Did you ever just automatically erupt over something someone said or did and then wondered where that nasty reaction came from inside you?
Unfortunately for our bruised egos, sometimes we discover that we aren’t in as total control of our emotions as we had assumed ourselves to be. I dislike realizing that personal flaw as much as anyone—letting what I was really thinking/feeling slip out of my mouth before I had a chance to stop it.
There is a good reason for that caustic reaction slippage; and it’s often one we may not like but it still exists all the same. At some deeper level within us we may have been damaged or wounded in some way, but we refuse to accept the possibility because we feel that acknowledging that deeper woundedness makes us weak; and weakness is something we just cannot tolerate, especially in ourselves. I’m certainly guilty of that, and imagine others are as well.
I could go all shamanic on you here and talk about ancestral wounding or past-life wounding and how to release the energies of trauma long held in your ancestral bloodline or in your previous-life existences—the karma factor per se, but I want to talk about THIS life—right here—right now. The wounds you’ve received from THIS life are as affecting and sometimes more powerfully disruptive to your current life as those wounds long accrued by previous others before you ever existed in this timeline.
What I find most personally affecting are the chronic, rather than the acute woundings—the angry words continually slung at you or the too frequent unkind deeds toward you that build long-fermenting resentment within you because they continue their affectation on you for such longer periods of time. So then the real question is why do we tolerate this abuse of us while in the presence of another?
Maybe it’s because of the ‘LIFE IS COMPLICATED’ excuse we often give. If there were easy choices all around us, we would snatch them up. But when the choices are harder, and the emotions more raw, and the ties more binding between you and the offender, that’s when we start to question the rightness or necessity of what we might pursue next.
I don’t have to tell anyone that family issues are particularly complicated. There is the family we are born into, and then there is the family that we choose to gather around us. Families are messy situations with rightness and wrongness issues all mixed together because we have often learned to accept and tolerate more abusive family members in their imperfect handling of the world around them—mainly because we had no other choice at the time.
But within every situational ‘tolerance’ we mustered to get through the situation with our family members, that ‘tolerance’ had an impact on us at some deeper level because pain is pain. When people say or do nasty things to us, it hurts. And because whoever is hurting us so deeply is someone we love or even depend on (as children), that makes the pain sting longer and go deeper than a verbal slight or glancing blow from someone we cared less about.
These deeper root issues are the fodder of therapy sessions far beyond my capabilities, but I do want to mention here that you are not alone in your festering resentments or your chronic self-doubts or even your misting eyes during weaker emotional moments, because we all have them. It’s an aspect of what we often call LIFE EXPERIENCE; and sometimes that so called ‘experience’ can be not only character building on the positive upside, it can also be ‘hard to accept’ on the down side.
Sometimes you just need someone to talk to, to help release the pent up anger and frustration. Find a professional who can help vent your pressure valve before you truly blow your stack. Get to the root of that hidden woundedness before it pulls you under. Forgiveness may be a panacea for all ills, but forgiving yourself for allowing the wounding to occur in the first place in adult relationships is often the hardest task of all.