Please put on your understandy pants...
So one of the things I have written about before is giving children simplistic notions of good and evil. This person hurt me, thus they're evil. People who are good don't hurt me/have problems they take out on the world around them/yell at me/drink so much. This leads to a terrible chain of events. First, they're unable to process the world around them as non-hostile. If good means nice, and evil means not nice, then it is good to hit someone who is evil. But, worse for the child's mental health, "evil" is a force, it is outside us, a universal Jungian archetype entity. It can't be fought. It can't be reasoned with. It can't be compromised with. It just is.
We can't forgive our parents or people in our past, because we have this notion that when someone does something 'wrong' to us, it is personal, it is 'bad'. It is like when you went to class with holes in your socks and even though you had shoes on all day long and nobody noticed, you still felt unseemly. But the whole time they were hoping you didn't notice they wet themselves or had a hole in their shoe, or hadn't eaten in two days. It narrows our point of view, and makes rational, understandable conflicts and situations 'scary' and fraught with stress.
Your dad drank because he was unhappy and was self-medicating. It wasn't about you. Your uncle molested you because someone molested him and he was sick in the head. Your boss bullies you because someone is bullying him and he's not mature enough not to kick the dog when his dad yells at him. It's not evil, it's not wrong, it's not bad. It just is. Any human being, given X motivation, Y pressure, and Z torture, whether it's all in their mind or not, will do A, B, and C. It might as well be a computer program that ran for all the personal attachment it has. Seeing the world in black and white, like we accuse teenagers of, because it is what they've been taught their whole life, only harms us and our world view. And our inner peace.
Next time you're tempted to 'simplify' the explanation for a child in your life, or maybe even overhear someone doing so...take the time to treat that child like a human being, with a mind. That doesn't mean there aren't things children don't need to know about, or that aren't too complicated for them to understand. But...telling them 'because he's a bad person' or 'they didn't like us' because you didn't get the lease/job/promotion is making that child's world view smaller and smaller and more and more boxed in. It breeds discrimination and ignorance, needlessly.
K.
We can't forgive our parents or people in our past, because we have this notion that when someone does something 'wrong' to us, it is personal, it is 'bad'. It is like when you went to class with holes in your socks and even though you had shoes on all day long and nobody noticed, you still felt unseemly. But the whole time they were hoping you didn't notice they wet themselves or had a hole in their shoe, or hadn't eaten in two days. It narrows our point of view, and makes rational, understandable conflicts and situations 'scary' and fraught with stress.
Your dad drank because he was unhappy and was self-medicating. It wasn't about you. Your uncle molested you because someone molested him and he was sick in the head. Your boss bullies you because someone is bullying him and he's not mature enough not to kick the dog when his dad yells at him. It's not evil, it's not wrong, it's not bad. It just is. Any human being, given X motivation, Y pressure, and Z torture, whether it's all in their mind or not, will do A, B, and C. It might as well be a computer program that ran for all the personal attachment it has. Seeing the world in black and white, like we accuse teenagers of, because it is what they've been taught their whole life, only harms us and our world view. And our inner peace.
Next time you're tempted to 'simplify' the explanation for a child in your life, or maybe even overhear someone doing so...take the time to treat that child like a human being, with a mind. That doesn't mean there aren't things children don't need to know about, or that aren't too complicated for them to understand. But...telling them 'because he's a bad person' or 'they didn't like us' because you didn't get the lease/job/promotion is making that child's world view smaller and smaller and more and more boxed in. It breeds discrimination and ignorance, needlessly.
K.