Rick was an angry man—a very angry man. He was referred to me by his therapist to assess whether medication could help his depression. Normally, we associate depression with being unhappy, and Rick was definitely unhappy—miserable even. He couldn’t sleep, had little energy, and thought a lot about suicide. But although his diagnosis was depression, his predominant mood was anger, the kind that could burn you if you got in its way.
Rick had already seen and rejected nearly a dozen therapists, most of them within the first session. His list of complaints against them was endless: They didn’t listen well, failed to take his problems seriously enough, charged too much money, offered gimmicky suggestions. Rick found reasons to reject each of his therapists as easily as he rejected almost everyone else in his life. In fact, he was about to leave his current therapist—the one who had recommended him to me—although he had been seeing him for only a few months.
Rick was clearly a Rejecting or Anger type, what Buddhist psychology terms an Aversion type. Filled with anger, his was an energy of pushing away, of rejecting even those people, opportunities, and situations that he most desired. Rick was still in his early forties, too young to worry about the heart disease that so often plagues people with this temperament. But one could say that Rick already had a disease of the heart. From my point of view, he was slowly but surely destroying himself from within.
Rick was attached to his small self—so strongly attached to it that he wore it like a second skin. Unlike Joe, he wasn’t concerned with insufficiency but with inadequacy, so that his mind was completely caught up in seeing what was wrong with everything. Rick was a prime example of the “judging mind,” the mind that continually criticizes and rejects what is. Whereas the what-if mind sees the world in terms of what it wants, the judging mind looks for what it dislikes and can reject.
Unlike the what-if mind, the judging mind has little interest in either the past or future. Instead, it’s preoccupied with the here and now. But because its relationship to the present is one of constant criticism, the judging mind actually prevents Anger types from experiencing their lives moment by moment. Anger types have difficulty abandoning themselves to the experience of, say, watching a movie, dating a woman, or working at their chosen job because of the way they distance themselves through their constant evaluations and judgments: “I don’t like that movie....I’m disappointed with this woman. ...I can’t stand where I work.”
Having registered its dislike, the Angry mind goes on to find a reason for it: “The movie was too dull... She doesn’t give me enough attention.... This job pays too little for what I have to put up with.” Now that the judgment has been not only made but also substantiated, Anger types can forget about finding any pleasure in whatever has been rejected. And they can certainly forget about being surprised, engaged, or even caught off guard. The extraordinary uncertainty of experience— the way it changes from moment to moment, the way it transforms us— can be pushed away. All experiences can be kept at a safe distance, while Anger types’ judgments and reasons provide them with the illusion of control.
Sadly, Anger types are rarely aware of their own behavior and its effects on others—or on themselves. They almost never realize how quickly they write people off, how rapidly they dismiss unfamiliar ideas or reject new possibilities. On a date, for example, instead of staying open to the possibility that a woman might change as you get to know her, that a man might behave differently under different circumstances, that people are an unpredictable mixture of good and bad to whom we may have a wide range of reactions and responses, Anger types jump to their judgments, often without realizing the part they themselves have played in the encounter. For example, an Anger type might find it difficult to imagine that the woman he dated was nervous precisely because he himself was so critical and judgmental. “She’s just too awkward,” Rick might say dismissively about a woman he’d gone out with, without realizing that perhaps his own negative attitude had helped to bring out that particular side of his date.
Likewise, Anger types might not realize their own stake in the judgments they make. It was far easier for Rick to say something like “She’s way too insistent about that topic,” or “Doesn’t she see how wrong she is?” than to pause and reflect, “That topic really pushes my buttons” or “I feel very strongly about that issue.”
In fact, Rick was letting his fear run his life—not the fear of insufficiency that haunted Joe, but the fear of being attacked or diminished. Every time Rick even imagined that an attack might come, he responded with an instant blast of aggression that made it extremely hard to get close to him. Sadly, Rick had no idea of his own role in this dynamic. If he could have realized how often people left his presence with hurt feelings or the sense of being humiliated, he would have been astonished. In his own eyes, he was only the victim, the one whom “nobody liked.”
As I’ve worked with Anger types over the years, I’m struck by how quick they are to blame others—and how unaware they can be about their own role in conflicts. Rick, as we’ve seen, is a prime example, but my patient Joanne was another. Joanne was a woman in her early fifties who had founded her own small business nearly twenty years earlier. She consulted me for some executive coaching sessions because she was frustrated by the way she kept losing employees. She could always find good people, she told me, but just as she got them trained and up to speed, they seemed to leave, despite the excellent salaries she was paying and the good benefits she was offering as well.
