emotional poison | David M Masters

Alright, no doubt. You’ve been disrespected, even abused. That was a terrible injustice, but what are you going to do about it? The answer makes all the difference.

You can feed into the cycle of abuse, it’s the natural response.

Your boss says something which cuts you to the quick, and you resist lashing back, but when you get home, you say something biting to your spouse, who doesn’t want to rock the boat, and one of the kids gets inadvertently put down. The child goes to school and barks at another child, who disrespects a teacher, who disrespects a coworker, who gets upset at a cashier at the supermarket. The cashier strikes out at the person who is rounding up the shopping carts, who comes home and kicks the cat. The mom who sees this outburst expresses her frustration and the pet abuse, gets the dad upset, the family has an outburst but the father tries to settle the dispute, and he’s your boss, who it short with you, yet again, and the cycle readies for another round.

While, admittedly, over-simplified, this is the pattern of abuse, which can only be interrupted by nonother than (you guessed it), you.

The buck stops here, with you. You are the only one who can stop this abuse from running, like wildfire, throughout the world.

I like the way don Miguel Ruiz refers to this as “emotional poison.” When someone is the recipient of emotional poison, they know of no other way to ease the pain than to put it on someone else. So, he or she strikes out at you, now you’ve been infected. What are you going to do?

The next time someone disrespects you, infects you with their emotional poison, you could instead make the conscious decision to break the cycle. You can affirm, “This stops, here and now, with me.”

What you do next changes everything.

You can disable, the emotional poison by applying empathy, forgiveness, and love. You seek to understand that your boss was infected and have empathy for his or her condition, forgiving the transgression because you know what’s happening. After all, your boss is only doing the best he or she can do with what they have.

Your boss doesn’t know what’s going on, but you do.

But you’re still infected. You can’t just push it down, cover it up, and ignore it, because that will cause the wound to fester and build up more poison inside you, ‘til… well, you know what happens. Either it finds a way to come out in an explosive event, or it will cause your immune system to deteriorate, making you more susceptible to illness, accelerated aging, and possibly premature death.

That’s why you need to apply the most powerful healing energy of love to the wound. And when you do, something amazing happens. The wound heals enabling you to powerfully chose the love response. So, now…

What are you going to do?

When someone judges you, you can have the wherewithal to understand what’s going on behind the scenes and not take it personally.

When you are rejected, you can find acceptance that things are what they are, nothing more than that. Search your self and see if there is any value or hidden (meaningful) message in the rejection, otherwise, let it flow right past you, as if it were no thing. And it was, because it really had nothing to do with you, and far more to do with your rejector trying to release their own poison in that moment.

If someone tries to shame you for something that is just the way it is, there is no reason to defend yourself and you can have compassion for that person who tried to disempower you.

You have the ability to break the cycle of abuse.

You can be the person you needed to reach out to when you were hurting, instead of falling into the trap of becoming someone who perpetuates the spreading of emotional pain.