As my friend and mentor Parker Palmer, teaches, ‘Violence is what we do when we don’t know what to do with our suffering.’ Violence to our planet, violence to our communities, and violence to ourselves are what we do when we refuse to look inward and work with the heartbreak of the everyday.
Related Quotes
Looking back, I realize this time as the beginning of my own radical self-inquiry. My pain helped me realize that I was lost. My soul, no longer content to be ‘bruised and battered,’ took charge of my body and grabbed the attention of my conscious mind. The headaches, which continued even as the self-inquiry began, became a way for my body to say, in effect, ‘Wake the fuck up.’ For, if I didn’t wake up, my soul was going to drop me to my knees, writhing in pain.
Radical self-inquiry is the path to seeing habits and patterns. Questions that drive us toward that insight are endlessly helpful:
- ‘What parts of me are being projected onto the other person?’
- ‘How do I reclaim those parts of me?’
- ‘What do my reactions say about me?’
- ‘Why do I do what I do?’
- ‘Why do they do what they do?’
- ‘What need for love, safety, or belonging might they be trying to meet with their irrational behavior?
Power in the hands of one afraid or unwilling to look in the mirror perpetuates an often silent, always seething violence in the workplace. Worse still, when a leader leads from his or her shadow, the dismembering havoc is perpetuated down the line until the company, the tribe, the community simply assumes this is how life must be.
His question in response to my exploration of how those things we’ve tossed into our shadow have a deep power that, when accessed with compassion and skill, can drive our creativity. He cried quietly when I noted that his struggle must be so painful.
You do not have the right to traumatize abusive people, to attack them personally or publicly, or to sabotage anyone else’s health. The behaviors of abuse are also survival-based, learned behaviors rooted in some pain. If you can look through the lens of compassion, you will find hurt and trauma there. If you are the abused party, healing that hurt is not your responsibility and exacerbating that pain is not your justified
right.
You do have the right to walk away, to literally and virtually gather yourself up and remove yourself from the dynamic. Take space in order to remember and fortify yourself. You have the right to create boundaries that generate more possibilities for you. Those boundaries may be short term or permanent.