I was surprised to hear Joanne’s complaints because I’d actually known her by reputation before she ever came to see me. By all accounts, she was a brilliant woman who had built her company from the ground up and was still involved in all aspects of her business. She was energetic, creative, and hard-driving—all considered desirable traits for the American entrepreneur. It wasn’t in Joanne’s nature to look to herself as the cause of her workplace unhappiness. But that is exactly where we had to go.
Joanne’s company was fairly small—only about twenty-five employees, all told, and all of them had a lot of contact with her. I met most of them, and saw them as good, solid people. It didn’t take me much time to realize that it was Joanne herself who was driving them out, not with low pay or long hours, but with her relentless criticism and judgment, followed by her need to micromanage even the smallest detail. She spent most of her time telling each of her workers exactly what he or she was doing wrong. No wonder people left as soon as they could.
Joanne finally had to face her own role in the problem when one of her most trusted employees resigned. She was shocked to receive his letter of resignation, which to her came as a complete surprise, and called him into her office for an explanation. Because of their close relationship, the man was willing to tell Joanne what no one else had dared to say: Her constant criticism and rejection of other people’s ideas had finally gotten to him. Although he knew that she thought highly of him, he still found her denigrating remarks painful, and he’d started developing migraines and indigestion in response.
Joanne was shocked to think that she had actually helped to make this man sick. We began discussing her Anger-type reactions in a more honest and thoughtful way, and Joanne started to practice some of the heart-opening exercises described in Chapter 15. She also began thinking more deeply about her own experiences with being criticized and rejected. Her father had been a demanding taskmaster, never satisfied and always quick with a sharp remark. Joanne began to realize how much of his negative attitudes and contemptuous responses she had unconsciously adopted.
Joanne’s progress was slow, and people have continued to leave her company at a rate she finds distressing. But she’s taken the first steps on her road to self-awareness—a small beginning, but a beginning nonetheless.
Rick and Joanne shared a trait that is all too common—the wish to blame others for the problems we create ourselves. When we’re undergoing stress, our minds automatically go into search mode, seeking reasons why we feel so awful. Unfortunately, we rarely look in the right place—at our own attachment to the small self, our own insistence on feeding our fear, envy, resentment, and confusion. Instead, we seek our answers in the shortcomings we see around us. We may even be right in our judgments. But if we don’t also look at our own role in a problem, we’ll never come up with a strategy that will really work.
A particularly ineffective strategy that most of us use from time to time is projection, the attribution of qualities or motivations to others without sufficient basis in fact. One of my favorite jokes contains a wonderfully extreme example of projection—the certainty that we know what’s going on in other people’s minds and the willingness to act accordingly:
Levy was miserable. He lay sleepless in his bed in his tiny Lower East Side tenement and watched the snow come down. “Everything happens to me,” he thought. “I’ve just gotten settled into this apartment, and the landlord says I have to move tomorrow. Fine, I’ll move—and I’ve even found another place, right down the block. But now it’s snowing, and tomorrow the sidewalks will be full of ice and snow. How will I get my stuff from here to there in this terrible weather?”
Suddenly Levy had a wonderful thought: His friend Goldberg owned a sled. “Wonderful!” he said to himself. “Tomorrow, I’ll go over and borrow the sled. I’ll load it up with all my possessions and drag it down the street—problem solved!”
Levy was just about to fall asleep when he had a troubling thought. “What if Goldberg won’t lend the sled?”
“That’s ridiculous!” he said to himself. “He’s my best friend. He’ll be happy to do me a favor. Stop worrying, and go to sleep.”
But the thought wouldn’t go away. “What if Goldberg won’t lend the sled?”
“Nonsense,” Levy said to himself. “Haven’t I always helped him when he needed it? Why, I’m the one who got him his first job. I’ve even lent him money. Besides, he’s a generous guy. Stop worrying and go to sleep.”
But once again, the thought returned. “What if Goldberg won’t lend the sled?”
“The rotten ingrate!” Levy said to himself. “Haven’t I always gone out of my way for him? And when his son was sick, didn’t I stay with the boy for an entire weekend? Doesn’t he know I’d do anything for him? And now he won’t even lend me his lousy five-dollar sled?”
Enraged, Levy jumped out of bed, threw on his overcoat and galoshes over his pajamas and bare feet, and stalked across the street to Goldberg’s apartment. He banged loudly on the door until a befuddled Goldberg, still half-asleep, slowly appeared in the doorway.
