REWIRING OUR ATTICS: Compassion

(This is the last of the long entries)

Although life doesn’t impact on everyone in the same way, most of us walk broken to some degree. We often grow up unaware of the “why” of our woundedness; we hide behind a semblance of normalcy and pretend we’re okay. But those wounds ooze out through our defensive behaviours and manifest themselves in the way we deal with life and people around us.

When we don’t have the knowledge or courage to name and manage the pain, it remains an unknown shadow, haunting from deep within us, frustrating us with its unsettling presence and frightening us when it oozes out at the most unexpected moments. The harder we try to hide and repress the oozing, the more fatigued and confused we become, opening the door to futility, burnout and depression.

When we know and understand better how those mangled thoughts first came to be planted inside of us, we can then begin to empower ourselves by forgiving ourselves for the woundedness behind those damaging words. Even if the circumstances surrounding the woundings were beyond our control and we didn’t do anything wrong to cause those wounds, there is still a good chance that we have been blaming ourselves in some way, especially if the damage occurred when we were children. Remember, when children don’t understand what’s happening to them or around them, they will often make up stories or create their own reasons, and usually to their own blame and detriment.

Guilt, blame, shame – believing that we are unlovable, bad, “damaged goods” and “beyond redemption” are the lies that have kept our truest selves hostage in the dark for so long.

Shining the light of truth on those lies diminishes their power over us.

Our own compassionate forgiveness frees us from the dismal prison of self-rejection and carries us beyond the reaches of those dangerous whispers that would have us believe that we’re forever unredeemable and worthless.

As we continue to rewire our attic - replacing negative self-talk with the truth of our meaning - and forgiving ourselves for being wounded (some use the word “weak”, but I prefer to call it what it is, wounded), we can dare to unmask the behaviours that we have been using to protect those wounds. Masking is reflexive - we mask our deepest soul-wounds in order to better cope with our confusion and pain. We use all kinds of behaviours, defence mechanisms and “bandages” (like drugs, food and alcohol, for example) to cushion us against the inner pain, as well as the external demands and realities that might otherwise further overwhelm us – family, marriage, school, work and social expectations. Sometimes, our defensive behaviours repulse us, making us feel even worse about ourselves, deafening us to the cry of the wounded child buried deep beneath those behaviours. But when we become aware of our woundedness, and realize that those behaviours have been shaped by our need to protect our deepest self from further injury, we can dare to feel compassion toward the wounded child who created those defences in the first place.

And once we’ve begun to experience the healing of our own understanding, forgiveness and compassion, we can then dare to embrace with love that deepest self.

I believe that one of the most compassionate, loving things we can do for ourselves is to become our own best friend. Think about it. Who better understands the deepest “why” of your woundedness? Who best understands why you are who you are…and who you yearn to be? Yet so often we shun ourselves in disgust.

But I firmly believe that no matter how hard and sincerely we search for companionship and comfort from others – God, spouse, best friends, doctors – until we become our own best friend, we will never experience the profound yearned-for depth of friendship in anyone else. I will go so far as to suggest that we can’t authentically love anyone else, including God, if we can’t also love our own self.

It has been my experience, since my epiphany of possibility in the ICU that morning 20 years ago, that the more I’m able to embrace my self with compassionate forgiveness and love, the more capable I am of loving and receiving love from others, including God.

Truth shines possibility into our lostness.

Self-knowledge continues to map us through our crossroads.

Compassion empowers us to love our wounded self back to life.