In the lifelong quest to overcome the self, and finally to be free, the biggest obstacle for a victim will be hate. Victims feel powerless. They know injustice personally and certainly can find justification for everything they do that is aggressive or hurtful. Women who eat themselves silly or spend themselves into oblivion or spend hours a day cruising social media can explain that their choices are rooted in the past, that their compulsions are beyond their own control because the past wields such a staggering influence on their daily life.
Remember this: Eliminate the self and you eradicate your tormenting wound. The soul is your identity, your connection to what is true, to what is beautiful, to what is important. The self is your enemy, your connection to what lies, to what makes you feel ugly, to what trivializes, minimizes, and cheapens your life. Only one of these two will survive your lifetime. The trouble is, only you can advocate for your soul. Your self will always be the aggressor, your self will daily come up with increasingly cunning schemes to keep you humiliated, self-hating, and stuck.
The steroid for the self is hate. It is the single most powerful thing you can feed it. So don’t. Hate coddles a victim. Hate swaddles a victim. Hate comforts a victim. Hate feels like power, for a moment I am superior. For this instant I have the power, not them. It’s a lie.
The Big Book connected to Alcoholics Anonymous (I don’t have that addiction but I swear by this book because it is SO incredibly useful for any victim.), the Big Book outlines a process for sobriety that includes as one of its first and most definitive steps the writing down of all of your resentments. This is a comprehensive list of the people in your life that you hate or resent, why you hate them, and then how it has affected your life, what they did or did not do to you.
This process of recording every single personal resentment you carry is a pivotal exposure of the addiction of hate that is central in the life of every victim. You will be astonished as the volume of hate you carry for people long gone. You will be shocked by whom you hate that is close to you. You will likely discover violent hate for people you’ve never even met. Once this hate has been exposed, use God to show you when you are taking out your hate like cud and chewing on it. Every single time you hate and notice it, pray to have your focus shift, and then deliberately engage in something that is deeply satisfying, NOT something distracting that will really just leave the hate playing like Musak in the background of your consciousness. This will be a lifelong habit that you develop, but it is vital to starve the self, to absolutely STARVE it. The more you deny the self this potent food of hate the more it will die, leaving your soul free to flourish. In the aftermath of your willful choice to not hate you will see evidence of fresh self respect, fresh courage, fresh expression that feels authentic, that is solid and creates beauty and order in your hourly life.
Hate normally comes as the comforter when you are unconsciously feeling humiliated or ashamed or afraid. It comes when you’ve recalled something bad, something you did, or something that was done to you and you shift from the terror of that line of thinking to the more comforting direction of hate. Try to pull that out, and then look very, very closely at what triggers the habit of hate. This process is not about ignoring memories, as I’ve said in this blog you absolutely need your own attention, you absolutely need to look closely at the most damaging events of your life. But do not use those recollections as an excuse to wallow in hate. Use them to look at your own choices and to change the ones you make today.
For me this process is a moment by moment, a continual discipline. When I worship in the morning I begin by ringing my holy bells, lighting a candle, and measuring out the incense that will burn on the altar for the next 5 hours. The very next thing I do, prior to study and prayer, but after that prep is completed and the stage is set for formal, holy, worship is to take the crystal piece I have out of the bottom of a engraved sterling silver cup that sits upside down on the altar. I put the cup rightside up to my mouth and I pray that hate will leave me, will leave my son, and will leave my husband and therefore will leave my family, then I breath into that silver cup, and immediately I turn it back upside down on the altar, empty, for the day. This is a symbolic gesture that allows me to acknowledge my true enemy and to refocus me on the elimination of it for yet one more day.
Focus on what has been done for you, not what been done to you. Focus on what you love, and feed your soul. Deprive yourself of malice, of insidious and scheming thoughts. Do this with willful, grim determination and it will change your life and give you sudden authority over areas that are woefully out of control currently.