Healing the Big Hurts in our Lives – Revisited

A reader shared with me today that my Blog post from several issues ago (Recovery from Big Hurts) left her a little troubled.  It wasn’t that she disagreed with the post.  It was just that it all seemed to go too fast from trauma to a soaring spirit.  I’m glad she expressed her concern because that certainly wasn’t my intent.  When I wrote that post, I had several specific situations in mind.  One of them, from initial trauma to closure was an 18 month journey.  Another was shorter; another longer. 

When we are deep into the hard stuff, many of us would like to rush through it quickly in order to escape to the peace on the other side.  This makes total sense.  The hard reality is that recovery from big hurts takes significant time.   It cannot be rushed.  In fact, rushing that recovery might mean that we are not acknowledging the depth of our pain.  And as the saying goes, unacknowledged pain is transferred pain.  In other words – pain that is unacknowledged will find its way into another area of our lives.  And who among us wants to give that much power to our original hurt?  

Another friend of mine commented to me today that only those who have suffered can really understand another person’s pain.  She’s probably right.  But that kind of compassion doesn’t come from gliding quickly over the hurts in our lives.  It comes from digging deeply into ourselves as we wrestle with whatever it is that is before us.  Eventually this digging and wrestling produces something within us that is pure gift.  We have been in the crucible and ideally, we have emerged refined.

Dealing With Difficult People

Flyers for workshops entitled “Dealing with Difficult People” come across my desk now and then and certainly a quick Google search on this title brings up a host of websites.  It always makes me wonder... Do the people who are being called difficult know this about themselves?  Who are the difficult among us and what makes them difficult?  It is absolutely true that we not so infrequently encounter people in our lives who we and perhaps even others might describe as difficult.  And knowing good skills re: how to manage conversations with these individuals makes really, really good sense.  That said, I’d like to explore the difficult people question from another angle.  For me, the fundamental question when encountering a difficult person is this:  What vulnerability in me is being triggered by this encounter?  What have I not come to peace with in my own life that this person’s behaviour is raising to my attention? 

Many of us will have encounters with difficult people that come and go so quickly, within days we hardly remember the experience.    And then there are those encounters that stay with us much too long, causing us to stay awake at night, creating illness within us...  Perhaps this person is a colleague or family member and we cannot escape the difficult encounters.  Perhaps we are tired and don’t have the energy to manage the difficult person’s insecurities or moods.  Perhaps the other person has, in fact, been inappropriate or rude and their behaviour is not acceptable.  All of this could be true.  In addition, however, we must face the question from the perspective of our own personhood.

Has the “difficult” person’s behaviour triggered an insecurity we have not resolved?  Has our way of communicating triggered an insecurity in the other person that has caused them to react with “difficulty”?   A friend shared with me today that when she recently said the following: “That person makes me so mad,” her spouse reminded her that actually she should say, “I allowed myself to make myself mad at that person.”  I have believed for a long time that the only person we can change is ourselves; our responsibility in life is to reach ever more toward a greater maturity.  One of the first steps on that journey is recognising our own piece of the puzzle whenever we might encounter someone we declare to be difficult.

Defining Forgiveness

Shortly before Christmas and on the heels of the Newtown, Connecticut tragedy, the Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail ran an article entitled, How do we forgive?  While I was thrilled to see the article in the paper, the article troubled me.  While the author of the article proposed a definition of forgiveness, it was clear that those interviewed were not necessarily operating out of the same definition as the one proposed.  Those interviewed were not only talking past each other, they were also talking past the person doing the interviewing.  Much has been said about forgiveness over the past 20+ years, yet we still do not seem any closer to a definition to which we all or many can agree. 

The key points of dispute are this:

·       Does forgiveness require the offender to ask for forgiveness or is forgiveness something we do for ourselves, regardless of the repentance of the offender?

·       Is forgiveness the same thing as saying “it’s ok”? 

·       Does forgiveness equal reconciliation?

·       Can we forgive on behalf of others?

