless it’s someone that we are ACTUALLY responsible for like a child or someone we have some legal agreement to care for - we are not required to stay and make it work.
No matter WHO it is - if it’s another consenting adult we are ALLOWED to walk away. And sometimes that is the ONE healthy choice. Any spiritual or self help teaching that says otherwise is operating from delusion, not spirituality.
What Is True Forgiveness?
SO much of the spirituality and self help world is centered on this idea that we should learn to be ok/equanimeous with everything.
That we should be perpetually working to ‘transcend’ our negative emotions, to ‘overcome’ our ‘egos’ and to get to a place where nothing ever bothers us ever again.
That to be ‘spiritual’ is to see the light and love in all people and all things, and to get to a place where we never consider anything to be bad or harmful.
Within the context of relationships, this can look like being expected to tolerate any and all behavior, to never be mad about anything, to see everything as some divine lesson we’re meant to be learning and again, that we should be working towards a state of ‘unconditional love’ where we never have healthy boundaries because we see everyone and everything as innocent and we live as though nothing can or does ever harm us.
This isn’t forgiveness, and this isn’t spirituality - this is bypassing our human nature, and it’s bypassing our natural harm detection mechanisms - which is really just a DENIAL of life so much more than it is an affirmation of life.
The reality is, if we are going to be truly ‘spiritual’ we are going to be people who are in alignment with REALITY.
All of reality.
Both the energetic, etheric and more ‘supernatural’ elements of reality AND the physical, mental and emotional aspects of reality.
We are going to be people who can see that there is no separation between what is true in the ethereal and what’s true in the physical.
We are going to be beings who can understand that DEGRADATION is degradation. That when we are being degraded on a physical level, on an emotional level or on a spiritual level, we aren’t ‘aligning’ spiritually. That to ignore physical, mental and emotional degradation doesn’t make us more ‘spiritual’ but rather it makes us beings who are trapped in denial of reality, and who are spiritually bypassing what’s truly going on.
The truth is, reality is always speaking to us - it speaks to us in the language of pain and pleasure. It speaks to us in the language of pain and pleasure on ALL levels - mental, emotional, physical and spiritual.
When we are experiencing harm or degradation on the ‘denser’ planes of our existence, and when we choose to ignore this, deny this, pretend it isn’t happening, when we try to spiritualize this or make it into something that it isn’t - we aren’t becoming more spiritual - we are simply beings who are ignoring parts of WHAT IS in the hopes that this is going to better our lives in some way - and what most of us are going to discover if we do this for long enough, is that the exact opposite happens.
When we try to make harm ok, when we try to find some spiritual reason for why we should continue to be subjected to harm, when we look for why we deserve it, how it’s part of our ‘soul path’ or use any other kind of spiritual bypassing technique to convince ourselves that harm isn’t harm - we aren’t opening ourselves up to broader wisdom - we are doing mental gymnastics to try to make what isn’t ok, ok.
When we actually want to move from a place of true awareness and actual spirituality, we want to understand that the more we are in alignment with reality - all facets of reality - the more ‘spiritually aligned’ we actually are.
What Does This Have To Do With Forgiveness?
It’s my belief that TRUE forgiveness isn’t something we can achieve while we are still being actively harmed.
True forgiveness is not a choice we make, but rather is a natural place we ARRIVE at, when we have been able to REMOVE ourselves from the harm we were experiencing, when we have been able to REPAIR the damage in the best ways we can, and when we have gathered enough SPACE from the incident to have been able to learn what we needed to learn from it, and to grow in whatever ways we needed to grow from it.
Forgiveness is NOT the same as saying what the person who caused harm did was ok.
Rather, forgiveness is a state of seeing the ‘bigger picture’ being able to see the roots of why the harmful person was harmful, being able to see the role we played (if any), being able to see that we were not to blame, being able to see what we needed to learn in terms of how to get ourselves out of the situation and how to make the harm stop, being able to learn what we needed to learn about boundaries or changed behavior, and we have been able to make those changes, we have been able to heal the wounds and we are now in a SAFE place.
