Why Live 1.7

1.7 Wounding Me Will Not Heal You.

“It was just a prank, learn to take a joke"

Was the response every time I told family members that they did not have the right to shame me, hurt me, or betray my trust.

People seek retaliation and revenge as a means to have immediate emotional gratification. 

Patience does not seem to come easily to people who are still hurting emotionally. So they justify their impatience with excuses and self importance.

However, wounding others does not “teach them a lesson”, it hurts them and now adds another thing for them to try to survive through. Making it even more confusing and difficult to figure out how to fit in socially.

People who get pleasure from wounding others are looking to view themselves as important, special, or righteous. But they really are just weak emotionally, ignorant of the real causes behind people’s behavior, and empowered by self delusion.

It’s instinct to fight back, I get it. When humans live outside of society that retaliation response helps them to survive. So we all have the urge to retaliate. No sense in trying to deny this fact.

But if you’re reading this book right now then you are not surviving off the land and you are not fighting to stay alive on a daily basis. So that urge, that instinct, is no longer beneficial in modern society.

Yes, we are still animals but that doesn’t mean we can excuse away barbaric behavior.

Using violence, spreading lies, social manipulation, and gas lighting are all examples of emotionally weak behavior.

I was an adult before I heard of EQ. It’s like IQ but instead of evaluating your intelligence, it evaluated your emotional abilities. There are different tests offered to test your EQ online with varying ways of measuring it.

Now a days you can find many books on the subject and I highly recommend that you read a few. I always recommend reading books to learn new skills!

We are social beings and as such we will always be pulled emotionally by those around us. It helps to understand what emotions are (the mammalian brain communicating) and what messages you are internalizing (your values and beliefs) so that you can then adjust or adapt your habits and behaviors.

Think about this:

Our first experiences are obviously as helpless infants. The neocortex (the “you" you identify as) is not fully formed yet so there is no filter from your desires to your behaviors.

When a person can’t overcome an oppression, the brain adapts to survive by accepting the behavior as acceptable. 

You see this clearly in households where violence is common and valued. I actually witnessed a new mother start to violently hit her toddler in the face with a metal spatula because she said her father used to hit her in the face with his leather belt. Her toddler brain had internalized that being beat in the face was acceptable parental behavior. 

The human brain is capable of amazing things such as visualizing experiences we’ve never actually had- that’s how we get our favorite fictional books.

It is capable of mistaking a rubber hand for our own when hit with a mallet.

And yes, it is capable of wounding others for our own pleasure.

But you don’t  have to be a mindless primate chasing after every one of your urges.

You are a modern human capable of reading, self evaluating, and of choosing healthy habits regardless of your emotional urges.

So the next time you think about “pranking" someone to get back at them or have the urge to hit someone because they aren’t acting in the ways that you want them to- stop and think.

Your actions will cause a new emotional wound in the other person but will not heal whatever pain you are currently figuring out. 

A short term surge of joy is a really stupid excuse for hurting another person.