There’s an implicit and often unspoken tendency to promote standing on the necks of others while climbing out of the pits of love and life. You’ve heard the stories, masked as mantras:
- He’s not worth it.
- She doesn’t deserve you.
- You’re better than them.
- They can go to hell.
- He’s a loser.
- She’s an idiot.
- Hurt people hurt people.
I could go on. If you mine your memory, you’re likely to find lots of statements like the ones above. They’re given to us by people we tend to trust, admire, and respect. That’s understandable because the people who provide these statements are usually the ones who care about us. They often want us to feel better, see a new perspective, distance ourselves from harm, start over from a heartbreak with a new orientation, and craft a new life.
I’ve learned that, for me, healing my soul and my body doesn’t happen when I compromise my view of humanity and skip opportunities to see the pain and power of others as likened to mine.
Using the “helping” statements like the ones listed above only rendered me blind, coarse, and stunted. So, a person may feel better for a minute after talking big talk (Yeah! He doesn’t deserve me. I’m better than him and his lies! ……. That’s right. She learned her lesson. After what she did, she got what was coming to her. …….. They can all go to hell after what they said to me, how they left me?! I don’t need them anyway.).
However, the person using these statements probably won’t feel better for long. These “helpful,” “thick skin,” or “tough love” tactics are super sneaky tricks.
They pretend to facilitate healing in us by promoting hurt hurled at others. They create the illusion of external strength by generating internal monstrosities. That’s not how healing works. That’s not how any of it works! Healing is wholeness. Healing in one member, while another is hurting, doesn’t last. It’s all or nothing. You can’t heal the world by hurting others and you can’t fix yourself by breaking someone else.
Repeat: You can’t fix yourself by breaking someone else.
That means, even after the most terrible abuse or pain, there is still room for love. This is not cliche bullsh*t. This is spiritual law. It trumps all other laws whether you believe it or not. Love covers a multitude of sins. It can easily cover the most heinous story you’ve lived or are living.
How?
By revealing to you (while or after you’ve created the distance you need to be safe, be clear, and gain stability) the stories that others are operating from.
- The person who abused, violated, dismissed, abandoned, used, cursed, hit, left, and lied to you was also abused, violated, dismissed, abandoned, used, cursed, hit, left, and lied to.
This is t/Terror.
We are in cyclical, interconnected stories.
Supreme Love, through anchored ascendency, can give us natural and supernatural power to wake up, gain vision, and become sensitive to the interior lives of our Self and that of Others. With Supreme Love we can see from eternity….such a view is the grandest perspective of now. This is much, much, much better than ONLY seeing what’s right in front of you…the person sitting with you at dinner or the empty seat where you wish someone was….the vacant room where you make up stories to match the t/Terror in your soul and flesh/body….or the crowd of people you feel alone in. Seeing way, way, way far beyond what’s in front of you, or inside of you, enables the ability to grasp fuller pictures, with more complex and readily available stories. This mature vantage point enables attachments to a primary truth —-> which is that there is no separation.
If you break someone else’s neck ::::::::::::: by refusing to see and honor their humanity, holding them hostage in toxicity, demoting their value in attempts to promote your own, rejecting the fullness and depth of their stories, frailties, and connections to violence and freedom :::::::::::::::: then, you are, in effect, doing the same thing to you. You are participating in your own demise when you participate in the demise of others. There is no separation. You are never alone.
This healing without hurting can happen.
You don’t need venom to move and grow (at least not forever!). So, after you get safe space, healthy distance, and clear vision from the person abusing you and whom you are abusing (because t/Terror works cyclically, it’s NOT unilateral), you can heal mercifully. If you choose to do so. #Amen. We all can. We can get in touch with pity for the people who hurt, along with pity for ourselves, the hurting and hurters. (This is why the “hurt people hurt people” mantra is so dangerous; it implies a superiority/inferiority, us/them dichotomy that doesn’t exist.)
To guard against false superiority/inferiority complexes and temptations to promote the Victim lover identity, we can see how we developed taste and fate for masochism, barbarism, contempt, and pain. Then, WE CAN CHANGE OUR STORIES. We can do deep excavations of the soul. We can create clearings in our pain body. We can make plain, and bless to wholeness and light, our shadow effect. #ActuallyYouCan #YoureTheOneYouveBeenWaitingFor
And as you practice Supreme Love, please remember:
You can’t fix yourself by breaking someone else.
Not even a little bit.
#SupremeLoveTaughtMeThis #SupremeLoversUnite
Jeanine Staples is Associate Professor of Literacy and Language, African American Studies, & Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the Pennsylvania State University. Her book, The Revelations of Asher: Toward Supreme Love in Self, is an endarkened, feminist, new literacies event (Peter Lang, 2016). In it, she explores Black women’s t/Terror in love. She produces research-based courses and methodologies that enable marginalized girls and women to realize internal revelations that fuel external revolutions.
Dr. Staples’ next book details the evolution of her acclaimed undergraduate course, The Philadelphia Urban Seminar. In it, she explores Supreme Love in schools. She shows how she generates curriculum and methodologies that incite anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-ableist pedagogical stances among teachers interested in urban education and equity for all people in schools and society.