From this vantage point of safety, we will often naturally arrive at a place where we no longer have anger, resentment or any feelings of shame about what we’ve gone through - because we see the whole picture and we’ve healed to a degree that has led to enough empowerment that we are no longer being harmed and again, we are in a space of safety.
It’s a place of being able to find compassion for the person who harmed us, being able to see them in their flawed humanity and being able to see that they were working from their wounds - without making that mean we should stay, without making that mean that the pain they were causing wasn’t happening and without making that mean that we should just put up with it because it’s ‘not their fault.’
Forgiveness is NOT the same thing as saying the pain you suffered at their hands is washed away. That the trauma, the scars, the open wounds no longer exist because you understand they didn’t ‘mean’ to hurt you. Just because they didn’t mean to, doesn’t mean they didn’t. If someone accidentally shoots you, you still have a bullet wound.
Seeing them in their innocence is NOT the same as saying they are not harmful. Understanding that a wounded cat bit you because it was scared of you doesn’t mean that your flesh no longer has teeth marks in it. Seeing someone as acting from trauma and not from a place of being FUNDAMENTALLY bad, evil, vicious or harmful does NOT ERASE DAMAGE DONE or mitigate FUTURE DAMAGE. You’re still wounded. You’re still a person.
It’s about understanding that the anger, rage, sadness, pain, resentment and all the other negative emotions we feel while we are being harmed are not the things that are ‘blocking us’ from being happy. They are not the reason we should feel like we aren’t spiritually aligned or like we are failing on some level.
SO OFTEN in the spirituality/self help world we are shamed and blamed for having these negative emotional reactions to harm - and we are told that if we could just get rid of/rise above those negative emotions, that life would then be fine.
THIS is the major misunderstanding.
Those emotions are there to let us know that we are being degraded. And so long as the degradation exists, the emotions are going to exist.
We aren’t going to ‘get rid of’ our anger, resentment or sadness so long as we are stuck in a situation where we are being actively harmed. It’s like expecting to stop feeling physical pain at some point when we are being repeatedly stabbed. The pain isn’t the problem, the pain is the MESSENGER ABOUT the problem.
The emotions we feel while we are being harmed are the MESSENGERS that something needs to change, and they are the motivators we need to do the scary, hard and uncomfortable work of making those changes. They are not the CAUSE of our pain and they are not the problem.
We will naturally stop having anger, resentment, sadness and so on when we are no longer being harmed. We don’t have to ‘get rid of’ the emotions, we must get rid of the CAUSE of the emotions - THE HARM.
THIS is what the spiritual community doesn't’ seem to understand. And it’s what we need to learn if we really want to feel better in life.
So yes, we want to ‘get rid of the emotions’ by USING them as tools to help us CHANGE HARMFUL CIRCUMSTANCES.
THEN we will feel better.
THAT is what forgiveness actually is.
Having witnessed our negative emotions, used them as the messengers they are about where we are being harmed, and then having used them to help us CHANGE what needed to be CHANGED so we can be in new, less harmful circumstances.
We don’t get rid of negative emotions - we get rid of HARM. THEN we naturally feel better and can see things from that expanded perspective.
Rehabilitation
Finally, we want to understand that in the BIG PICTURE, we do want to work to rehabilitate people who cause harm - but we must be able to do it in a way where we aren’t perpetual collateral damage.
We must be able to do this kind of rehabilitation work where we support people, where we see them in their innocence, where we give them new tools and strategies for working through their pain and trauma - in a way where no one is being perpetually asked to carry the burden of someone's pain or past trauma in order to make this happen.
This is tricky and not so straightforward, but it’s the way forward in the LARGER picture.
Understand that by ending our desire to see people as EVIL - we will start to create a system where people can be rehabilitated. Where we can catch signs of trauma EARLY and rather than disciplining or shaming these people, we will start to look for ways of curbing that trauma and pain. We will stop with our incessant cycles of punishment and retraumatization - victim/victor cycle - and start seeing that systems need to change.
This is going to be systemic, as well as part of what all of us start to live in our day to day lives.
