I decided to shift my focus from online shopping to forgiveness because when I stopped shopping and buying stuff online I realized that being in a fugue state online masked a lot of negative feelings and enabled me to stuff all kinds of hurts and resentments down.
Although the distractions meant I didn’t have to deal with all the yuckiness … none of it went away. It just stayed there until I finally did something to deal with it.
Over the last week I’ve been reading Radical forgiveness (Colin Tipping) and I’ve been putting a lot of focus and energy into understanding the beliefs and preconceptions I’ve been holding as my way to interpret my world. The theme that keeps coming up for me is: I am doomed to spend my life being unappreciated and uncompensated for my gifts and am fated to a life of frustration and bitterness.
When I write this it’s feels pretty comical because it’s oh so dramatic and seems ridiculously extreme. Yet at least a handful of my friends seem to share these beliefs. One friend emails me from time to time complaining about “Earthlings” who just don’t get the brilliant services he offers and his frustration with trying to “get them to see the value.”
I can relate and I know also that complaining does absolutely nothing to improve the situation. I’m well-acquainted with complaining and grousing and although it feels good to have other people commiserate it never got me any closer to what I wanted.
So I figure I’d try the radical forgiveness approach to see if that will shift my way of showing up in the world.
For example, because I have been moving through my life with the assumption I’m a some sort misfit and doomed to live a life of people who love me but just don’t get me at best and being dismissed and rejected at worst, I realized that I’ve seen my world as a kind of emotional battlefield in which I’m just waiting to be rejected by the people I encounter.
Rejection doesn’t mean someone out and out saying, “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard” and turning their back on me although that’s happened from time to time. It’s often very subtle things like someone interrupting me and saying “I have to be in another meeting in 5-minutes” or saying “What exactly is your question.”
I’ve learned that people rarely intend what they do and say to be a rejection. It’s my perception and super sensitivity to all those things that has me interpreting everything as that way.
I’m also learning I have a foundation story and then there are all kinds of little variations on the theme that pop up for me as well.
I’m not sure I’ve yet healed much so far but the first step of any process is insight and awareness and I’m hopeful that I’ll be moving closer to feeling peace in the future. And I’m also hopeful that I’ll at least be able to heal in terms of my emotional responses to specific situations that I’ve found trigger me.