We All Fall, Be Kind
With so many stressors and triggers happening around us, it's easy to lose sight of the fact that we're human and inevitably make mistakes. As a means to avoid the mistakes we may be making, we tend to lean on the judgment of others as a way to distract us from our own growth and potential errors. In these moments of judgment, if we can instead find empathy we unleash the most powerful tool in recovering compassion and going easier on others and ourselves, no matter where we may have gone wrong.
Everyone’s emotional response looks and feels different. Some may sleep for days, some may work 80 hours a week, some may yell, some may shop; the list goes on and on. How we cope is not often something we are aware of, we simply know that for a moment we feel less terrible. But then, the guilt and shame come in. We feel bad for taking a nap or for buying another kitchen appliance or for being on our phones more than we thought we should be. We spend minutes shoulding all over ourselves (I should have done this, I should have done that) as if the act of punishing ourselves for having a response to stressors makes us bad people. It is the extremeness of our feelings that we can curve in order to find kindness and potentially further knowledge of ourselves.
It is very unlikely that you or the people in your life are bad even if you have done something bad. We all make mistakes, we all do bad things, and we all decide what to do when those events take place. Our responses to our mistakes tell us more about our character than the mistake itself.
I have found in my work, that oftentimes people seek out a box to put people into, especially people who have committed a sex offense or a violent assault. We want to paint them in a certain way to make ourselves feel better because if we can paint them as evil or wrong we feel like we can control the badness in our own lives. We other them, because it is too painful to admit that we too could be triggered or pushed to harm someone or ourselves. When we leave our pain or trauma unattended, it will burst out like a bull at the rodeo. Our lizard brains will take over and we will do whatever we have to do in order to believe that we are protecting ourselves, even when what we are doing could be harming ourselves and most likely someone else.
For the longest time, I refused to believe that I could be anything like the person who abused me. I believed that I was inherently better than him, void of causing the deep erosion of a soul the way that he had done to me. Then, I started listening to the stories of other people who had committed sex offenses. I watched them as they talked or even listened to me talking. I saw in them a really hurt child or person that was so damaged they chose to damage their soul even deeper. I saw in them the same thing I saw in myself: a hurt, abused person trying to put the pieces back together and struggling to do so. For me, my further harm was not committing a sex offense, it was abusing myself. Suicide attempts, harmful relationships, intentionally getting people to leave my life, the list goes on. I sought destruction just like they did because I believed the only thing that I was meant for was a life of pain.
It scared me deeply to know that I can understand these people not as the enemy but as people. It is the greatest gift of my life because the empathy I feel for them is still the empathy I am trying to find for myself. Accepting myself, being kind to myself, letting myself go through this life sometimes in shambles and sometimes in glory is a constant never ending journey. I preach empathy as the greatest gift we can give one another because of its power to create color. When we lack empathy, we only see things in black, white or gray. Empathy is the rainbow. It lets our eyes take in the light that our heart needs to see; to know that we are good exactly as we are. The practice is not fixing all of the harm inside of ourselves, it is looking at it and giving it a safe space to exist. So when someone strikes a chord, you know how to back bounce a little easier and a little faster. When you are triggered you step left instead of right or as Michelle Obama so elegantly captured “when they go low, we go high.” The only way we achieve that is by accepting we will fall, identifying the things that tripped us up, accessing tools that allow us to find a path towards healing and being kind to ourselves and those around us.
I challenge you to seek empathy for someone you have decided is bad or evil. Can you look at them and find the human side? The broken side? And then, can you do the same for yourself?
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