Understanding that people are acting from wounding, and that a LOT of that wounding comes from our systems of power and inequity means that we can start to see that the ways society punishes people for how they are reacting to very real threats to their safety and security is barbaric. We will start to see just how deeply our systems CAUSE the very trauma people are then reacting to, that society then punishes them for - leading to more and more trauma - and we will start to see why - because this is profitable. This is how cheap labor is created. This is how we as people ‘in the middle’ are scared into following cultural norms that harm us and harm others, this is how we are convinced that ‘criminals’ are getting what they deserve when they are treated as less than human rather than us being able to see that their lives are being robbed from them and this is how we are blinded to the very system itself.
Learning to see all harm as coming from a place of trauma means that we will start to LOOK for the root causes, rather than ASSUMING people are inherently evil, bad, wrong, irresponsible or simply deserving of punishment. And this can then help us see where we want to participate in the change in the unique way that WE can.
We will also stop with the ‘love and light’ denial that keeps us in situations where we think we should ‘transcend’ the harm that others are causing us - like expecting ourselves to one day be able to put our hands into a fire without getting burned.
We will start to see that no matter how much we love someone, how much we see them in their innocence, how much we understand WHY they do what they do - this DOES NOT erase the harm. And we have to understand again, that when we leave ourselves in situations where we keep exploring ourselves to people who have SHOWN US THEIR TRAUMA and their LACK OF CAPACITY NOT TO BE TRIGGERED all we do is open ourselves to attack, and then we are going to go out and ATTACK - either ourselves or others. Every time.
There is no healthy way to stay in a relationship with someone who can’t help but attack you.
We must understand that our desire to be able to ‘transcend harm’ by no longer PERCEIVING another as harmful/their actions as an attack/their actions as a personal attack because we know it has nothing to do with us is actually a trauma response in US. That is our childhood response to being in situations where we were NOT CAPABLE of getting away from/setting boundaries between us and those who were victimizing us. Our desire to stay in the relationship and love them better is oftentimes a projection from a childhood where we thought if we just loved our caregivers/abusers we couldn’t escape from enough, that they would then turn loving towards us. It’s often an unhealed wound in us to want to spiritualize taking abuse. It’s often an unhealed trauma in us to want to love someone better who simply can’t right now. It’s commonly a trauma response to try to be in relationship with EVERYONE when we are being damaged. It can be a trauma response to deny that we are humans who ARE BEING DAMAGED. No matter how innocent the attack, no matter how much we see that it’s not about us - again if someone shoots us because they think we are someone else or accidentally - we still bleed.
Sometimes we have to slow down and realize that in real reality, it’s irresponsible to keep putting ourselves in a state where we are going to be harmed and then have to heal. It’s better to remove, not get harmed anymore so we can spend our time proactively, not reactively healing/recovering. Because we DO HAVE to recover when we are attacked.
Don’t waste all your light recovering from the attacks of a wounded person. Don’t waste your light justifying their behavior. Turning it in on yourself by allowing them to connote to abuse you is self abuse. Love that inner child who learned that - so you can evolve past it. Don’t spiritualize that trauma response.
There is no healthy way to stay in a relationship with someone who can’t help but attack you.
Again, we all have our stuff. Our traumas. Our wounds where we attack. There is a difference between imperfect humans interacting, hurting one another, and being able to recognize that hurt and change. To work together on our triggers. To navigate and show the ability to change and grow together - that is what relationships are. We will never be perfect and that’s ok. But again, big difference between ABUSE and normal human crunchiness.
No one is harmful on purpose. Everyone is acting from wounding.
Please be brave enough to see where someone has no capacity not to wound you, and to put up the boundaries/walk away where you need to.
THIS IS A LOVING ACT.
Seeing someone at their light does NOT mean ignoring their very real shadows. You are not impervious and you need to consider yourself.
Believe them.
You deserve safety and a place where you are not constantly exposed to someone who can’t help but attack you. It’s not you. It’s not anything you did.
Let’s normalize this complexity.
Then let’s look systemically at how we can start to be a part of the BIG change that will lead to more safety and rehabilitation for all, by simply noting where the harm is being done, and where we can act in ways that serve to create positive change.
This is complex, and we are capable, one step at a time.
<3
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