Do you know when you are being treated badly?  It seems like a strange question, but my experience tells me that many of us don’t actually feel it in the moment, or we do sense something is amiss but we gloss over it. Then it wakes us up in the middle of the night. Even then, we may question our feelings, and be uncertain about whether we should do something about it. Mostly, we do not act on behalf of ourselves, and find ourselves simply adjusting to the bad treatment. In popular parlance we “swallow” it.

But at some point, in some way, typically passively, it needs to be spit up.

“Forgive and forget” is one of our internal adjustment strategies. It’s reinforced as the way to go among religious and new age spiritual communities. Forgiveness has its place of course. But as a go-to default strategy I don’t trust it. To be precise, my take is that forgiveness has its place at the end of an intentional process of working through the insult/assault with the insulter/assaulter. Afterwards, we may or may not choose forgiveness.

But too often it’s a premature “flight to transcendence”. It’s an ideal, and like all ideals, forgiveness does not take seriously enough the insult, the insulted, or even the insulter.  As such it’s little more than our personal collusion in our own mistreatment.

Another strategy is to instinctively rationalize the mistreatment or our first impulse is to try to understand the motivations of the person or community who have mistreated us. You know, “guess he was having a bad day”, or “she didn’t mean to, I’m sure”. We cycle mentally into what was motivating him or her and in this case, we may take too much responsibility for their bad behaviour.

But where did we learn to capitulate, take the high road, fly off to the land of ideals, swallow our anger, or enact premature forgiveness?

I wonder if these strategies are little more than childhood survival tactics transposed to adult situations. When we were helpless and dependent, in the face of mistreatment we have limited options, but all of them were in the service of survival. Initially, we would have protested by crying and making a serious fuss. This is the natural response. But when we discover that this is futile, or worse, provokes more mistreatment, Plan B kicks in.

One of the first things we do is travel north, away from our feelings and into our thoughts. This happens automatically or instinctively. We need to control the instinct in our body to lash out, the throat wants to scream, the hips and legs want to get, the arms want to flail.  We cannot tolerate the experience or the idea that the ones who are supposed to be taking care of us are negligent. We cannot be motherless or fatherless in other words.

So, we form a belief that they aren’t doing something wrong. It’s “me” that is the problem. I am bad. This belief gets formed at the deepest layer of our unconscious, and then gets acted out in all kinds of ways, in our adult life.

When we are mistreated as adults, this belief ensures that our first thought when we’ve been mistreated is: “I must have done something to deserve it”. Otherwise life is unbearably unpredictable, fickle, cruel. We “grin and bear it”. In doing so we are reenacting an early childhood strategy that brought order to a chaotic existence. Your badness, your “deserving it” is the solution to intolerable chaos and cruelty. Over time, it is possible that we simply do not feel the insult to our integrity and self-worth when it occurs at work, at home, or with friends.

It’s sobering the day we realize that we actually participate in the construction of situations in which we’ll be mistreated. Freud called it “repetition compulsion”. We unconsciously seek out those who will mistreat us. My theory on repetition compulsion is that it’s not merely neurotic. It has a redemptive purpose. We do it so that one day we might actually see ourselves doing it, and wake up out of the trance of the survivor.

In the meantime, all the rage, all the hatred, all the resentment doesn’t just disappear. It goes underground. It is repressed. But this is not merely a psychic, or mental process. The repression is held in our body. My own set of repressed feelings went into my hips and ass. It took almost six decades for the tightness to start to interfere with my functioning. But it can just as easily show up in any of our internal organs. We get sick. But if we take this to a conventional doctor, s/he won’t even touch the source, only the symptoms. All these repressed feelings need to come out if we are going to regain health.

Standing up and “doing bloody battle” (as Andrew Feldmar puts it) on behalf of oneself is a sign of the recovery of the true self. With the boss, with siblings, with friends, with mother, with father, with anybody who crosses the line.

Nobody else is going to stand up for us and nobody else should be standing up for us. This is our battle to fight.

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