So something came up. That was utterly not his fault but I misunderstood and spiralled into a world of hurt and abandonment. All my lovely efforts at mindfulness and inner calm went out the window as I curled up on the bathroom floor sobbing pathetically. I imagined him coming in to ask what was wrong and I couldn’t even work out the sentence I wanted to say. The snippets of injustice I was clinging to were not based in reality and circled back to my frequent familiar mantra – ‘Don’t leeeeeeeave me.’
He had no intention of leaving me, he had no idea I was even upset, and I knew I was spinning into something far previous that a tiny comment had triggered. It’s like I have a broken toe, it’s been broken for years, and I have managed to learn to walk in a way that doesn’t aggravate it, but all he has to do is slightly nudge my toe with his and I experience excruciating pain. Last time he stepped on it (more than a year ago) we had many days of sadness and long exploratory talks which resulted in mostly confusion and more hurt, so I have tried since to deal with this one on my own.
It’s a recurring sense of being engulfed by a wordless terrified feeling of being mortally wounded and rejected by a loved one, and it is often so completely blind with rage and terror that it has no words. So I am guessing it comes from a place of very young infancy, and as such, I need to find a way to let go of it.
I’ve stopped trying to work out who it was that hurt me when I was so small. I know my parents were all over the place doing ‘God’s work’ so any one of the random people around would have been in charge of me, and untrained, would have not known how to respond to a screaming baby. I guess it was some error back then that has stayed with me and there is a part of me that won’t let it go.
So I looked up forgiveness. Which led to radical forgiveness, which is on a whole new plane of surrender and which I don’t think I am actually ready for. But it was interesting and seemed powerful, so here are my learnings for today:
RADICAL FORGIVENESS BY COLIN TIPPING
The process of Radical Forgiveness:
- Tell the Story.
- Feel the anger, hurt, pain, for two minutes.
- Imagine the person who hurt you and why they did it. Remember that hurt people hurt people. Feel empathy, ask why you think they did that. What unrealistic expectations did I have?
- Consider that it is for FOR me. That I asked for it, somehow. That this person showed up to do to me the thing I needed.
You don’t have to believe it, just think it. You don’t have to understand or figure it out. Just be willing to entertain the possibility that we are co-creators and we get precisely what we want.
There is also PROJECTION. If there’s a part of us we hate, we project it on to other people and make them wrong. So if somebody is upsetting us in someway or who we find difficult to accept, what we are doing is looking in the mirror, we can say maybe this person is reflecting to me something that I have denied or repressed. Look at them and see it as an opportunity to heal yourself. Doing the forgiveness work on them we are actually forgiving ourselves.
The soul will always move us in the direction of healing – we keep on creating situations that offer us the opportunity to see the error in our thinking or beliefs. We have patterns that keep on repeating – abandonment, betrayal – one’s higher self is orchestrating us to have these experiences until we get it. It’s a self healing mechanism that operates below the level of consciousness. It’s an opportunity to wake up. The people who we think are troublesome can be the best teachers. As soon as we get it that that’s there to serve us, we can do the forgiveness work and the behaviour usually disappears. But if it doesn’t, we need to separate ourselves from them. Don’t be a doormat. If you do the forgiveness work and it does not stop, you do need to get out of there. Learn your lesson and move on. But usually you’ll find that when you do the work it’s an energy shift and it affects everyone else.
Whenever we get upset we can say this is an opportunity for forgiveness. There is a worksheet and a 13 step process (on www.radicalforgiveness.com), but a quick one that you can remember is four simple steps:
- Look what I’ve created.
- I notice my judgements but I love myself anyway
- I’m willing to see the perfection in this situation.
- I choose peace
And very quickly the energy changes. It stops you going to victimland. It is a fake it till you make it. Even if you don’t believe it or like it, it works.
So after just listening to that, I feel better. It makes sense that I would see something in my love that isn’t even there just so that I could get this old pain triggered (it is definitely a recurring pattern) so that I could confront it from the very primitive place it came from and try to forgive it there. I must admit, I have not done the full radical forgiving, I will save that till I’m ready. But good to know that all the resources are on Mr Tipping’s lovely website for free. Thank you
The Comfort Zone 