No one likes it when someone complains about everything and everyone in their life while doing nothing about any of it. Or when their narrative consists only of their stellar ability to seek out something to criticise in every situation. When I spend time with such people, I feel like they plug in to my system, suck the energy out and leave me depleted and drained. This is unpleasant at best and interprets as,
‘Limit time and interactions with this person to protect my energy. As they are not ready to take responsibility for themselves, they may be seeking someone to take responsibility for making them feel better.’
The short version is a neon flashing sign reading.
DANGER – MAINTAIN DISTANCE
I have recently been reminded that to miss this negative sign is to blindly walk in to an exhausting dynamic which is costly to get caught in and costly to get uncaught from.
However, our prevailing culture largely demands that we deny such experiences and only speak of all things positive. We must utter words of complimentary praise for ourselves and our fellow human, no matter what. Or face the wrath of the positivity police who parade around seeking someone to shutdown/judge/silence for daring to voice anything different read negative irrespective of it being true.
Please note that I am not suggesting for a minute that we all become like the above example where we can’t open our mouths without speaking negativity or having a negative impact. What I am pointing out is that to demand only positive, or deliver only negative, are both unhealthy approaches that do not show the whole picture.
The cultural prohibition on anything negative, is ironic given the media’s role in feeding the world with words of never-ending negativity about death and destruction. Albeit prioritising certain parts of the world while ignoring the plights of others.
When I look at the human aversion to seeing or speaking of the non-positive alongside the seemingly unsatisfiable hunger for the negative that the media supplies, I see something bigger in the interplay between them. What we are banned from acknowledging in our own lives, we seek to see elsewhere.
The whole picture of the individual human heart and therefore every populated part of humanity; family/church/employer/government/country/world etc contains … positive, negative and the mess in the middle that combines both. When we deny either good or bad in ourselves, it must go somewhere – this is how disowned parts of the shadow self, get projected in to others, who are then condemned for them! Those who refuse to own, much less work on their shadow parts, are particularly prone to projecting in this way.
In psychotherapy terms we refer to the negative side as the shadow side. In current cultural terms, the non-shadow side could be likened to the FB side of ourselves. What we put out to the public is usually the shiniest, sparkliest, version of ourselves. There are also the exceptions of those who hang their dirtiest linen out on the FB line to dry. However, the majority remain somewhere in the middle while bearing more towards the best. This is ordinary human behaviour.
In life beyond Facebook, when we are honest about ourselves, we own our shadow and non-shadow sides. We require both sides to be whole. If we are too fragile to own our shadow sides, we will project these in to those around us, particularly those we don’t like or even envy. This is how the extremely fragile seek to protect themselves from their own shadows.
However, culture typically teaches us to always be positive and never to speak of or dwell on the negative. Nothing wrong with that when applied to the superficial day to day disappointments and frustrations. However, if we deny and dismiss the deeper, more difficult emotions along with what evokes them, we dismiss the invitation within them. The presence of pain whether physical or psychological, points to something that needs attention. To dismiss this, to avoid rocking the boat of the positivity police, is to override a warning at our own risk.
It is not surprising that a culture that condemns us for daring to speak of the difficult, loves to binge on news that is full of the negative. At the opposite extreme, those overwhelmed by dealing with rather than denying the negative in their own lives, may avoid the news altogether. Again, every mix of this exists in between these extremes.
The banning of our shadow sides, individually and collectively, is how prejudices arise and continue. Whatever cannot be owned or tolerated in the individual becomes disowned, projected out, located in a conveniently different individual, who then becomes a target for the one who disowns their shadow side.
When you get a group of individuals who all choose another particular people group to project their collective disowned shadow sides on to, you get particularly shadowy behaviour from the group doing the projecting.
Humans get hurt; physically and psychologically. The pain we feel is a signpost to something that needs addressing. If we ignore this, we permit the ongoing, unquestioned, presence of the pain.
Typically, we do not gaslight ourselves or our fellow humans when feeling or healing from physical injuries. However, it is a cultural norm to gaslight the human hearts natural vulnerability to getting hurt within the ordinary business of living and relating. The norm of negating this natural heart-level-hurt still reigns supreme and largely unchallenged.
This propensity for gaslighting the human heart, has been handed down the generations. When we talk about breaking cycles, we are referring to the generation who stop to question, ‘the way it’s always been done – to establish whether there is a better way’. In this instance by addressing the polarity between the physical and the psychological.
Here are some of our cultural favourites from the, ‘here’s some we prepared earlier (but haven’t’ bothered to update) cue card offerings’. These are often pulled out in the face of some kind of serious heart level hurt.
Don’t dwell on it. It’s in the past. Draw a line. Put it behind you. You need to move on. You should be ok now.
While there can be truths in such sayings, they do not create a whole picture without allowing or acknowledging that healing is a process. These sayings show us how hard we find it to tolerate the hurts of the human heart on anything other than a fleeting level. When we are socially conditioned to believe that emotions are weak and unnecessary, or something to think or pray away, we lose the truth that the hearts capacity to feel the entire range of emotions, is its barometer for aliveness.
When we gaslight the human heart for feeling pain, we are saying,
‘Be better, happy and positive. Immediately. And always. Without needing to walk the messy, painful, lengthy, unpredictable path from whatever caused the hurt, through the impact/pain/cost of it, to the healing.’
This is not only ridiculous and unrealistic, but blatantly cruel. It can also be an expression of ignorance, which can yet be educated when people are willing! But to gaslight the human heart is to demand our fellow human or our self, be at a place of healing, without having to walk the pathway that leads from hurt to healing.
This is the equivalent of saying to someone with two broken legs,
‘It’s happened. It’s done. It’s behind you. You need to stop wallowing/dwelling on it, as you can’t change it. It happened x amount of time ago so you should put it behind you and be up and running by now.’
In other words … BE HEALED. NOW. MINUS THE PROCESS OF HEALING or you’re weak/failing/doing something wrong! This is GASLIGHTING!
Hearts, like every part of the human body, need time, care and sometimes medication/treatments to heal.
The heart does not need shaming, blaming, dismissing, belittling, denying, ignoring, forcing, hiding, overriding or put simply, abusing via refusing to see.
The heart does need seeing, hearing, acknowledging, understanding, respecting, honouring, valuing, supporting and loving, in to healing.
It is time to stop abusing the human heart; our own or each other’s.
It is time to say ‘no’, to gaslighting the human heart.
It is time to acknowledge some hard facts; full, not partial aliveness, includes heart level hurt; we cause it, we receive it.
We cannot jump from hurt, straight to healing. We must walk the path that joins one to the other. It is a process and a messy, painful, often unpredictable one at that.
By investing the time to heal our hearts, we also learn new insights which help us to better protect or prepare ourselves, for certain potentially harm-causing situations in future.
The alternative is to deny/gaslight our heart pain until the body speaks so loudly and disruptively that we are forced to stop and listen.
Or, we can hand out the baton of hurt that we are handed to all and sundry around us as a way of projecting/communicating the pain that cannot be owned or processed in to others.
Let us choose not to pass on the hurt that has been done to us by making those around us feel it.
Let us also choose not to deny the cost/impact/pain done to our hearts or the time required to process and heal a hurt heart.
We can all take steps to stop gaslighting the human heart, by learning to listen to, love and support our own heart.
Change always starts with us. And we start by looking after our own hearts. The healthier our hearts are, the healthier what flows from them, will be.