Perfect Love, Imperfect Relationships: Healing the Wound of the Heart by John Welwood

Author:John Welwood [Welwood, John]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Shambhala Publications
Published: 2011-08-08T05:00:00+00:00

Acting Out the Wound

Self-hatred also fuels grievance and violence against others in a fairly predictable way: We try to transfer our own bad feelings onto other people as a way to feel less bad ourselves. While this takes an especially grisly form in public displays of scapegoating and warfare, the same dynamic operates to some extent in most human relationships.

Discharging aggression on others is a classic way of trying to alleviate the shame or self-hatred that comes up in relationships. It could be something as simple as a wife making a sharp remark about her husband driving too fast. If he hears this as blame, it may trigger his inner critic. Then, to defend against feeling like the bad self, he makes her into the bad other instead. He counterattacks, blaming her for nagging him. Now she feels like the bad self, and to ward off her own critic she in turn tries to make him the bad other: “Why are you always so defensive?” And he retorts: “Why are you always so critical?”

This is what couples do all the time—tossing the sense of badness back and forth like a hot potato. No wonder marriage partners become so invested in being right, even if it destroys their relationship. Being right is a way of trying to deflect the critic’s attack, with its crippling self-hatred and shame. It is always very sad to see two people who love each other going at each other this way.

One of the shortcomings of conventional religion is that it often speaks in the voice of the critic, blaming people for their sins and unworthiness. Instead of castigating people for their faults, it would be far more compassionate and skillful to help people see how the so-called deadly sins are all symptoms of not knowing that they’re loved.

Greed, for example, grows out of an inner sense of hunger, “I don’t have enough,” under which lies an even deeper sense of “I’m not enough.” Yet what is this inner poverty that we try to relieve through consuming and possessing, if not the emptiness of feeling cut off from love? Fire-and-brimstone moralists would have us believe that greed is proof of our sinfulness. But perhaps greed is only as compelling as it is because it promises to relieve our deprivation, yet without ever delivering the real goods, thus leaving us ever more prey to our hunger, which only the food of love can truly satisfy.

Likewise, jealousy only arises out of lack of confidence in being loved: Somehow life is loving others more than me. Similarly, self-centeredness, arrogance, and pride are attempts to make ourselves important or special, as a way to make up for a lack of genuine self-love. Egocentricity is a way of trying to make the world revolve around “me,” to compensate for an underlying fear that I don’t really matter much at all. If we felt loved, it would of course never occur to us that we didn’t matter.

And what drives people to seek power

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