Witnessing as healing, as vengeance
Once, a person I saw as a mentor hurt me. Our relationship had begun in a friendly, amiable, affirming way, but over time began to feel coercive and pressuring. Wanting to protect his feelings, I gently refused and expressed discomfort when he asked things of me I did not want to do, and in response he said the right things, but his actions showed my boundaries would not be respected. The situation felt intolerable, particularly as a person who easily sees the best in others and has a tendency toward people-pleasing to avoid conflict.
When we were about to spend time together, I would rehearse the ways I would stay centered and focus our interactions on what I liked about our relationship, but in person I felt my boundaries and concerns dissolving under the very skills and expertise that I wanted to learn. Walking away, I felt good and told myself I was okay with everything that happened, but within an hour I would fall into anxious nervousness, shame, and wondering how to avoid this happening again. A part of me saw him as holding an enormous charisma that overrode my will, and it was hard to shake though I used every tool I could. Every tool except for telling others what was happening outside of my closest people.
Eventually I broke off contact, but later ended up in another shared community space. I told myself I would be fine, but I felt wracked with shame and a quavering sense of terror every time we inadvertently made eye contact or had to speak. With the support of my therapist, I began telling my story to others. This validation of the ways I’d been manipulated helped me to ground myself in recognizing what was happening wasn’t okay and to see how much I had been doing to protect this person’s feelings at the expense of my own.
A confluence of circumstances created the opportunity for the two of us to have a facilitated confrontation. It was the kind of restorative justice process that is dreamt-of and so hard to accomplish. We showed up, and the facilitator was both skilled and aware of how power skews what seems like a neutral relationship. I told my story, and the facilitator met my ex-mentor’s deflections and dismissal with firm, kind accountability and encouragement.
As I watched, I saw my ex-mentor’s countenance start to soften, and tremble, as his defenses against pain relaxed and he began to feel his guilt and shame over what happened. At the same time, I felt my own heart lighten as I became unburdened of all I carried. I walked into the process trembling in fear, and walked away feeling joyful, light, and free. There was no more for me to carry, no desire for further retribution, nothing.
The seed of vengeance may simply be in the longing for having one’s hurt witnessed and validated by the person who caused us harm. An instinctive knowing that this could bring healing and relief. But so rarely are those who have caused harm able to bear the feeling of their own guilt and shame. Instead they defend against it, minimize it, reject it, or compel others to hold it. Lacking that outlet for healing witnessing, vengeance becomes that venomous instinct to cause them a hurt that will match the hurt we feel, escalating rather than healing discord.
What we want and what we owe
Perhaps the fear of guilt is that it aligns with a sense of obligation that is greater than the gratification of our own wants and needs. The feeling invites us to reckon with the conflict between others’ needs and expectations and our own desires. So much goes back to power and its uses. Guilt is that which weaves us into just and beloved community. Guilt knits communities together, and it may be wielded abusively by someone with power and authority who feels threatened by the needs of another. We may give a gift out of love, and then use that gift as a hook later when we feel angry or scared, as a way of coercing the person to take care of us.
Guilt may be an inner prophet who calls us out when we’re out of integrity and need to make rectifications. It is appropriate to feel guilt for committing, participating in, or allowing harm or injustice to occur. Guilt spurs us to make things right and grow as people. Yet those who cannot tolerate guilt may demand forgiveness as though it’s owed to them, and crumble when it’s not given. Such a demand asks the harmed person to do their emotional work for us rather than letting us suffer and work through our own guilt.
Meanwhile, many of us have been trained not to allow others to feel guilty, ashamed, or in pain. We are all too ready to spare them their guilt and remorse, consoling ourselves with a story about our strength or virtue. Forgiveness may be granted before the offense is even known. When we hesitate to take on the pain ourselves, we feel our own pang of guilt. We may tell the story that by letting them be accountable and feel their guilt, we are torturing them. Yet all we are doing is letting them feel their own feelings.
Ironically, in those moments, if everyone involved was willing to simply practice feeling their own guilt and allow each other space, there would be greater healing than the urgent efforts to fix and shut down pain.
