When we combine unconscious patterns of relating in ways that cause us harm, with a firm belief that we are incapable of causing harm to others, we have a disastrous mixture, because we then tend to believe that we are as helpless as we were during our childhood. We fail to recognize or feel our anger and rage because anger feels dangerous and threatening to us, but when we don’t feel it, we can’t use it appropriately to protect us from harm. Anger is a normal human emotion, and if we fail to accept that being the victim of the worst kind of hurt and pain has made us more, rather than less angry, we run the risk of believing that our experiences made us “better” people because being abused taught us to be gentle and kind. Certainly there is nothing wrong with being gentle and kind, but if we attribute those qualities to being victimized as children, and we do not recognize the depth of our anger and instead see ourselves as incapable of hurting someone else, we cannot be fully human, because in order to be fully human we have to accept that if we are capable of doing good, we are also capable of causing harm.
Some people may cause more good than harm, or the other way around, but we are all born with the capacity for both, which is an evolutionary necessity because any organism that's unable to inflict harm is destined to die out due to its inability to defend itself. We need the ability to cause harm in order to survive. It doesn't necessarily mean we have to use that ability but we do need to possess it, and we need to recognize it exists because we won't be able to use something we don't know we have. And if we believe we're unable to inflict harm, if we believe the ability to cause harm does not exist in us, then we are also likely to believe, consciously or unconsciously, that we can't defend ourselves against harm. If we harbor a belief that we cannot defend ourselves while continuing to place ourselves in unsafe situations and relationships, we remain trapped in the role of perpetual victim.
Internalized Anger
I believe that the conflict between an unacknowledged desire to hurt others, and the belief that our experiences taught us to be gentle and kind to others may often result in the deepest pain, because those of us who believe we do not want to hurt others often display behaviors characteristic of internalized anger. Suicide threats, self-mutilation, withdrawal and distancing are behaviors that often communicate rage, and that leave others feeling helpless, hurt, frightened and confused. When we deny any intent to harm others by these actions and insist that we are only harming ourselves, we are communicating our refusal to acknowledge and deal with our underlying rage in less destructive ways. Denial of the impact of our behavior on others is often as damaging as the behavior itself.
Therapists who collude with clients to avoid the discomfort of examining our own hurtful behavior are not being kind, they are being misleading and irresponsible. For our own wellbeing and that of our significant others, it is necessary to understand and to accept that all human beings are capable of inflicting pain, and that we all do so, whether intentionally or inadvertently. And whether we care to believe it or not, we all inflict pain intentionally at one time or another. Even the name-calling behaviors we learned as young children are intentional attempts to cause pain, because we would not engage in that behavior if we did not want to hurt someone‘s feelings.