According to my own attempts at a definition, forgiveness is the opposite of saying “it’s ok.”  To forgive means there was something that in fact was “not ok.”  And while it is often easier to forgive a repentant offender, we forgive first and foremost for ourselves, to release ourselves from the pain of the event. 

But here it gets tricky:  To genuinely release ourselves from the pain of the event usually involves coming to a place where we are able to see the other as complex, capable of good and bad, just as we are complex, also capable of good and bad.  Sometimes when this happens we are able to extend the hand of grace to the other – when this happens we observe a quality in the human spirit that is so profound, it can only be described as holy. 

Notice though that so far none of this is the same as reconciliation.  Forgiveness – precisely because it is so much a personal journey – can easily be unconditional.  Genuine reconciliation on the other hand goes beyond the personal to directly include the other, it must always depend on the movement of the other as much as on the movement of the self and as such, it is always conditional. 

Recovery From Big Hurts

I have the privilege now and then of walking with people who have encountered deep and profound hurts in their lives.  They wonder aloud to me whether they will ever be better.  Big hurts are so profound they make the very act of breathing hard.  They sear into our souls to a degree that we can hardly imagine life returning to “normal” again.  And the hard truth is that life never really does return to its old normal again.  Our only dying hope in these valleys of pain (and it is a type of death) is that we will emerge on the other side alive.  Perhaps wiser, perhaps stronger but in our darkest moments, emerging alive is enough.

The hard truth is that the big hurts of our lives will change us.  The question is how.   Buried in this question is also the source of our strength – because the question of how we will be changed depends significantly on ourselves. Will we become wiser, stronger, more compassionate people?  Or will we become embittered, angry and sullen?

Again and again I come back to a quote that was shared with me more than 15 years ago:  Hanging onto resentment is like drinking poison but expecting the other person to die. Sometimes we know we are drinking poison but it has become like an addiction and it is hard to stop.  Sometimes we want to stop but don’t know how.  Sometimes the pain is so deep it is as though the poison is being thrust into us by an unseen hand that refuses to let up.  But every now and then, the glory of our human spirit is greater than the resentments that threaten us.  And in those moments, our spirits soar - sometimes tentatively, sometimes boldly – but always with great courage toward a future more profound and more whole than the hurts that once were killing us. 

The Upside of Down

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Recently, I was speaking with a client regarding the challenges she was encountering in her job.  My client began to reflect on how her greatest strengths seemed to flip to also become her greatest weaknesses.  I have thought about this before (and experienced this myself) so yes, this made sense to me.  But I wondered aloud to her:  What would happen if we flipped that around?  Could it be that her greatest strengths might actually lie in the center of her weaknesses?   What if she saw her weaknesses as the portal from which to encounter her strengths? 

One of the clearest examples of this I have ever encountered was with a former supervisor.  In his previous workplace Gary (not his real name) was known as a barracuda, a power monger, perhaps even a bully.  Gary knew power in all its forms; he understood its texture, its nuances, he knew it so well he could taste it.  Slowly and over time (through workshops and through the courage of some people who could speak boldly to him) Gary came to realize that his use of power was killing the people around him.  By the time Gary came to my place of work he had transformed his use of power to the degree that he was and continues to be one of the most empowering people I have ever met.  Gary’s perceived weakness (a misuse of power) was in fact the portal through which he encountered his greatest gift:  To know power so well – in all its forms – so as to be able to empower others.  To throw away all that knowledge of power would not only have been a loss, it would have denied that which was core to Gary’s personality.  It would also have denied those of us around him his gift of empowerment.

So I wonder, what are your weaknesses?  What gift might be lying there for you among them?

Welcome!

Welcome to my first blog posting.  This blog has been a long time in the making – at least in as much as I have often written small “articles” or postings in my mind.  Now I am finally committing those musings to “paper.“  In this blog I will be reflecting on themes related to conflict management and change.
 What has always inspired me in this work, is the journey of the individual in the context of the hard stuff of life.  My hope is that this blog will not only provide insights into themes related to change and conflict, it will also speak to the location where change is always both the hardest and the most profound – in one’s self , the person riding the waves of whatever it is that their environment has thrown at them.  
Welcome!