02/01/2024
Emotional pain causes the windows by which we view the world, others, our relationships, circumstances, and even ourselves to shut tightly. Pain diminishes our ability to remain objective and full of grace. Pain can turn the kindest human being to lash out, operate from fear and distrust, and live a life through the lens of negative expectation. It can also cause one to live a life of subjugation, servitude, codependency, and repression, vacillating between the suffocating need for love or the soul-crushing fear of abandonment.
Everyone must learn to be their true selves, which requires detaching from groupthink and honoring higher virtues, especially when the ones we love seek to destroy us in obvious and not-so-obvious ways. Parents who ignore, devalue, scream, dismiss, criticize, neglect, and abuse their children may suffer from a delusional sense of subjective morality, where they convince themselves that the pain they inflict is for their child’s own good.
Learning to manage my mind more logically has permitted my consciousness to understand this prickly, alarming lynchpin within my subconscious mind. As a child, my parents were my gods, and if they ignored me, shamed me, or verbally abused me, my young mind assumed they had every right to. Having spent nearly a decad breaking through faulty negative childhood programming, I now recognize a higher moral code, one that is rooted in compassion, grace, dignity, integrity, expansion, growth, kindness, and love.
Had my parents answered to the authority of love rather than their subjective sense of morality, our entire family would have flourished like sunflowers. What they were unable to break through, I chose to. 🫶🏿