beware the blind side of kindness

I read so many memes about being kind. I seem to be inundated with them lately.  Be kind, be kind!

Here is the problem!  The people that take such memes to heart are the ones that already are kind! 

They are the people that smile at strangers.  

They are the people that watch their words and don’t say things that are unkind or meant to hurt.  

They don’t call people names and verbally abuse other.  They are the people that do good deeds to others like phoning or texting or emailing their friends regularly. 

They are the people who have tears in their eyes when they point out that you have inadvertently crossed one of their boundaries and caused them pain.

These people don’t need to be reminded to be kind! they already walk the path of kindness! 

I find it interesting that the people who need the advice to “be kind” are the very ones whose character defect is that they treat others with a distinct lack of kindness.  

• They always show their grumpy face to the world.
• They complain about everything and everyone.  
• No service is good enough.
• They find fault with everything.
• They complain about every injustice whether real or only perceived.
• They regularly ignore and neglect people and expect others to pick up the slack. 
• They have no trouble using emotionally abusive language if they feel they have not gotten what they want or expect from others.  And they act like their expectations are entitlements.
• They shun and reject anyone who does not meet their standards or especially anyone who dares to point out to them that they were unkind.

For some reason these people remain unaffected by all the reminders to be kind! 

• Do they really think that those reminders are not meant for them? 
• Do they feel that the world owes them kindness but they have no need to return any kindness out to the world?

For years and years I beat my head against a figurative brick wall being kind to people only to be casually shown abuse and disrespect in return.  

I am learning that this is called “toxic normal”.   It is when bad behavior / unkind behaviour / emotionally abusive behaviour is so frequently practiced upon us that we accept it as the way things are supposed to be. We accept it because we have never known any differently or any better.

I think I am a slow learner.   But finally, with my head bleeding from the pounding, I am learning that it is not enough for me to be kind, I have to also expect others to be kind to me.  If I don’t hold them accountable for their behaviour they will surely continue with their toxic normal because they simply have gotten used to getting away with it. 

I can’t force these people to be kind.  A million memes to “be kind” will not penetrate their thick skin of self-assuredness that they have a special right to be unkind simply because it suits them, or servers them in some emotionally depraved way. 

However self-kindness, the other side of the kindness coin, means that most assuredly I do not have to allow these people into my life or back into my life as long as they believe I, by my virtue of kind heartedness, am an easy target for their unkindness.  

Just because I am kind does not mean that I have to continue to be an emotional punching bag for others to work out their emotional pain upon.  I respect their pain, I acknowledge their pain and I even sympathize with their pain. However that does not give them the right to inflict pain upon me.  My kindness must stop when people start to think that my kindness makes me weak or makes me an easy target or makes me a convenient victim or makes me abusable.

So next time I see one of the “be kind” memes I will be kind, I will be kind to myself and maintain my healthy boundaries for self-protection.  And I will be kind to the people who treat me with kindness and respect.  And I will be kind to strangers and greet them with smile.  And I will even be kind to the people who come to me acknowledging their past unkindness and asking to make atonement.   Why?  Because I know that the act of wanting to make atonement means they have done some personal healing work. 

What I will not do is show kindness to people who abuse me with words or actions by making myself their victim.  I will with kindness however give them the space to feel my absence so that they can maybe realize that have some healing work to do.

Renate Dundys Marrello

2018 – 10 – 29

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Post Estrangement: Thoughts about Friendship

Danial Laport quote: 

"On our dark days, our exhausted days we may think that no one is celebrating us…but there is someone thanking you for something or showing you how good you are."

I think I have had way too few of these kinds of friends or relationships in my life. I came to realize this when the darkness of shadow entered my life in the form of a traumatic rejection. That was when I learned what a shallow support system I really had.

Looking back I see that my life has been filled with people eager and willing to tell me all the ways I have let them down, who have gleefully pointed out my failures and my faults, who have compared me to others and found me lacking. And I accepted this because I believed they were reflecting the truth at me. I had come to believe I deserved their disparagement. Most of them disappeared from my life the day the shadow entered my life and I never heard from them again. I fought for my recovery with less than a handful of friends who stood by me. And some of those remaining friends I lost when I started to become stronger. Some I lost when I started to say no to any abusive put downs. Some I lost when I enforced my newly learned boundaries. And some I lost when they became envious of me for going after my dreams.

As I got better, as healing transformed me and I started to recognize that maybe I did have worth. I also was given the gift of some incredible new friendships. Friendships that lifted me up, that saw through my grief and into my heart filled with kindness and a longing to be loved. They celebrated my moments of progress, they supported me thought the darker days, they encouraged me to continue my healing path because I was worthy of being healed.

Finally, over time, I think I have come to realize that I deserve a better class of friends. I have created a different definition of what a friend is and in the process I have brought those kinds of people into my life.

It took me a while, but I now recognize who those friends are, and they are in the most unlikely places and showed up at the most unlikely times. I think of them as my angels of survival. Without their presence I might not be here today. I did not hear their messages as clearly when my mind was clouded with negative and critical self-images. However, I did feel their healing balm. Now I feel the warmth of their loving acceptance and that sustains me through my darker days. 

