Separated But Thriving - Coping With Separation

Separated But Thriving

By Rob Hadley

This information is provided to assist anyone going through separation or divorce. Feel free to reproduce it and use it where you choose, on condition that you include the credit “by Rob Hadley, www.VancouverHypnotherapy.Org”.

Part 7

How Much Are You Going To Hurt?

Here’s a secret. It’s a valuable one because it can save your life. When someone does something hurtful or unkind and you are on the wrong end of it, you can choose how much it’s going to hurt.

That may sound a little strange, but think about it.

If someone calls you a bad name or tells you “you are useless,” the temptation is to feel hurt and offended. Specifically, your pride is hurt. Equally, you may find he or she has made you feel ashamed or embarrassed.

Let’s take those things one at a time.

Your pride is hurt. Pride is a very expensive commodity. To be proud is in some cultures considered a sin—though that’s not something we get into on this course. Either way, Pride is something you choose—that you “opt into.”

(From WIkipedia) Pride is, depending on the interactional and cultural context, either a high sense of one's personal status (i.e., leading to judgements of personality and character) or the specific mostly positive emotion that is a product of praise or independent self-reflection. Philosophers and social psychologists have noted that pride is a complex secondary emotion which requires the development of a sense of self and the mastery of relevant conceptual distinctions (e.g., that pride is distinct from happiness and joy) through language-based interaction with others[1]. Some social psychologists identify it as linked to a signal of high social status.[2] One definition of pride in the first sense comes from St. Augustine: "the love of one's own excellence".[3] In this sense, the opposite of pride is humility.

Well, all that’s very well, but if I feel terrible as a result of being insulted, I still feel terrible. So here’s the thing. What if you said to yourself, OK—he’s said his thing. Well, I’m not proud. Actually, I don’t give a damn. If that’s what he thinks, fine. He can have that opinion—that’s his choice. It’s my choice to not care, one way or another.

You are now “opting out” of pride.

When someone is abusive or insulting in public, it’s usually obvious to everyone but that person that he or she is behaving in that way. This devalues the person’s actions to the point of making them irrelevant. Besides, no one really cares. It may not seem that way to you at the moment that a screaming row degenerates into a shouting match in the street—but it’s still the truth. If you shelve your pride, you shelve your ability to be hurt.

When you hear, “My God, have you no pride?” the strongest answer is “Actually, no. I have no pride.” No one can hurt something that doesn’t exist.

We’ve heard how this course helps us act like the mist, not like the wall that can be knocked down. This is a case in point. The insults, the rages, the tempers—none of those outbursts can hurt you if you say to yourself—I really don’t care what is said—my pride cannot be hurt.

The entire concept of shame and “being ashamed” is instilled in us from the earliest time we can remember. Be it humiliation or disgrace, we can limit the hurt to the point of its going away.

When I travelled in Africa among the Dinka and the Nuer tribes of South Sudan, I saw some extraordinary sights. In those poverty-stricken lands of continual civil war, it was not unusual at that time to see a soldier carrying a small bag of maize on his head and a machine gun, walking naked in the bush.

They simply had no clothes. The thought of shame didn’t even enter their heads. They had food and their weapons, and they could continue their war of liberation. Not having clothing was an issue that did not even cross their minds.

To them, fighting the war was more important than the issue of “shame” over not having clothes. Their war was so that their children need not die of hunger, and their wives not starve to death. Their war transcended the luxury of “shame.”

Whether they had decided it or otherwise, they had abandoned the concept of shame as a luxury. It became a non-issue. No one really cared after a while. After you see 50,000 starving, naked people, you pretty soon feel ashamed of having clothes and a full stomach.

You can choose how much you are going to hurt. You can also build incredible strength by giving up those things that allow you to hurt. Perhaps later, when you want them again, you can rediscover them. But in times of trial, they are luxuries that can hurt you and you hang onto them at your peril.

The other great truth of abuse is that—it only hurts if you care. When you no longer care, it really doesn’t matter what is said or what is done. Like a television channel broadcasting a message of hate, if no one tunes in to that channel, it really doesn’t matter.

Only by choosing to tune in to that channel do you allow yourself to be hurt. You have to learn to choose which channels you let get through to you.

When your lawyer writes a letter to your spouse or his or her lawyer, he does so in a way that removes emotion from the correspondence. If you can manage to think about the issues and deal with the difficult challenges with an equal lack of emotion, you will be helping yourself enormously.

By allowing yourself to think dispassionately about the difficulties, you will prevent yourself from being hurt. The moment anger or resentment comes into the equation, you allow your former spouse to hurt you. By removing these factors, you prevent yourself from being hurt, and you allow yourself to think clearly.

It is absolutely normal to feel hurt and upset at times. You would almost be inhuman not to feel that way. You can, however, put a limit on how much you are going to hurt. You really can “choose how much you are going to hurt.”

Think of it like this.

• If your spouse were to say to one of his friends, “She’s a real bloody monster”—you’d feel insulted.
• If your spouse said to your mother, “She’s a real bloody monster,” you’d probably feel even more insulted.
• Hopefully, if your spouse said to you, “You’re a real bloody monster,” you really wouldn’t care—it’s not important and it doesn’t matter.

In those three examples, there are three different levels of insult. One small, one larger, and the other non-existent. If we acknowledge there are degrees of insult, then we can reasonably say, “OK—this insult is not nice but it’s not as big as that insult.”

Let’s attach a value to each one—perhaps the first insult is worth 2x, the second 5x and the last 0x.

Now, stay with me here; I’m almost done. When one of those insults comes along, if we really can’t bring ourselves to discard it completely, we should try to evaluate it rationally and say to ourselves, I am prepared to feel hurt to a value of 2x and no more.

Once that 2x worth of hurt is spent, the thing is done and over and no longer matters a damn to anyone. Give it more “hurt value” and you are selling yourself short. Don’t waste emotional currency on insults from spouses. It’s just not worth it.

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