Healing anger when someone betrays you

Hey….probably good to write every now and again while I’m in the midst of praying my way instead of blogging once I’ve found my way through.

Tough news is just that: tough. No way around it. Not gonna cover it up. It can break your heart. It can make you angry. It can make you fall apart and wanna cave it for a good…..long……while.

I got some really tough news recently. Really tough.

I’m angry, hurt, bitter, feel betrayed and used, like I wanna scream. Someone I love has been hurt and my heart is tearing up inside.

I know right this moment I MUST make make a choice. Either get control of these emotions and the reality of what’s going on or they will control me. Either wallow around in this anger as justified as my ego argues, or establish in thought right this moment what is governing and ruling the hour and respond to THAT.

Sure, my ego is screaming. But more importantly, I am already fully aware of the calm, strong currents of Divine Love and its creation. And the duty of the moment is to shift thought THERE.

How? How can I or you or anybody push passed the emotions when you feel self justified? By taking a stand for reality..that is spiritual.

Mary Baker Eddy has helped me understand this a lot. She writes a ton about thought….how to train it and manage it..in Science and Health. A fave line states “Hold thought steadfastly to the enduring, the good and the true and you will bring these into your experience proportionably as to the occupancy of your thoughts.”

So with this situation then, my thought immediately reaches out.
I ask “What’s the enduring, the good and the true that I can hold to right this moment? What is really going on?”

The enduring….what is lasting…is the simple yet profound fact of the divine Being..God..and His idea..man….held inseparably in a panoply of Love. The only thing EVER going on is this conscious activity of Love being itself and expressing itself as creation…including you and me. None of us ever fall from this divine stronghold. None of us ever are separated for a moment from it.

Any human circumstance that suggests otherwise can be seen as the misrespresentation of this spiritual fact.

It really boils down to: what are you going to believe is really going on

Go back to that question….What’s enduring? what’s good? what’s true?

I’ve written a bit on the enduring.

What’s good and what’s true?

Good is the very nature of God and hence of man’s real character.

What’s true is the essence of that nature. Man is innocent, tender, loving, compassionate, strong, honest, obedient and principled.

So in praying, I defend this. It’s like getting into thought and refusing to believe the material picture as the truth of someone’s character. A mirage always seems real until you get up closer. There’s no water there. Same with personalities and character.

Working and praying like this demands you shift from reading the material picture to discerning the spiritual fact…to wrap our thoughts around reality…and defend the true nature of God and man even amidst the scenario where so much is arguing its opposite

You have to lift your thought OUT of the present situation blaring in your mind of what just happened by someone else to the person you love….You have to lift thought up to DEFEND with all your heart and soul and mind WHAT IS REALLY GOING ON IN REALITY.

I’m not saying ‘deny that this wrong doing occurred.’

I am saying forgive, love through it, because you defend the true nature of someone’s spirituality.

Now on the surface, this doesn’t erase the shock and pain of the circumstance. But it keeps thought off the pull to condemn, slander, or ridicule. It keeps thought out of the anger and hatred. Mind you, whenever anyone does anything that’s self centered, he or she ends up punishing themselves because he or she has to face their own thinking.  And while I hope for someone’s immediate wake up call to see the wrong that’s been done and to apologize for it and change his or her ways, sometimes we don’t see that change of thought. But we can still defend the true nature of man is steering that person’s behavior.

This is hard stuff sometimes….to defend another’s truth. Much argues against doing so. Much will try to sway you to feel justified in being angry at another. But it doesn’t help. Anger or resentment will never bring healing.

Reality is spiritual–Mary Baker Eddy writes in Science and Health. That doesn’t negate the realness of our now experience. But it does require that we lift it out of just the physical realm. The current of Truth is ALWAYS AT WORK….lifting thoughts up, redeeming MOMENTS, and helping each one of us forgive, forgive, forgive.

Why forgive when there’s so much wrong that’s been done?

Well, bring that question back home: have YOU ever done something you regretted that hurt another? Were you conscious you were hurting someone else and did it anyway? Too many of us can say yes to that question and I don’t care if it’s you scraped off the icing off the top of the cake your mom just made your sister for her birthday (true story I was a chubbo 8 year old and snuck sweets anywhere I could find them). …or if it’s worse….if it’s befriending someone you know is in the midst of another relationship to be a source of comfort to that person…all the while you justify you’re just being a friend to them and yet you know in your heart you’re falling for them and you end up really hurting yourself…(yep, another true story, happened when I was in college)….or even still more recently, I had to go silent for a while and just cut myself off from family for a while to get some ducks in a row that I needed to without a lot of unsolicited, though well meaning opinions…this hurt them much and I knew it would. But I had to take care of me….more on that later.

So see, I surely just thought of those 3 things right here sitting here without a whole lot of thought and there’s probably hundreds more I could write about…..We each have done things without intentionally trying to hurt someone else ……

So it’s vital in thought to steer it and keep it on what is true…that the presence of Love is the only atmosphere I dwell in or anyone else dwells in. That right at this moment, all of us are being influenced only by that which is honest, pure, genuine, and unselved. That at any moment, if our actions seem to stray, that we are not lost or victimized. That at any moment, anyone can be freed from a misinfluence or misunderstanding of his or her true nature.

It would seem that loneliness or rejectedness or feeling like a failure would dominate thought and lead it to commit acts that are foreign to our inclinations. But knowing this tendency, if someone’s actions do fall far from what you’d otherwise expect, you can and I can have compassion toward them and just keep holding their truth up in thought as we think of them: that this individual is a child of God and reflects only the substance of Love, of Truth, and as such is a wholely good and loving individual.

Defending reality will free your thought up from thinking any one individual is an evil doer. Evil is never the person …it is simply a mass of wrong thoughts that for a moment dominate another. But it is never that person’s true character or nature…..
Bare with me as it may seem I’m rambling.
This is the work of the hour that really matters…to heal and renew all of our thoughts about another. To lift thought out of the muck of judgement, criticism, attacking slander. And to keep thought on the truth of someone’s spirituality.

So as I do this in my own thinking, my anger lessens. And I begin to hold in thought only the true nature of this other one’s character. And this healing influence does settle my anger.

It will take more times praying like this….I know….to completely once and for all heal the sting that that anger and resentment try to persuade. But I will keep on. Because I know that all of us are Love’s creation. None of us intentionally wake up to harm another. And all of us can be freed from misinfluences. And most importantly, if we’ve been wronged by another, all of us can feel the healing comfort of divine Love’s embrace. That is our right. And it’s worth every ounce of our thought in defending.

More soon……