I want to live my life with my heart wide open. Wide open to the joy and ecstasy of the world but also wide open to the pain and sorrow.
Sometimes those things go hand in hand. The pain of losing the love of my life broke me open in a way that helped me heal old hurt and pain and I don't know if that would have been possible in other circumstances.
It's hard to know if pain in someone's life will brake someone or help them dig deeper and find strength that they may have not found except for the adversity.
But too often the world is harsh and unforgiving. I don't view this as a personal attack in anyway only that people are in pain the majority of the time. People are struggling to get through the day we are each dealing with our own stuff. We are dealing with society the Patriarchy, we are dealing with classism, sexism, racism, ageism, able-ism, we are dealing mental health prejudice and/or trauma, and on and on.
The truth is I never know when I might get triggered and even though I have spent the majority of the last 5 years working through my triggers the truth is I still have quite a number left to work on. So many in fact that I may never be finished. And at the same time I feel quite lucky that I have found Nonviolent Communication and have been able to use that to heal and continue to use it to heal.
I have had some experiences of being called out and I have also talked to people who have been called out. And I want to bring some awareness to this. I think that overall calling people out can be good. I also think that we do need to bring some awareness to the idea that being angry and taking our anger out on someone isn't the same as calling someone out.
We all have anger. We have been hurt by the system we have felt invisible and we are tired of this and we want to move from feeling helpless to doing something about it. I think often this starts out as Anger which I believe to be over all good. Anger has power and a lot of energy and movement. Unfocused Anger though doesn't always have the affect that we want to have. Unfocused Anger is just lashing out. But if we take the time either before or after we lash out to figure out what the actually unmet need was that brought out our feelings of anger then we have a chance to really pay attention to what is going on and make changes from a clear headed space.
In talking to some people who have been called out and from my own experience of being called out, and I don't know what the answers are completely, but when I realized I was causing someone else pain I wanted to back away mostly because I have experienced so much pain in my own life and it's triggering being the cause of someone pain. It takes a lot to not run and hide. I also have triggers around making mistakes as this was not allowed in my family of origin. And yet I think it is way to important to stay in the struggle and continue to interact with people.
I am wondering if we have space to bring awareness to the idea that it is a false dichotomy that having being called out and we are doing good work can't exist together. There will always be places that we having figured out yet. I am white and I have trauma and I live in the poverty class and I am bisexual and I grew up in the middle of my mother who lived in poverty and her parents who had lots of money and so I got to have some privilege. I am also a highly sensitive person. I have a hard time being being around to many people.
I think that we must remember that the false dichotomy comes from the patriarchy in the first place because when we remember that each person really is coming form their own space of oppression and that very very few of us have all the privilege it softens our hearts and allows us to really start seeing each other from the perspective of our humanity. And this in turns really brings down the patriarchy and other systemic ways oppression has kept us all down. By softening our hearts to ourselves and each we create spaces in which we can not be controlled anymore. We learn to hold ourselves with compassion and empathy allowing this to grow within ourselves. From this space of compassion for ourselves our heart space grows and the natural thing that happens is we can't help by have more compassion for others because when our cup is full then it spills over. This doesn't happen when it is forced or we are told things like it is better to give than to receive. It only happens when we are so full of compassion that our hearts and heads make a leap allowing us to see the pain of those that have hurt us.
We are told by society that we can either protect ourselves or be kind and compassionate and understanding. But my experience is just the opposite and even though it took me awhile to fill my cup so that my compassion could be overflowing. I have been in situations that I felt completely terrified of someone and turned that in to understanding and like magic my fear isn't the overwhelming fight flight or freeze experience that it began as.
So my goal here is not to tell anyone what to do or how to react but I do think it is worth changing our definitions of what is calling out vs. feedback which ultimately will have to do with our goals in the conversation. And also how to handle being called out and how to make ourselves open for feedback. How to learn and open our hearts to being called out even if the majority of what the other person is doing is venting.
