SWAPPING HEADS

It’s not hard to grasp the idea that if you’ve been victimized as a child, until you learn to protect yourself—and come to know that you’re worth protecting—you’re liable to keep stumbling into situations in which you’ll be victimized again.   But what can be harder to identify are the mechanisms by which you open yourself to misuse and abuse.

For much of my life I held an ideal about living harmoniously with everyone who happened into my life. When someone cut me to the quick, I’d get appropriately angry. I’d rail at them in my mind to work off steam, then confront them as diplomatically as I knew how. But if nothing got resolved, I’d find a way to “swap heads” with them. Suddenly I’d find myself seeing everything from their point of view, intuiting what they thought and felt and why they’d done what they had—or, at least, imagining I did. Then my anger would subside, and I’d experience a sense of personal transformation. I’d feel humbled, clear, and whole. In this rapt state, I no longer felt vulnerable, so forgiving and mending fences came easily. This transformation always felt like a spiritual passage. There was only one problem…well, two, actually: I wasn’t really invulnerable—and the other person hadn’t changed. In fact, now I was more vulnerable because in the process of identifying with and forgiving the other person, I came to feel an even deeper sense of connection with them, so that when they repeated whatever behavior had wounded me in the first place, which they were bound to do because they hadn’t taken any responsibility, I was even more deeply hurt than before. The cumulative effect of experiences like this was to make me feel that the harder I tried to be a good person, the more misery I brought on myself.

I now believe that the reason the experience of “self-transcendence” transported me the way it did was that it allowed me to feel hopeful in situations where, in fact, there was no hope and created the illusion, on a symbolic level, that I’d resolved my childhood predicament. What underlay this hope was the apprehension that if I could transform my feelings, so could the other person—hadn’t I just proved it could be done?—and underlying this apprehension lay the misguided assumption that, like me, they would want and aspire to.

I suppose the bottom line was that I kept trying to extend to other people the same degree of empathy and understanding that I wanted for myself, not so much because I expected a return, but rather because by offering it, I felt myself creating the possibility of such empathy and forgiveness in a world that hadn’t admitted such a possibility to me.