“Goldberg!” said Levy in righteous indignation. “You know what you can do with your no-good sled? You and that sled can go straight to hell!” And leaving the astonished Goldberg behind him, Levy stalked back to his own apartment, threw off his snow-covered overcoat and galoshes, and slept the sleep of the just.
I love this story because it makes the concept of projection so clear. Levy is so ready to get angry, to blame others for their supposed shortcomings, to attribute unkind motives to his friend, that he can’t even see that he’s invented the entire conflict. I like to imagine him telling the story to his other friends the next day, describing in glorious detail Goldberg’s selfish refusal, which in his mind has taken on the status of unassailable fact. The story is funny because it’s exaggerated, of course. But when I think of the way we get caught up in our own projections, I wonder if the events are exaggerated all that much.
While we’re pretty much all guilty of projection, the kinds of projections we make tend to vary based on our type. A Fear type like Joe usually creates projections based on his wishes or fears. If he’s feeling envious, he may convince himself that other people are happier, more successful, or simply better than they really are. Or, to soothe his envy, he may imagine that they’re somehow worse. Either way, he’ll be viewing others through the lens of his own wishes, not as their true selves.
Anger types, by contrast, often tend to project their judgment or blame onto others. “My employees are so ungrateful,” Joanne might say. “My business would be so much more successful if Terry were a more reliable employee.” Indeed, Joanne is the one who is not grateful to her employees for their hard work on her company’s behalf. Instead of seeing this quality in herself, she projects it onto others—and blames the others accordingly.
I wasn’t able to see Rick for regular therapy, but he sensed with me an acceptance he hadn’t found with any of his previous therapists and asked if I’d agree to see him occasionally. After we’d seen each other a few times, he told me what he considered the source of his problems.
When Rick was nine, his family was invited to another family’s cabin for a weekend. The other family had a thirteen-year-old son whom Rick liked and looked up to. The two boys were assigned to the same bedroom for the weekend, and that first night, the older boy initiated sexual contact. Confused and not knowing what else to do, Rick allowed the encounter to proceed. But he felt violated, ashamed, and unsafe, and he had no idea how to respond.
Ultimately, he did nothing. He allowed the boy to repeat the encounter the second night, and he said nothing about the incident to anyone. For his entire childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood, he pushed the entire experience, along with the flood of feelings that it had produced, down into the subterranean levels of his psyche. Although consciously he could barely remember the incident, Rick developed the subconscious belief that his own weakness and submissiveness—which he felt had left him open to the first incident—might make him vulnerable to future violations as well.
Rick also unconsciously blamed his parents for not knowing about the problem and protecting him, and he harbored an enormous anger because they had failed him so badly. Rick felt bewildered and alone— and that made him angry.
Because Rick had refused to think about the incident consciously for so many years, he was stuck with a nine-year-old’s understanding of what had happened. His young mind had come to the following conclusion: “Either I’m submissive and risk being attacked, or I’m dominant and therefore safe.” If that was the choice, Rick decided unconsciously, he’d go for dominance. Certainly, no one else could be relied on to protect him, so he’d have to be ready to protect himself.
In his forties, Rick carried those memories more heavily than ever, along with the bitter feelings that went with them. He’d now had a lifetime of responding to the world based on that incident, a lifetime of feeling like a victim. Ironically, although he wasn’t responsible for what had happened to him as a child, he had become responsible for how that incident had affected him. Every day—every hour—Rick was choosing to feed his small self, the self of anger, judgments, and bitterness. He was continuing to follow the choices he had made as a nine-year-old, when he’d decided to shut out others who couldn’t be relied on, to respond with anger and aggression when anyone tried to get close.
The nine-year-old Rick had made these choices innocently and unconsciously, not knowing how greatly they’d affect him over the years. His job now was to bring those choices into the light of awareness, realizing that when we make choices unconsciously, we actually lose the power of choice. And the price for losing that power can be enormous.
The first step for Rick was to realize that although his deepest desires were for intimacy, affection, and love, his own actions were keeping him at arm’s length from anyone who might provide him with these creature comforts. For Rick, as for most Anger types, rejection served to insulate him from a supposedly dangerous world.
Based on the past thirty years, Rick had plenty of evidence that every one of his relationships would eventually go terribly wrong. “If it’s going to happen sooner or later,” he reasoned unconsciously, “why not make it sooner? If I reject first, then I can’t be rejected.”
