Your hurters are your healers.

Everyone is going through something you know nothing about. It takes someone that is hurt to hurt another person, most hurt is a cry for help by the hurter who is going through pain and the transmission of their pain to other is one of their coping mechanism. It can be very challenging to be at the receiving end of other people’s unhealed traumas. When situations like this occur, as they often will, I try to remember the words of Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, who quipped in Meditations:

“When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: the people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own – not of the same blood and birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are unnatural.”

It can be very tough to take the high road when people, for whatever reason, go at us at a low vibration. It might be a betrayal, backstabbing, name-calling, public humiliation, or making triggering statements. These situations often escalate so fast that it can be hard not to get angry or emotionally hijacked. The key to navigating these situations is to try to learn from the situation and realize that every hurter is a healer. They have come to teach us a lesson we have yet to learn truly. Leadership often remark on hurt “People Change When They Hurt Enough That They Have To”

The most basic impetus for change is pain. From the time we are first able to make choices as a child, we instinctively avoid pain. But a better response to pain is to change so we are no longer hurt by it.

Clinical psychologist Martha Stout, author of The Sociopath Next Door ¹, noted that 4 percent of the general population has an antisocial personality disorder.

“About one in twenty-five individuals are sociopathic, meaning, essentially, that they do not have a conscience. It is not that this group fails to grasp the difference between good and bad; it is that the distinction fails to limit their behavior. The intellectual difference between right and wrong does not bring on the emotional sirens and flashing blue lights, or the fear of God, that it does for the rest of us. Without the slightest blip of guilt or remorse, one in twenty-five people can do anything at all.”

We live in a world where there are more sociopaths, psychopaths, narcissists and toxic humans than we can imagine. With social media and social comparison, the world is getting more toxic, and kindness is a place in Siberia. In Psychopath Free: Recovering from Emotionally Abusive Relationships With Narcissists, Sociopaths, and Other Toxic People ², author Jackson MacKenzie also made the following observation: “More than 15 percent of our population is made up of people with a severe and incurable emotional disorder—and yet, due to the hidden nature of their symptoms, we know practically nothing about them. Usually, by the time someone decides to learn about personality disorders, the damage has already been done.”

Psychopath – narcissist – sociopath

They’re manipulative people—completely devoid of empathy—who intentionally cause harm to others without any sense of remorse or responsibility. And despite some differences between each disorder, the bottom line is that their relationship cycles can be predicted like clockwork: Idealize, Devalue, Discard.

Understanding psychopathy requires letting go of your basic emotional instincts. Remember, these are people who prey on forgiveness. They thrive on your need for closure. They manipulate compassion and exploit sympathy.

Narcissists will indeed hurt us ⁴, but the hurt is often inflicted to protect their pride, possessions, or ego, rather than to create pain. Narcissists are self-absorbed and preoccupied with achieving the perfect image (recognition, status, or being envied). They appear to have little or no capacity for listening, caring, or understanding the needs of others, which can leave them without true intimacy, the feeling of being understood and held safely and lovingly by another person.

Narcissists consistently hide their insecurities so that no one can hurt, humiliate, disappoint, or use them again. However, hiding behind false bravado means they forfeit the intimate joys and sorrows that are part of life’s journey and, along with them, many of their own desires.

The difference between the villain and the hero is the way they react to the pain they’ve experienced. What separates a villain from a hero is the hero learns from their pain and tries to help others avoid the same pain. The villain, on the other hand, seeks vengeance against the world that hurt them. ⁵

Meditations

Daily Calm with Tamara Levitt – Vulnerability

It can be challenging to be candid about our feelings with others. With a select few loved ones, we often feel comfortable showing vulnerability and expressing our emotions. But when acquaintances and co-workers ask how we are feeling, we often give guarded automatic answers such as “fine”, “not bad”, “great” or “busy”. These words can be like an armor that protects us from exposing vulnerability.

Sharing vulnerability can help us accept and move through challenging emotions. It can also heighten intimacy of our relationships. The purpose of mindfulness is awareness and acceptance of our experiences without judgment whatever that experience is. Instead of accepting and allowing our feelings, we are burying them, denying them, not only to our colleagues but to ourselves.

To break the habit of those fine, thanks, responses. When someone ask how you are feeling? Pause, take a moment to consider it, seat with the question, scan your thoughts and feelings . Breathe and observe you can then respond as candidly as you can even if it means revealing some vulnerability.

Embracing vulnerability brings us closer to our truth, it improves our emotional self-awareness and helps us endure challenging emotions. It can build trust and authenticity in relationships. It brings us closer not only to how we are feeling but who we truly are.

“Vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity and change.”― Brene Brown

Daily Jay with Jay Shetty – See and Be Seen

The human eye has 256 distinct characteristics that help to identify an individual person. For comparison, a fingerprint has only 40, our eyes are amazing. And yet, even with this incredible capabilities, we often look past what is right in front of us. We look past who is right in front of us,.

Eye contact is more powerful than we may realize in terms of feeling a sense of connection and belonging. We humans are exceptionally sensitive to social cues, we listen for tone of voice, to guage whether someone is happy or angry with us. We observe body language to see whether people seem open or friendly or closed off.

We can get so absorbed in our phones that we can forget that all around us are real life people. And so, we neglect to acknowledge them plus so much of our conversations taking place online, in-person contact might feel uncomfortable.

Daily Trip with Jeff Warren – The Boggle.

Sometimes we are in the boggle, life is throwing everything at us. From complex siituations, complicated relationships, we have all these feeling and impulses pulling us in different directions and we have no idea what to do with it. No idea how to resolve it all, even no idea what self-care strategy to implement right now.

What is interesting about the boggle is that there is the challenge of the situation itself, or situations and there is the added challenge of the confusion it. The scrambling to make sense of all of it.

Meditation teaches us that inner turmoil does not need to completely own us. We can still choose to do something restful. Even with various tug of wars happening in the background. We can choose to seat and be however imperfectly, so forgive the imperfection, confusion and uncertainty.

Podcast