11

WHEN THEY COME AT YOU THE WRONG WAY

How to Not Absorb the Gift of Someone Else’s Awfulness

Living well is the best revenge.

—George Herbert

» IN parts 1 and 2 of this book, we began exploring parts work as a doorway to more creative and productive relationships with our own emotions. In part 3, we also applied neuro-scientific and neuropsychological lenses in order to widen the view to include social issues. Hopefully it is clear from the practices at the end of part 3 that many of the approaches we can take to get to know our inner parts better are also helpful in deepening our insight into and connection with other people. In this final part of the book, we’ll be synthesizing what we’ve used so far—parts work and neuroscience, working with our inner parts and with other people—as we look at certain kinds of challenging daily-life situations we all face.

The parts work approach opens the door to experiencing the incredible nuance and richness of our inner lives. Yet it would be naive to act as if emotions were just an individual affair, disconnected from the complexities of social conditions, outer relationships, and situational contexts. Perhaps the true power of parts work is that it helps us see what’s alive in others more clearly as a result of our own inner excavations. How many of us fear that living with such openheartedness in the world means we’ll then have to let all manner of toxic people into our close orbit? Or wonder about what to do when others come at us the wrong way? How do we keep feeding the sparks of fiery tenderness and tender fieriness when other people are out of line or just don’t give a damn? How do we keep aiming high when they keep punching low? Does abiding in truth mean we cut off anyone we see abiding in ignorance? Does walking tall mean we purge our lives of all beings who don’t reach for the same bar—or try to but not as hard as we think they ought to? What do we do when we ourselves stumble in error or find ourselves on Front Street?

Frank Herbert wrote, “The mystery of life is not a problem to be solved but up a reality to experience.” And while he was clearly pointing to matters of a more existential variety, I believe this idea is germane to these interpersonal questions as well. I don’t think there’s a clear answer or that there can even be one. I think the point for us as intentional and ethical people is to wrestle with these questions and experiences for the sake of themselves, because it is simply right to. I think the point is to bring the light of a critical and openhearted awareness into these complex issues—not so much to find “the right way” but simply because the process of engagement is rich with lessons and fodder for growth. I think the point is to be as true to our convictions about the preciousness of life as we can be, to continually fail and fall down at times, and then to bounce back better than before. It’s not a problem to be solved but rather a process to discover within. And we do this in the name of love, that which is also known as justice.

There once lived a nun who meditated in a remote monastery for many years. One day, she finally uncovered the deep well of peace inside she had been seeking all along. Only, this wasn’t some ordinary state of tranquility. The energy inside her was shimmering, warm, beautiful. The peace gave rise to a certain pull, a tug, a conviction right there in the center of her chest. It was as if the spaciousness of heart itself was longing to find an expression, to connect. The nun decided it was time to leave the monastery and to head into the nearest town. She said her farewells, packed her things, and set out to share her revelation with the world, with those who needed it.

The nun, beaming in her sublime state, walked until she found the perfect place to begin—an open-air bazaar. Only, having spent so long cloistered in the monastery, she felt jarred by the hustle and aggression of this place. One man knocked right into her as he passed by without stopping to apologize. Another man aggressively catcalled her. And while she was trying to shake off that experience, someone else told her to smile. The worker at the vegetable stand tried to charge her double for her groceries. A teenager attempted to pick her pockets. All around her, people rushed about fixated on their own affairs and wants, and the nun, who had thought she might act as something of a savior to these people, came undone.

Surprised, she reckoned, “The inner peace I had was beautiful, but it must not have been real. Genuine spaciousness of heart would not shrink so quickly in the face of aggression. True realization is unconditional, unshakable.”

The nun returned to her meditation. This time she went deep into the mountains where she could sit with the trees and the animals and feel the warm sun and cool breeze on her face. Communing with the earth, perhaps the highest teacher of all, it wasn’t long before the great inner peace reemerged.

