"What's going on in me that's causing this person to bug me?"
Radical, eh? Don't we normally ask ourselves what's going on in the other person that is causing them to bug us? Gee, why is he being so mean to lil' ol' innocent me?
We might even say it out loud to the other person: What's your problem?
If instead we ask what's going on in ourselves, we might discover something much more interesting and useful and likely to be modifiable.
We might, for example, discover that we secretly worry that what he just said about us could be true ... Am I selfish? Am I rude? Am I insensitive?
When we can forgive and accept ourselves as we are, we are not offended when others point out the parts we're not so proud of.
As far as I can tell, the most effective intervention after feeling judged or criticized will almost always be self-forgiveness and self-acceptance.
When I have forgiven and accepted myself for being a slob or being a neat freak or whatever, your opinion of me becomes just that ... your opinion.
And opinions don't need to be corrected, changed, or defended against.
Opinions are free to be as they are, perhaps wreaking havoc on their owner in the same way that it hurts to hold a hot potato, but not making any difference at all to me unless I catch one when you toss it at me and decide to carry it around. Then and only then can it burn me...
1 comment:
This exact subject been floating around in my mind lately - that the judgments I'm so afraid of are only scary because they've not been met or accepted in myself. I really like that hot potato metaphor. If I refuse to play that game - and catch it - I won't get burned.
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