LOVE MONTH: DAY 11: “I love mankind, he said, “but I find to my amazement that the more I love mankind as a whole, the less I love man in particular.” ― Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Hahaha…so true. My friend always says that I love humanity, but humans, not so much. Hahahaha…this is great. I get this more than I can say.
There will always be challenges for me in dealing with people. I get to work too often with those who have mental illness, and this can create a dynamic of codependency and dysfunction on a scale that is uncomfortable when I am not in the best place myself.
That wears me out sometimes. I experience a sense of needing to just lock the doors and windows and not answer the phone. But that does little to resolve my issues.
I find that there is something in my cognition about what is going on that needs to shift. It is that I am piling on a bunch of crap from yesterday, last week, last year, 25 or 30 years ago…ugh! And then I begin to project ALL of that into today and tomorrow and next year…ad nauseum.
So, to stay in this moment is, once again, the answer to all of that. To resolve to remain mindful of myself and what is going on with me in this moment is so important. I have ended relationships with others because I was overwhelmed by shit I just made up! Isn’t that great? And it is only because there are certain things in me that come up and remind me of another time when I felt like that. Oh!
So, I sit with the feelings and find the common denominator and work through them until I see what my cognitive process is all about with that stuff.
It seldom has anything to do with the situation at hand. As a mental health provider, I find that I get this most often when dealing with bi-polar and borderline tendencies in others. Most addicts have them in some measure, and some in great measure. Ego defenses that are uncomfortable for all of us. This is something we need to know about ourselves in relations with others.
Why does it make me uncomfortable? Because it triggers past experiences with others. I am not responding to this situation, I am reacting to that situation. So, this comes up over and over in our inventories. A lot of therapists and mental health providers will not work with certain individuals, because the spin that it creates is not beneficial for anyone.
So, we get to see how we can heal our perceptions and our cognitions, based on this dynamic. It is a great source of healing and self-love and gives us the ability to love others who are broken too.
Dolphin Hug 