She headed back to the marketplace. “I want to know if it’s for real,” she thought just as she passed an angry man walking in the other direction down the road. The man stopped her: “Excuse me—where is your husband?! Where are your children?! You stupid, selfish, childless nuns. You contribute nothing to society. You belong at home, tending to a household. I hate you and your kind.”

He went on and on. And yet the nun found herself quite curious about him. She noticed his facial expressions, his gestures, a sense of anguish about him. She also noticed the sensations of fear and defensiveness in her own body, and she remained in touch with those feelings even as she listened closely. He continued berating her, but instead of reacting, she took in each word that he was saying, responding, “Oh…really?…How interesting you feel this way. Please, tell me more.”

The man became even more infuriated. “Are you even listening to me?! I’m saying that I hate you.”

“Oh yes, you’ve made that quite clear,” she said. “But, let me ask you: Suppose I’m at home and I hear a knock at my door. I open the door and find someone wanting to come in, and I welcome them as a guest into my home. As the guest enters, I notice they’re holding something in their hands. ‘Here, I’ve brought you a gift,’ they tell me. I look at the gift and decide that I don’t really want it. And so, I tell them, ‘Thank you so much, but no. I appreciate the offer, but I can’t accept your gift.’ Now, tell me, to whom does the gift belong?”

“It belongs to the guest, of course.”

“Exactly! And in the same way, today I have welcomed you into my home, into my personal space, and I’ve listened to your words. And you truly are welcome here—but this gift of aggression and hatred you’re offering me? I don’t want it. It’s yours to keep.”

This allegory gives us an ideal model for how we can walk through this world as wakeful people. It reminds us that we can minimize how much aggression we absorb as we walk through the marketplace. And it suggests that we might have more options than we think we do in our dealings with others. The nun in the story has the composure not only to stay in touch with her inner parts—her sense of fear and defensiveness—but also to discern that the man accosting her is not made of anger. Anger, rather, is just a part of him—and a part that she is free to deny entry to. But all of this came down to one crucial skill: discernment. Discerning, aware, cognizant of whose emotions belong to whom—she is thus able to refuse the angry man’s “gift” of hostility. She models a kind of mental muscle that is possible and important for us to build.

A client shared with me just the other day that, after hearing this story, she put a sticky note on her desk that reads:

Whose emotions are whose?

RETURN TO SENDER.

The nun’s response is deeply counterintuitive. As we saw in our earlier discussion of neuropsychology, when faced with hostility our limbic systems tell us to get away from the angry person, to fight back, or to shut them out. Culturally, we’ve translated these impulses into conventional logic about how to handle interpersonal discomfort. Turn the earbuds up full volume, walk away, and maybe compose a rant about it on social media. The spiritualized version of this, I’ve been told, is to visualize a force field around myself that deflects any bad vibes that come my way. None of these are bad options necessarily, but each of them entails some sort of contraction, some sort of resistance to what the world naturally and persistently presents us with.

Those methods also entail quite a bit of emotional labor, something many of us are doing too much of already. The path the nun takes is different. She stays in her power. She stays connected to her body. She intentionally doesn’t let the man rob her of her peace. She even welcomes him. And because she rightly discerns that the energy he is trying to offload on her is simply his own hostility, she doesn’t take his words personally or wrestle with them in any way. She performs a relational jujitsu move that allows him to fall over from the momentum of his own anger. He comes at her, but she simply steps out of the way, and he ends up flat on his face.

That’s the power of discernment.

I can think of a thousand instances of someone coming at me the wrong way where I accepted the gift. Where I didn’t pause and remember, “Oh yeah—your bullshit doesn’t have to become mine.” In a flash, I take their vitriol and ignorance as if it were my problem and wrestle with it. Maybe I react and escalate the situation in the moment, maybe not—but I definitely let the person take up residence in my head. Even if I let it go for some time, there it’ll be at 4 a.m. when I can’t get back to sleep, eating at me. It’s likely there’ll be one thousand mental replays of the scenario (a conservative estimate), circling round and round. With each repetition, I’ll think of a new clever comeback I wish I had thought of in the moment. I’ll plot my revenge in a multitude of ways. I’ll resent all the other times I’ve been in similar situations before. I’ll generalize the episode in a number of ways: it becomes evidence that there is something wrong with men…New Yorkers…conservatives…some other group, or that life is inherently unfair, or that there must be something wrong with me “to keep attracting and manifesting this.”