All of us may respond to the fear of being hurt by wrapping ourselves in layers of protection. Even if we haven’t chosen such an isolated life as Rick’s, we may still be keeping our loved ones from ever truly reaching us, or distancing ourselves unnecessarily from the day-to-day joys of life. A hard heart, a bristly personality, an attachment to strength, or a fiercely competitive spirit might mask our fears of closeness and our sense of our own vulnerability. Complete dominance seems to offer at least some protection from the humiliation of losing, the shame of being second best, the vulnerability that comes from being “less” than another. Even when we compete against ourselves, our drive to be “the best” can be a way of keeping us isolated, both from loved ones and from our own experience.
Of course strength, competence, self-protection, and even competition can all be wonderful things. But only when they’re conscious choices, made with goodwill. We need only to look at the daily paper to see the costs of untamed aggression. What damage is done to the emerging self-image of a group of boys on a football team that loses by seventy points to a far superior team? What lessons are taught to the twelve-year-old hockey players when the game ends and the fathers of opposing teammates get into a fistfight over one of the ref’s controversial calls? What potential is lost when an aspiring graduate student is publicly humiliated by her professor in an unnecessary display of the professor’s intellectual superiority?
Aggression breeds aggression, just as violence breeds violence. When we react aggressively—even out of our own fear—we can be sure that the effects of our actions will live on in another. We can see the effects of aggression, violence, and hatred grow and spread—in the Middle East, in Iraq, in the Sudan, in the inner cities, in once-innocent schools across America. This violence did not arise out of nowhere and all at once. It began, in every instance, within human hearts that were, at some time in the past, threatened or violated. In response, a decision was made, consciously or not, to harden that heart, to be strong, to retaliate, to “fight fire with fire.” That decision, like the actions that prompted it, made the situation even worse: Every person who decides to add their own anger or hatred to the fire only gives it more fuel to burn. And now the fires of violence are raging, everywhere we turn.
Although I was only meeting with Rick every few weeks, he was deeply committed to our sessions. He let me know how much it meant to him to feel accepted by me just as he was. “All my other therapists tried to fix me,” he told me once. But with me, he didn’t feel judged or analyzed or in need of fixing. He felt instead that I was simply sitting with calm acceptance—and that created an opening for him, a place where he finally felt safe.
In fact, I liked Rick. He was bright, articulate, honest, sincere. I could see through the anger, could see the tenderness and longing and the deep desire for freedom and happiness that he kept well hidden most of the time. Although he could not accept himself, I was able to accept him fully, his small self as well as his large. And because I could see that larger self—because I could see more in Rick than he could see in himself—his healing began.
Of course I was Rick’s therapist, and I’d had years of training in sitting with calm acceptance. But any of us can create this kind of safe space for another, simply by refraining from judging, by refusing to reject the angry person even though he or she seems to invite it. This acceptance is a gift that can be offered by anyone who has the willingness and whose own heart is still alive.
Think of a small child who is having a tantrum. If you’ve ever been with a kicking, screaming child who calls out insults and says she hates you, you may know firsthand how tempting it is to retaliate, to get angry, to punish. “Well, I hate you, too!” I’ve been tempted to say to my own children, on more than one occasion.
But there is certainly another, more tender part of any loving adult who simply sees the innocence in that ranting child and knows that a forceful response will serve neither the adult’s nor the child’s best interest. Yelling at the child will only escalate the problem, as will losing your own temper, hitting, or even shouting insults.
So you tune into another force, which I think is love. You access your empathy and compassion for the child, and you recognize how much the child is suffering within her anger, perhaps even more than you are. You may need to respond with firmness, to set limits, to isolate the child or remind her of what might happen if the tantrum doesn’t end. (“I can’t bring you to the grocery store next time if you don’t settle down right now.”) But you respond from a place of love, not anger— which allows the child’s anger to subside.
If you are an Anger type, you can engage in no better healing than to offer the people who upset you the same loving, firm response that a good parent might offer an angry child. I’m not suggesting that you become a patsy, that you allow others to walk all over you, submit blindly to aggression, or stop asking for what you need. I am suggesting that you try to view your “attackers” or “opponents” as small, angry children who are suffering in their tantrums, and that you rise to the level of a loving parent in your firm but compassionate response.
This is not an easy road to take. I have certainly found it challenging in both my therapy practice and my daily life. When someone treats you aggressively, insulting you or denying you your rightful due, it’s very difficult not to respond with equal aggression, to try to force the other person to give you what you deserve, to insist that others acknowledge the rightness of your claims and the wrongness of their own actions.
