Well, This One Won’t Be Funny…

Another dies in bitterness of soul, never having enjoyed anything good.

                                                                             Job 21:25

I thought that my next post would be something witty, funny, and light.  Nothing was coming through.  Instead, I have been reliving times of my life and encounters with people that were far from funny.  My doctors call it rumination.  It is horrible and really requires work to stop.  I’m writing this post for me this time.  I don’t know if anyone else will find it of use or even mildly interesting, but I need to do this and after all, this is my blog.  Even though I’ve hoped it would help others, it ultimately needs to help me.  So, there you go.

I’ve ruminated on the past incessantly of late.  I can’t be in a quiet room or car without memories popping in my head.  It is always the ones of relationships that I was never able to fix.  People are out there or dead and I will most likely never be able to restore my relationship with them.  So, I regurgitate the situations over and over.  Nothing ever changes except that my anxiety, self-loathing, and anger at the situation not being able to be fixed increases exponentially.

The only one who is punished here is me.  No other person is affected or sees me differently than they did in these encounters.  I’ve tried to correct that in the past by writing scathing indictments to these people and never mailing them.  Some say that this is liberating, but I don’t.  I’m only writing here because there is another way to use this idea that might be more useful to me.

My sister has recently done things that were sneaky and underhanded in a huge way.  Part of me is SO angry and another part knows that this last situation caused an end to our relationship and there is no chance for one ever again.  So, I go over and over in my head her wrongs to me and how she is an evil person who just must prove that I am nothing and she is the best.  I’ve sat with this thought recently and tried to identify my emotions as I thought it.  Frustration was the major one.  It was so hard, but I realized that my sister and I had been placed in an impossible childhood, pitted against each other.  I recalled recent conversations.  Some were odd.  She would jump into a conversation with a group of people and just tell everyone how many college degrees she had, or how she had swum in her inground pool in April.  I realized that if I put her recent actions in the context of her recent behaviors, a connection to our childhood issues took place.  She was trying to control events, but her motive wasn’t what I had assumed.  She was trying to get significance in a messed-up family, and this was her way of achieving that.  Thinking of it this way, I put myself in a place where my own emotions had room to change.  I still struggle with anger at times, but as I remember my analysis of the situation, I can reverse that emotion.  I feel regretful and sad.  Anger frustration and bitterness were eating me alive but having compassion for another allowed me to have compassion for myself.

At the beginning of this post, I saw myself going through a litany of wrongs others have done to me.  I was going to write about them all, but I don’t really feel the need to now.  The tools I have learned in the mental health programs I attend, cemented by my faith, have applied themselves to other situations as well.  More often, when I think of a relationship that gives me “righteous anger”, the analysis of it gives me peace.  We are all human.  Very rarely is a person purely evil.  Usually, there is something in their past. Then both of your pasts cause that conflict between you.  If I see someone as a marred human being like myself and know some things I have done to meet my own needs in the past, I can see them just trying to protect themself or their heart.

That brings us to the subject of forgiveness.  How do I do that?  Do I open a wound in another just to soothe myself by telling them they are forgiven?  What if they don’t realize that they had done something they needed to be forgiven for?  What if that person is dead? 

As I meditate on the concept of forgiveness, I remember I have been told that it benefits the person extending it more than it does the person receiving it.  Just like bitterness will eat the person who holds it and has no effect on the one it is extended to.  I don’t pretend to have any wisdom here.  I know when I try to reason these situations out in my mind, my heart is lightened.  I think about the situation less and less, and when I do it holds much less of a hold on me.

Does turning my mind in these situations turn my heart as well?  I think it can.  When I let go of that bitterness and try to see my adversary as another broken human, the anger lessens (and eventually goes away).  If my heart no longer burns against that person and tries to empathize with it, I’ve let it go.  If I don’t hold things against someone, is that the same as forgiving them?  I think it could be.

Even with the events in my life that I cannot rationalize, I’m starting to find that I need to change my perspective.  Holding anger and bitterness against someone, even if they truly deserve every drop, causes collateral damage to my own spirit and soul.  There are a few people in my life who I will never understand, and I cannot fathom the wickedness that made them do what they have done.  I must give them to God.  He created them and understands what was done and what the repercussions should be.  I trust that.  Leaving it in other hands frees me from the anger and hurt.  It is a very slow process.  However, I will never trust these people again.  I guess what I’m trying to say is that my heart and mind are in control of how I am affected by any set of circumstances I face.  I have the tools and the support to free myself from the past and allow myself to blossom in the future.