You hurt my feelings

There are two sides of telling someone your feelings are hurt. On one hand, in order to walk open and honest, you need to express when your feelings get hurt. On the other hand, never lose perspective that your feelings being hurt is your issue. What that person did or said is filtered through your belief systems, perceptions, and past experiences. You are the one that had an issue with it.

The primary things that need to happen when your feelings get hurt is giving and getting information. You need to give them information of what they did or said, how you interpreted it, and how you felt. This will help them understand how you tend to translate things and communicate with you more compassionately. You need to get information about what they intended. In other words, find out what they meant by it.

Since it is critical for both of you to understand that your feelings being hurt is your issue, it is often beneficial to use I statements and take responsibility for what you’re feeling. You might say, “When you said, ‘Why did you do that?’ I took it that you were suggesting that I did it the wrong way. I felt hurt.”

So telling someone they hurt your feelings is actually not the most effective way to tell them they hurt your feelings. Hmm? Better to own how you interpreted it and how you felt.

The challenge is of course that when you are expressing your hurt feelings, it is challenging to own anything. Because after all, your feelings are hurt. It feels like they were mean to you… mistreated you… were insensitive… and whatever else. So there is a tendency to assume that they were.

So why not take a step back and ask them?… “When you said, I was ______, what did you mean by that?”

Keeping yourself intact

“I care too much about myself to allow you to treat me that way.” This is the phrase that I have domestic violence victims internalize. Many self-development books and philosophies encourage you to open your heart. Find intimacy, take emotional risks, allow yourself to be vulnerable, let your defenses down, etc.  But few talk about keeping yourself intact while you do this.

Keeping yourself intact allows you to take intelligent emotional risks. Opening your self up to someone that does not value the beauty of your heart is setting yourself up to be hurt.  If someone does not honor the preciousness of your heart, they do not deserve your open heart.

Discernment allows you to evaluate if it is wise to open your heart to a person or experience. It is still a risk to open your heart to someone who will likely be gentle with it. You will still feel vulnerable. Discernment merely increases your odds that your open heart will be treated well. Can they handle emotional intensity? Are they critical? Do they gossip?

Or… are they strong enough to be gentle?

Until you find the strength to stop someone from mistreating your heart, it may not be wise to open it. The number one thing to do if someone is mistreating your heart ( a.k.a. emotionally abusing you) is to stop the abuse. You can stop it directly by saying, “Don’t go there”, or indirectly by leaving. But make sure it stops. Shame on them the first time they abuse you- that is the risk you take when you share yourself. But shame on you for allowing it to continue.

It all gets down to how much you value the beauty of your heart.

Animals and Buddha Nature

Animals have no choice but to directly express their Buddha nature. Buddha nature is our essence–that which we really are: joy, light, and love. Animals, on the other hand, are always honest. (And yes, they do have feelings.) They have no choice but to be innocent and loving–because that is their true nature.

It is only humans that have the ability to reflect their Buddha nature in different ways. We can hide or mask who we really are inside. We choose how to reflect our Buddha nature by tilting our prism. If we are angry or judging someone else, that is how we choose to reflect our Buddha nature. Of all the choices we had to reflect our joy, light, and love in that moment, we chose to reflect our Buddha nature to condemn another human being. What a waste. The condemnation is destructive, but the true tragedy is the opportunity cost. It is the loss of the beautiful way that we could heave reflected our love during that moment.

Our free will is largely how we reflect our Buddha nature. Bart Anderson explains, “The (0nly) choice is how we affect- how we reflect our Buddha nature.” The choice we make is the effect our life has on the world.

Animals do not have this choice. How they are is what you get. It is our privilege to have this choice. Hopefully, we use this freedom well… That we choose to reflect the joy inside of us in some really beautiful ways.

Emotional responsibility.

 ”All of your feelings eventually do come out to play. You can either address them willingly- or on your hands and knees” Bart Anderson.

People stress taking responsibility for all kinds of things these days. But what about being responsible to what you are feeling? The overall healthiest thing you can do with a feeling is to express it. Feelings are energy; energy works best when we experience (feel) it and release it. So it would follow that emotional responsibility is committing to whenever you experience a significant feeling, you find someone to express it to. Think of it as being responsible to yourself.

It needn’t always be the same person. One person may better accept one feeling and another person may  more readily accept another. Discernment is essential when identifying someone to share your feeling with. Their ability to accept the feeling you need to express is the most essential quality in choosing someone to express your feeling to. Someone that has a similar life experience may be able to understand and relate to the feeling.

Obviously some feelings are best expressed to the person you are feeling them toward. Relational feelings such as anger and love work best when they are expressed directly to the person you feel them toward.

Journaling is also an excellent tool to express your feelings. Often feelings and their corresponding thoughts will cycle around and around your psyche until you place them outside of yourself. Writing allows you to concretize your feelings outside of yourself so you can relate to them. Just like sometimes you need to hear yourself saying something to someone in order to understand it.

And don’t think about it too much. Note that you are feeling something, identify someone to share it with, and start expressing.

You might feel a little vulnerable afterwards- that means you are doing it right.

Our judgment can teach us about ourselves

It  is important to be mindful that when ever we are judging someone about something, we have an issue with that part of ourselves.

Sigmund Freud referred to this human tendency almost 90 years ago with the term projection. Psychoanalysts have been referring to it ever since. Wikipedia summarizes this nicely, “According to Sigmund Freud, projection is a psychological defense mechanism whereby one “projects” one’s own undesirable thoughts, motivations, desires, and feelings onto someone else” (link). An example of this would be if we judge someone for being incompetent at something, it may be that we believe we are incompetent at that same thing.

Another variation of this tendency includes someone being threatening to us at the emotional level. If someone is good at something that we believe we are not good at, we often judge them. We seek to find something wrong with them or tear them down in one form of another. This includes our culture’s unfortunate tendency to tear down successful people and destroy beauty.

Once we allow ourselves to become aware that we are doing this, it allows us to change the dynamic from being destructive to beneficial. There are 2 primary benefits  that free you when you become aware of judgment. Firstly, we can learn about that insecure or dark part of ourselves. Carl Jung referred to this as our shadow. Whenever we judge someone, it is an opportunity to learn about something we are unable to accept about ourselves or something that threatens us. Accepting this aspect of ourselves allows us to heal the self-hatred associated with it. It also allows us to work on that perceived deficiency or challenge area.

The other benefit from becoming aware of our judgment is that it allows us to accept the person we are judging. This opens up the possibility of creating a positive relationship with them. If it was something positive about them we took issue with, this may allow us to learn about the things we struggle with from them.

Then we could learn from the beauty and excellence in others rather than trying to destroy it.