I’m the only one who does this, right?

From the perspective of neuroscience and experience-dependent neuroplasticity, this near-universal, all-too-habitual response is incredibly harmful. After all, the brain changes with every experience we have, and where we place our conscious attention heightens the way experience imprints itself on our neurology. Thus, each mental review of a conflict is wiring in the negative experience, like a groove in a record getting deeper and deeper. Also, the more personally we take an experience, the more intensely we’re likely to feel about it, which engages even more parts of our brain. For example, if we complain repeatedly to our friends about what went down (as it is perfectly natural to do), we’re then engaging a whole new range of neurological operations involved in social and linguistic functioning. Thus, we are not only deepening the neural pathways being carved into us, we are multiplying the number of neural pathways involved.

I’m not saying that it doesn’t make sense to react. I’m not telling you to not confront negativity and harm when it comes your way. I’m not saying the nun would have been wrong if she had chosen to get out of there or scream for help. Part of me wishes the nun had done some actual jiujitsu on the guy. I am, rather, shining a light on a very sticky web many of us get caught in. I’m asking, what would change if we truly discerned whose emotional energy belongs to whom in such situations?

Discernment can drastically reduce the amount of precious time and energy we allow such interactions to drain from us. It can save us a few dozen (or hundred) trips on the mental merry-go-round of repetitious thought. One way to look at discernment is to view it as “having good boundaries,” but I also like to see it as a matter of efficiency. There are a thousand different ways I can exert myself in an altruistic fashion. Every time someone else attempts to project their shitty feelings onto me and I bite the hook, it necessarily takes away from my other efforts to actually help. I could invest the time and energy to debate and argue on Facebook, or I could devote my finite resources to being there for people, organizing, and protesting in the streets. I could inch closer to burnout by confronting every little thing, or I could save my outrage for when it really matters.

Obviously, this is my truth. It doesn’t have to be yours. Your calling and conviction very well may have a different shape. I don’t, for example, feel called to get weighed down by the racist anger or comments of others online; I just want to continue supporting antiracist work. But maybe you feel it’s important to stand up to such people and either confront or dialogue with them—or even troll on them. Still, how would the kind of intentional discernment we’re talking about here change the shape of how you respond and the effects the encounter has on you?

The truth is, to be the angry man in the allegory would really stink. Anger is an anguish-ridden state to be in, and to get stuck there is a hell all its own. We are not punished for our sins; we’re punished by them. To exert aggression on an innocent passerby is its own punishment. I’d hate to be that person, stuck in such ways. The truth remains that the angry man’s contempt for the nun wasn’t about the nun—he knew nothing about her. What’s more, anger is a secondary emotion. It’s always a response to pain (just as with compassion). Parts of us that hold anger and exhibit outwardly facing aggression are defensive in nature—and what we defend are our vulnerabilities: the parts of us that hold pain, shame, and fear. We can logically conclude that the man in the allegory necessarily had some sort of painful experience he clearly hadn’t resolved and was still carrying with him. His angry parts wanted to make sure his vulnerabilities wouldn’t be exposed, and so he preyed on someone he perceived as more vulnerable than he is, a nun, to exert this toxic sense of power. Seeing things in this way, the man we would ordinarily regard as an aggressor is someone worthy of our pity and compassion.

Most human behavior is an attempt to discharge what we’re feeling. We are constantly trying to feel less alone with how things are for us. The more extreme the expression of our emotions, the more extreme the desperation to feel heard and understood deep down. We opt out of such habitual cycles when we take ownership of our own psychologies and know how to pause, process, and take responsibility for our emotions before we react.