Your Pains Pouring Into Passions
That thing you’re passionate about might inspired by the worst incident in your life ...
Rape victims often help rape victims,
Abused children often help abused children,
Poor people often help others to become rich,
Sick people help others to become healthy,
People from war-ravaged communities often teach peace …
This is not to congratulate your father for beating you, your mother for abandoning you, your business partner for bankrupting you or your government for lying to you.
Dealing with the individual people who did you wrong is a separate exercise and we’ll address that in our next chat.
For now, allow the oppressors to drift away, in your mind, and just focus on the events:
I was raped
I was defrauded
I was regularly beaten
I was abandoned
It doesn’t matter who did it to you – the pain is the same. Of course, the closer someone is to you, the greater the trust … and, therefore, the greater the breaking of the trust.
A relative raping you is worse than a stranger for you trusted the relative.
A mate ripping you off is worse than a bank for you trusted your mate.
So, if you can put the individual and the trust aside, the pain of the grievance is the same.
If we can, now, focus in on the event or crime, we might be able to find a presiding emotion connected to that event – feeling lost, abandoned, not listened to, betrayed or whatever.
Notice that I didn’t add anger and depression to that list. They’re not feelings but surface reactions – anger can arise from a hundred different feelings and depression can arise from the same hundred feelings. Like the iceberg, anger and depression are visible and above water. I’m now asking you to dive into the freezing water below and see the 90% that’s underneath, supporting the top.
Let me give you an example from my own life, which might resonate with you …
At 11-years old I was sent to boarding school for the best of intentions. I loved it for I was away from regular physical and verbal abuse. However, family is family and I always wanted to fit in and be accepted. I never did. At boarding school for seven years, I went home 2-3 times a year for around two weeks at a time. Each time I was criticized for asking who or what my siblings and parents were talking about, as if I should know people and events I wasn’t witness to. There were seldom questions about my life at school and I learned to shut up. I realised no one was interested.
I was a resounding success at school, being near the top of all the top classes and representing the school at more sports than anyone else. But that wasn’t good enough. I don’t know why I wasn’t good enough and I don’t know why my mother couldn’t say she loved me, despite my asking her several times.
I felt pushed out of my family and, as such, was always trying to engineer family gatherings which the others had little or no interest in.
I could make a long list of the things that happened but I’ll just bore you with the last one was that, when my mother died in May 2022, I discovered that my siblings got an equal share of her estate and I was deliberately left out. No one will tell me why. I was shocked that she could deny the existence of someone born from her body.
I could choose the sense of not belonging, being singled out for punishment, being shut down, being abandoned, why me, what’s wrong with me that I get this treatment, injustice and a lot of other feelings.
However, from these and other experiences, I have felt both angry and depressed and, when I dived deeper, I could see the label of insignificance.
So, there were many emotions I could have chosen but the one that sticks is insignificance – who am I that anyone would want to listen to me became my unconscious mantra … till I unearthed it and gave it voice and was finally free.
I’m sure you have a similar story in that you’ve had negative experiences and fallen against anger and/or depression. You might have dived deeper and identified several – perhaps many – emotions under the water.
I just ask you to hold your breath a little longer … stay with the emotions you see floating around you and see if there’s one that constantly floats to the surface.
That’s likely to be the emotion that’s driving you, right now, with your career, friendships, relationships, career, finances and family.
By identifying the prevalent emotion – which will be connected to your most prevalent negative self-criticism – you’ll identify two things:
Your greatest power, and
Your greatest access to freedom.
Try it, you’ll love it.