Lies, Take 2!!

Last week, this blog talked about using consciousness and openness as guides and love and forgiveness as anchors to help navigate trust waters in any relationship. That approach helped to alleviate the anger and hurt and help move forward with a relationship or ending it with dignity. Yeah well that all went to shit this week! I guess my old self got the best of me!! I continued to be hurt and angry and lashed out when I didn’t feel the other person cared, was indifferent to fixing the situation, and allowed everything else to take precedent, again feeling unimportant.

Letting go of the anger, the hurt and the attachment to the issue is really hard. Letting go of what you thought the relationship was is really hard. Whether it be a friendship, family or lover, how do you recover from dishonesty and trust again? Can you? Can we honestly forgive or is this the type of thing that gets thrown in someone’s face over and over again, causing deep resentment? Does it depend on how sorry someone is? Does it depend on remorse? Or is it doomed no matter what? Is this where the relationship ends?

I saw this quote this week that made me wonder. “Sometimes those why you thought would be a big part of your story end up being a chapter.” Perhaps the lying is all part of that chapter and when the chapter ends, so does the relationship. The really difficult part is that the reality of that quote hurts more than imagined. You start to be consumed by the relationship. Maybe you forget how the relationship treated you at its best because you focused on the toxicity of the present issue. You now focus on how inadequate you feel and filled with doubt about yourself. These feelings would push you to walk away.

Perhaps you focus on all the good times and try to rationalize this one issue as a blip. These feelings would push you to continue to work at forgiveness and not walk. There are some people who would say, “you can’t stay friends with someone who lies to you.” Can you? Have we all at one time or another rationalized a lie that we told by saying we didn’t want to hurt someone? Would we want someone to forgive us?

If this is family, how do you just walk away? I do know families who stop talking to each other, who justify it by saying that members “are dead to them.” I am not that type of person, I cannot and do not walk away from family no matter what. I may not like what someone did, but I don’t ever turn my back on family. In fact, I have trouble turning my back on anyone, even when they have hurt me. I have friends who have hurt me at times more than they will ever know. I am still friends with them, but I do put more of a wall up with them. I don’t share as much so I am not judged as much.

As the feelings of inadequacy and doubt creeped in this week, I realized that means another layer of a wound needed to be healed. I began to wonder if that was what this is all about. Learning to forgive more versus giving forgiveness lip service but holding a grudge. Learning to walk away is probably part of the lesson as well. Giving up the attachment to what I thought I had with someone, giving up the focus that the relationship had in my life may all be part of the learning.

I’m not sure yet, but I do know this followed my philosophy of the cha-cha of life. Take a step forward, perhaps one backward and then move side to side.