Unfortunately, meeting aggression with greater aggression simply doesn’t work. There are only three possibilities: Either you end up in a hostile confrontation that never ends, you lose the battle and feel worse than you did before, or you win the battle—and make a bitter enemy who is resolved to return one day and make you pay. In none of these situations are you truly acknowledged and appreciated. Even when you’ve won, you don’t hear the sincere apology that your heart longed for, or receive the genuine appreciation that your soul required. And when you lose, you feel all the more humiliated for having fought so hard. The best you can hope for is a frustrating stalemate, a bitter loss, or a hollow victory.
If instead you are able to greet anger with love—a response that often requires tremendous discipline, practice, and inner strength— you’ll be amazed at the positive results you reap. In the best-case scenario, your love will help to dissolve your “opponent’s” aggression, just as a parent’s firm calmness with a child can help to dispel a tantrum. Even if your opponent continues behaving with anger and resentment, you will walk away from the situation feeling better about yourself.
Anger locks us into endless battles that we will never win—battles that only make us feel worse about ourselves. Love, by contrast, frees us both from our own anger and from the anger of others, reminding us that we can always access our own larger selves and the joy they bring. This is a great offering that all of us can make to the world, to meet anger or aggression with calmness, firmness, and compassion, to see beneath the surface of another human being to what remains good and alive and hopeful in them. I don’t find this easy, either in my therapy practice or in my daily life—but I do consider it one of the sacred vows that give meaning to the spiritual path of any tradition. And I know that this compassion is the only true antidote for the misery of being ruled by anger.
Before I met him, Rick had already undergone long periods of traditional psychotherapy. But becoming more aware of his shortcomings without knowing how to “fix them” only made Rick feel worse. By the time I met him, Rick felt like someone lost deep in the woods with no one to guide him and no hope of ever getting out.
What I offered was another type of therapy, the Psychology of Mindfulness. This approach is based on great faith—the faith that inside each of us is everything we need to find freedom from our suffering; that there is more right than wrong within each of us; that as long as we are breathing, we have time to access our larger self and live in a world of joy (even if our pain never fully goes away).
Rick didn’t need a therapist who could help him “fix” his life. He needed help learning to quiet his mind enough so that he could safely approach the mountain of anger that stood between him and his happiness. Once he could look at that mountain calmly, he could understand its place in his life and make different choices about how to respond to it. He needed to explore the terrain of his inner life and see what it was waiting to teach him. He needed to fully accept himself, his smallness as well as his largeness, his anger, blame, resentment, and rejection as much as his love, tenderness, and much-ignored capacity for compassion.
In fact, after Rick and I had created a space where Rick felt safe with his anger, it began to dissipate. He softened, and in our brief times together, his anger was set aside. Then we could begin working toward awareness, the first step toward mindfulness. Rick’s anger had dominated his emotional landscape, like a bright flash of light that crowds out all other colors. He had to become aware of more subtle physical sensations—hurt feelings, for example, or bewilderment, or longing, or his own tenderness.
Rick also had to learn that by continually expressing and focusing on his anger, venting and attacking at the least provocation, he only made himself angrier. He had to learn to watch his language, to see that expressing his disappointment, over and over again, only gave it more solidity. Rick had to bring awareness to his speech, his behavior, even his thoughts, so that he could see how he was feeding his anger.
Gradually, Rick began to realize that the current source of his anger was himself. True, his friend’s abuse and his parents’ neglect were the embers that had long ago begun to burn within him. But now he was nourishing and stoking the flames by revisiting these memories time and again, and by finding new evidence for his victimhood in the present. Rick slowly saw that he had chosen to carefully tend the fires of his anger so that they never went out.
“Without my anger,” he said one day, “I’ll really have nothing. They’ll have done all those things to me—and I won’t even have minded. My anger is the one thing about me that stands up for who I am.”
Eventually, Rick became more aware of himself and less frightened of his own anger. Using the body awareness techniques in Chapter 15 helped him tune in to the other emotions he felt, besides anger: fear, sorrow, tenderness, sometimes even joy. He learned that his emotions were always changing, like sunlight flickering over water, and that he could calm himself through the Calming Breath Technique I described in Chapter 6. Gradually, he became able to enter into the furnace of his anger, to learn what it had to teach him.
Rick discovered that he, like most of us, had continued in his unhealthy pattern partly because he had always been unable to stop and look within. “It felt good to be angry,” he told me after several months. Like so many people, Rick had gotten satisfaction from stoking the fires of justified anger, holding on to lifelong resentments, seeking to exact revenge on an uncaring world for what had been done to him. “But now I see,” he concluded, “that I wasn’t just hurting other people with my outbursts. I felt good at the time, but lousy afterward, like a drunk who never quite connects the hangover with the shot of bourbon. It did feel good to be angry—but in the end, it wasn’t worth it.”
