Humans tend to flaunt their ability to be objective.
We trust our perception to be an accurate depiction of reality and our reactions to be generally appropriate to the situation. Appropriate in the sense that anyone would understand how we got there, feeling exactly what we are feeling, and having the exact opinion we are defending.
Rationally, we know people who are not us think and feel differently from us, but you’d be surprised to know how long it takes for someone —including you— to really see how far from others and from reality they were. It’s perfectly normal to be influenced by emotions: they are a strong force, and heavily color what our eyes see. If the glass is dirty, opaque, grey or deforming, what we see will be dirty, opaque, grey and deformed.
Taking distance from what our guts feel allows us to perceive not only what our lenses show, but also the space around them.
We keep our view, but we know it’s a view.
We keep the feeling of being deprived of beauty, luck, happiness, but we know it would be strange to feel otherwise, given we’re in so much pain, stress, fatigue.
We keep the annoyance at our boss, but we know we’re in a phase where we’re challenging authority and can’t stand being told what to do.
We keep our fears that our partner might leave us, but we know our abandonment issues have made us feel threatened more than once in the past.
We keep our right to complain and our friend’s sympathy, but we know at some point we’ll have to snap out of it if we want things to really change.
We keep our desire to get more, but we know that if it didn’t work last time or the time before, “more” might not be the answer that solves it all.
When life has hurt us, and we say “nothing goes well for me”, it’s vital to stay compassionate to its emotional truth: it means we feel deprived, robbed of so much it seems we’re left with nothing. We saw this already: nothing is true for our hearts, while it rarely exists in reality. Not because life can’t really, utterly suck —it can—, but because it’s often too complex for these absolutes. Our inner deprivation might shift our focus to all the things we don’t have, all that we’re missing, and that might seem like everything. But our future is built with both: being respectful of the glass, and the fact that it will always be mediating our relationship with the world, while being aware of what it is: a protection and a filter.
Moving forward (which I like to use instead of “moving on” because it maintains the beauty of change while getting rid the idea of never looking back) requires a delicate balance between protesting because someone made our windows cracked and dirty, and making sure we get the tools to fix them.
Empatherapy 