As animals who crave connection, we seek it through its many guises: approval, love, sex, enmity, vilification. At times it does not matter what the connection is, whether it feels good or awful, so long as it exists and we know we exist. Shame, however, is an emotion of disconnection. It is the emotion that tells us we have been severed from the group and are in danger of death, social or otherwise.
As we’ve learned thanks to Brené Brown, Shame says, “I am bad,” while Guilt says, “I’ve done something wrong.” Yet in our flattening, moralizing way, the overculture of the United States collectively believes that only bad people do bad things, and therefore to feel guilty is to prove the story of shame. This is to our detriment. We are all capable of causing hurt and harm, and likely will at some point in life. When we cannot tolerate the guilt and repair process of hurting another, our hurting tends to escalate. Defenses against feeling guilt render us more indifferent to others’ suffering.
In a cyclical model of time and development, metaphors of spiraling and pendulums are useful for contemplating how growth occurs. We turn into one direction until we’ve gone as far as we can, until it begins to hurt and impede our growth, and continue curving to the other side of the polarity.
One possible journey: We experience pain when we’ve hurt someone in the process of following our own desires, and start feeling a sense of guilt whenever a “selfish” impulse arises. Over time, however, we find ourselves hemmed in by guilt and always prioritizing the wants and needs of others from that feeling of obligation, setting aside parts of us. Eventually we feel the chafing of making ourselves smaller for the comfort and satisfaction of others, and reject guilt, shame, and obligation in favor of prioritizing ourselves.
Another possible journey: We see the smallness in the lives of people around us who submit themselves to relationships that look painful and loveless, and vow to put ourselves first. We deny and refuse anyone who expresses hurt or upset with us, fearing the loss of autonomy and control, until one day we hit a limit. Perhaps we feel utterly alone, with no one special in our lives. Perhaps we are held accountable in a painful and undeniable way, that fantasy of independence shattering when the harm we’ve caused finally catches us. Eventually we begin listening to that guilt and longing for connection, learning how to remain ourselves and respect the needs and feelings of others.
We reach the edges and continue curving back, each oscillation becoming more refined and skillful. Soon those vibrations seem almost invisible from the outside as we gain greater mastery and inner complexity, learning we always have a range of responses to every moment, and each response offers a gift and a limitation.
Autonomy and intimacy
So long as we treat emotions as things done to us, injected into us, we allow ourselves to be under the power of others. At the same time, we are capable of feeling others’ feelings and taking them into ourselves, and experienced and instinctive manipulators know how to find the people who will do this for them. In the swinging between autonomy and intimacy, we have all we need within us to practice discernment between what to give and what to retain.
Start within. Start breathing and imagine you find the core of aliveness, the belly center that gathers in your vitality, your passion and will, the core in which the fires of life burn. This is the center that has been with you since you were a feral child taking pleasure in the brightness of the colors of the sky and grass, disgusted with the textures of food, who played and kissed with innocence. Sense how that is in you today.
Imagine you find the core of relationship, the heart center that gives and receives social connection, that feels the web of relationships and your place within it, that senses how others feel toward you and you toward them. This energy reaches out into your environment with breath, communicating yourself into the world, and draws that connection back into yourself as guidance. The emotional field is the field of relationship, and this is the center that knows how to navigate this realm. Sense how that is in you today.
Find the core of potential, the head center that receives knowledge from the visible and invisible worlds, that gathers it into the cup of the skull and filters it through the nervous system. Here is the throne of that which we may call the higher self, the deep self, that which can see further and broader and deeper. That which sees the bigger picture, sees what is possible, that can bring us into radical, intentional, and beautiful action. Sense how that is in you today.
Imagine a circle around you that contains all you know yourself to be, all that is your responsibility. Imagine that as a cellular wall, a membrane, a fence, a bubble through which we can take in what we need and push out what does not belong to us.
With this connection, let us return to guilt and shame. That connection of the fires of the belly, who knows my innate worthiness, and the chalice of the head, which can see further, helps us to look at the matters of heart and connection with more discernment, self-compassion, and dignity. Without the head and the belly, those ruled by the heart center may be wholly subsumed by concerns about others’ opinions and approval.