Over time, Rick began to realize that his emotions were created first by thought. If he thought that the driver who cut him off in traffic was simply being a jerk, he’d get angry. But if he imagined that the very same driver was rushing to take a sick child to the hospital, he’d be understanding and would even pull back to make way. In both cases, the incident was the same—being cut off in traffic. But Rick’s thoughts about the incident—“That’s so unfair!” versus “I understand”—made the difference between an angry response and a compassionate one.
Emotions, Rick realized, are thoughts taking physical form, residing in the body. Their natural pattern is to flow, to move through the body like a stream or to rise and fall like a wave. It is when they become stagnant and stuck that they cause all kinds of problems. If, for example, Rick felt a momentary flash of anger as another driver cut him off, no harm done. The anger would pass in an instant, and Rick could return to his peaceful state. The problem came when the anger lingered on for minutes or even hours as Rick stoked its flames with further angry thoughts: “That jerk! Who does he think he is? How dare he cut me off? Doesn’t he realize how dangerous that was? Besides, I’m in a hurry, too. That’s the way accidents happen. . . .” Instead of signaling a problem and then passing quickly, the anger stagnated within Rick’s heart, causing him far more pain than the momentary discomfort of the other driver’s rudeness.
I sometimes see stuck emotions as debris that is clogging a mountain stream. As the debris accumulates, water backs up behind it. The pile of twigs and dead leaves begins to catch other floating pieces of debris, creating an ever-growing mountain of garbage that keeps the water from flowing.
Sometimes long-term psychotherapy can be like picking at the debris one piece at a time. It makes a difference, to be sure, but if the blockage is large, removing it piecemeal can feel like a hopeless task, especially since more junk is always floating downstream, adding to the blockage. Applying the understanding of mindfulness, by contrast, is like raising the level of water in the stream so that the debris is lifted up and easily carried away. Once the water is flowing, you can shift your awareness upstream and attend to the source of the debris. But you can experience the peace of a swiftly flowing steam even before you’ve fully understood what’s wrong.
Thus, over time, Rick got better at distinguishing one feeling from another. Simply learning to distinguish between anger, fear, and sadness gave him some freedom from the tyranny of anger. He became more comfortable with his other feelings, willing to feel scared and lonely instead of channeling his discomfort into an ever-present rage. He also became more willing to let his emotions flow, to accept that his sadness or fear would not last forever.
With time, Rick began to feel much better. He made a few friendships. He was able to repair some of his family relationships and let go of others. He was more content with his current job, but also aware of his desire for something better, and he was able to hold both of these thoughts with a sense of compassion for himself and hope for his future. He still had to do the inner work of finding and removing the source of the debris, the wound he had carried from childhood. But he could now do it from a place of strength and acceptance—including self-acceptance— rather than from a position of dominance and blame.
When the mind calms down, then the heart can open, which is what is was meant to do. Rick helped open his heart with a variation I created for him of the loving-kindness meditation described in Chapter 15. This exercise helped Rick stand firm in his newfound awareness and openheartedness so that he could go back in time and witness the events of his childhood, feeling compassion for his younger self and reaching out to comfort the vulnerable nine-year-old boy he had once been. He himself became the protective, soothing, loving presence that he had so longed for as a frightened child. Finally, Rick was healing himself.
For complete healing to occur, Rick had to move beyond himself to heal any ruptured relationships—in his case, his abuser and his parents, who hadn’t known that they needed to stop the abuse. Rick is still working on forgiveness, in a process that may never be complete. Meanwhile, though, his life is opening up in ways that he wouldn’t have considered possible even a few months ago. Most important, he’s cultivating the capacity for love and his deepest longings are beginning to be fulfilled—not by the world giving him what he thinks he wants, but by his own transformation into a loving, compassionate man. Rick was learning that even the most difficult events can become a blessing if they force us to take a deep and reflective look inside.
“How will I know when my heart is healed?” Rick asked me once.
“The heart is healed when we express kindness,” I replied. Rick liked this answer, because he understood that he could express kindness at any moment, even before his healing seemed complete. Every expression of kindness was both a cause and an effect of healing, in a process that would never end. I went on to share with him a statement that I’d once heard and never forgotten: “Life is so hard, how can we be anything but kind?”