The truth is, someone never takes away your power unless you let them. What state of mind do you have to be in to think it’s acceptable for love to look like judgement and anger? Why do we allow ourselves to feel loyalty to someone who hasn’t earned it? I think I am way too trusting, loving and kind for my own good. I give people too many chances. I believe in people’s goodness too much. It helps me, but often times, it also hurts me.
How do you strike up the balance between being strong and being kind? It’s something I’m still working on and haven’t figured out just yet. When someone comes at me in a way that is unkind, I often shut down. What should I do? I guess one tactic would be to say, “I can’t talk to you when you are acting this way”. I could also meet their anger, but that feels foreign and wrong. In my heart I know it’s ineffective and it only makes me feel more unsettled. I believe a good compromise would be to match their negative emotion level with a positive emotion level of kindness.
It’s not fair because even though kindness and love are more powerful and energetic emotions, anger is the one that sticks out because it’s a warning. It’s inoculating our emotional sense memory for future occurrences when your heart might be unsafe, where you may be vulnerable.
I guess if this is a similar occurrence that keeps coming up with a person, the best thing to do is leave the situation. But what if they are working on it? And it does get better each time it happens. But the fact is it’s still happening. And even if that person is working on it, there’s no guarantee that the instinct will ever go away.
So my main question is when do you get to the point where you’re giving love and goodheartedness too much credit and not giving anger, competitiveness and cruelty enough? Their power to wound the soul may just cancel out love’s ability to heal it. How can love grow in a place where war abounds? It cannot.
What to do, what to do...