Too often feeling guilt causes us to crumble and feel as though we must utterly abase ourselves for forgiveness or reject the accusations of harm. Again, guilt bound to shame, a combination that says “I am bad because I did something bad.” When this story is alive, we feel our worthiness and capacity for future happiness are based on the forgiveness and opinion of the person we’ve harmed. Which, you might think would make us more inclined to be kind to them, but more often than not elicits all the defensiveness, denial, controlling, seducing, and further gaslighting that only compounds the harm.
Let your guilt be here fully, in your sphere. Let yourself know that no one owes you forgiveness or the opportunity to make amends. This guilt belongs to you, it is telling you who you are and what you are capable of. More importantly, it tells you who you want to be. What does your guilt say to your belly? Your heart? Your head?
When we struggle with harming others we can feel at a constant impasse. “I want to be better but I keep fucking up!” We may get anxious and overwhelmed, afraid our friends and family will get exhausted by our failures and walk away from us. What we may not recognize is that it’s our avoidance of guilt and defensiveness that is the most alienating. The capacity for forgiveness is quite expansive when the guilty person demonstrates genuine remorse, contrition, respect for the hurt person’s healing process, and commitment to change.
All of this is helped by simply feeling our own guilt, before doing anything about it, and while we work to make amends. Pain spurs us to change, and guilt is a pain that says what we are doing is unacceptable. We have no reason to grow when we assuage, avoid, or numb our pain.
Those who have been harmed do not owe, and cannot be expected to provide, kindness. Some may be able to offer that, but spend much energy protecting and supporting one’s own hurt. Pressuring someone to provide forgiveness or kindness to assuage your guilt only compounds the hurt and slows down the outcome you want. Better to slow down, express remorse, and give the hurt person the space and power to determine how they want to interact with you in the future, what they want from you.
In the meantime, we can work on listening to the lessons of our guilty feelings and continue to grow and live our lives.It is impossible and unwise to stop living entirely while processes of accountability unfold, but it is useful to get support from a class, a community, a support group, or trusted friends and mentors to help us work through our conflicting thoughts and feelings and figure out what boundaries are appropriate. Even better if these supports are not people who unfailingly take our side and tell us we’ve done nothing wrong, but who help us to sort through our behaviors and figure out how we can do better.
Finding our place within collective and ancestral legacies
I grew up a white person in a country built with on the supremacy of white people, and lived in a Midwestern state that at one point actively embraced the politics of the Ku Klux Klan. So I was surrounded by explicit and implicit racist thought and action, some of which I recognized. Yet even when I actively rejected white supremacy, I was not fully aware of the extent to which racism informed my words and actions. When my friends of color started to push back and call me out, I did not respond graciously. I made it harder on them. I dismissed their experiences or focused on my own feelings rather than acknowledging the hurt.
Over time, I realized those who called me out were acting in self-care for themselves and respect for me. They cared enough about themselves to not let me be a shithead around them all the time, and they cared enough about our relationship to invite me to work on it and change rather than walking away. Many, I suspect, did walk away.
Listening to my guilt rather than defending, taking time to stew on my feelings and try to see things from their perspective, helped me to radically reorient my humanity. I aspired to be a person who is kind, just, and in integrity, and guilt showed me how far apart was the distance between that ideal and the ways I’d been practicing relationship. It continues as a spiral process of progress, regression, curiosity, discovery, hurt, regret, and accountability.
Most of us living in the United States who are not one hundred percent Native or the descendent of enslaved people owe our existence to the forcible taking of land, property, and personhood of others. We benefit from hurt that continues to live in the bodies of the descendants of those harmed, in the inequities of policing, income, wealth, and access to healthcare, clean water, food, and safety. Yet those that benefit most from this wonder, “Why should I feel guilty?”
If I were given a beautiful painting, and then learned that painting had been stolen from someone else, that would be a complex ethical issue. Perhaps I myself did not do the crime, but now I know the crime has been done and harm exists, and I have an opportunity to participate in rectifying it or continue perpetuating it. To admit that we do feel guilt means knowing that our pleasures and eases have been paid in blood. We confront in stark terms the depths of conflict between personal comfort and satisfaction and that which we owe to others.