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Yes, he looked harassed and driven, sullen and weak. I should have liked to start treating him there and then, for I know that pitiful young men like that are dangerous as soon as they are let loose on mankind.
I never feel more given to than when you take from me— when you understand the joy I feel giving to you. And you know my giving isn’t done to put you in my debt, but because I want to live the love I feel for you. To receive with grace may be the greatest giving. There’s no way I can separate the two. When you give to me, I give you my receiving. When you take from me, I feel so given to. —“Given To” (1978) by Ruth Bebermeyer from the album Given To
Our dialogue continued, with him expressing his pain for nearly twenty more minutes, and me listening for the feeling and need behind each statement. I didn’t agree or disagree. I received his words, not as attacks, but as gifts from a fellow human willing to share his soul and deep vulnerabilities with me. Once the gentleman felt understood, he was able to hear me explain my purpose for being at the camp. An hour later, the same man who had called me a murderer was inviting me to his home for a Ramadan dinner.
Our attention is focused on classifying, analyzing, and determining levels of wrongness rather than on what we and others need and are not getting. Thus if my partner wants more affection than I’m giving her, she is “needy and dependent.” But if I want more affection than she is giving me, then she is “aloof and insensitive.”
For example, instead of “Violence is bad,” we might say instead, “I am fearful of the use of violence to resolve conflicts; I value the resolution of human conflicts through other means.”
It would be in the interest of kings, czars, nobles, and so forth that the masses be educated in a way that renders them slavelike in mentality. The language of wrongness, should, and have to is perfectly suited for this purpose: the more people are trained to think in terms of moralistic judgments that imply wrongness and badness, the more they are being trained to look outside themselves—to outside authorities—for the definition of what constitutes right, wrong, good, and bad. When we are in contact with our feelings and needs, we humans no longer make good slaves and underlings.
I can handle your telling me what I did or didn’t do. And I can handle your interpretations, but please don’t mix the two.
When we notice how much of our lives we’ve missed and how little we have responded to the call of our own soul, we may get angry.
Depression is the reward we get for being “good.”
Requests may sound like demands when unaccompanied by the speaker’s feelings and needs.
I was asked to meet with forty students who had been deemed “socially and emotionally maladjusted.” I was struck by the way such labels serve as self-fulfilling prophecies. If you were a student who had been thus labeled, wouldn’t it just give you permission to have some fun at school by resisting whatever was asked of you?