I have also created a definition of what friends don’t do and now recognize those would be friends are not really friends but rather people looking for someone else to bolster their ego. I have found a name for them; my emotional vampires. They are the people that I know that I need to be very careful around for they envy my happiness and they feed off of my despair. They are the ones that claim the loudest that they love me and then stab me in the back with actions that prove otherwise.

Their words on one day may say “come here I care” and then on other days their words and their actions trigger my “you have just been emotionally attacked” warning button and I feel pushed away.

They are not to be trusted because they are inconsistent and that inconsistency is based on the unease they feel when they feel that their expectations are not being met by me. They have come to see me as the solution to their self-esteem problem regardless of what the cost may be to me. In effect they are saying it is easier to coerce my help feeding their ego needs than to find a way to heal themselves.

I keep my emotional vampires at a self-respectful distance. I wear my thickest emotional armour when I am near them so that I don’t get deluded into letting my guard down.

I still sometimes have a dark day, days when I am emotionally exhausted, days when I think I am on this journey of healing all alone, and then out of the blue one of my angels, says the most incredible thing, or lets me know how I have touched their hearts, or thanks me for something that I did or said that touched or helped them. And I feel uplifted for they helped me to see the goodness in myself that sometimes my inner critic fails to recognize, especially on a dark day.

Thank you to all the friends that I think of as the angels in my life.

Renate Dundys Marrello

2018 – 10 – 10

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Post Estrangement: Reflections on this Thanksgiving Day

I think of this day as a day for giving thanks for the blessings that we have. Sometimes this is hard to do when we have to face the things that we don’t have.

For me family is something I value so much. In my life I have done so much that has been uncomfortable for me to preserve family.

• I have neglected my own needs to keep family intact.
• I have accepted disrespect to myself, to keep family together. 
• I have made myself and my needs small to keep family together 

...and in the end it did not make any difference. Our family disintegrated when I was so worn out from trying to be everything to everyone that I became unable to give anymore. My spirit was so broken there was nothing more I could give without healing me first. 

The first break happened when someone used external events; that could have brought us closer if handled differently, to divide the whole family between those who would talk to me and those who would not. 

Then, as over time some of those relationships were reborn, others fell apart when it became clear that in healing I was no longer the totally self-sacrificing person that I used to be. 

• I dared to ask to be treated with respect! 
• I had the audacity to ask for equally divided emotional labour in maintaining relationships!
• for the first time in my life I had the temerity to say NO and to speak up for myself!

And some responded by walking away and others with confusion as they no longer knew how to relate to someone no longer willing to give and give and give until it killed my inner spirit.

As I ponder this, I think that many people see Thanksgiving as an event to ponder where they have been shortchanged and to manipulate events into giving them more. They see Thanksgiving as I time to tally the balance sheet and claim that they have not received enough.

So how can I be different? 

I can be different by seeing all that I have lost, all that I had hoped for that I have not been given and still give thanks! 

I have been given the gift of time, time for learning and reflection!

What a bountiful gift!

It has taught me to never take anything for granted because even those things you cherish most deeply and strive so hard to protect can be taken away.

I have been given the gift of knowledge and emotional healing!

What a bountiful blessing!

In coming to understand how personality and character affects our relationships, I have had such an eye opening experience. Learning that just because I feel empathy for others; that others do not necessarily feel the same way towards me; has allowed me to come out of the naivety that kept me beating my head against a brick wall and wondering why I had a headache.

I have been given the gift of mindfulness, of being more aware of the incredible gift of life and how precious each day is. I can look at this moment and see the beauty in it, even in the midst of heartache and sadness and regret.

I can see the gift of having my journal writing to connect with my innermost thoughts and keep me focused on healing as a journey rather than just a single event.

I have the blessing of being able to write my stories and connect with my grandson Walter; and even though I don’t know him at all in the physical realm I have a deep connection with him on the emotional realm.

I have been blessed with finding that I am not alone in this journey of recovery and that there are many other brave souls like me trying to make sense of all that has been lost. 

I am blessed that I did not end up going to the end of my life journey without learning all these powerful lessons; lessons that I would never have felt the need to learn if I had not endured the trauma of being alienated and discarded.

And so this Thanksgiving I give thanks to all the people who threw me away, they have given me so much more than what they withheld.

• You withheld your love and I learned how to love myself and feel deeply connected with and loved by the Divine
• You withheld your respect and I learned how to respect myself and treat myself with kindness.
• You withheld your compassion and I learned the magic of self-care and self-compassion.
• You withheld a connection because I would not change myself enough to please you and I learned how to be authentic with myself and that I too needed to be able to feel my emotions rather than sublimating my feelings to ensure your pleasure.
• You withheld relationship building honesty to conceal your unending need for more, and I learned how to be brutally honest with myself about my character, your character and the real nature of our relationship that was based on mask wearing pretenses.

I have gained so much more from being tossed away than I ever expected to gain.

Out of my sorrow has grown this bounteous gift of awareness and understanding and even acceptance that this is how it was meant to be for my own successful transformation to a person who loves and cares for and accepts herself enough to expect to be treated with the same degree of kindness that I have always so willingly offered to others.

Renate Dundys Marrello

2018 – 10 – 08

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Post Estrangement: Did I Know You?

I am starting to think that for me now, at this point in time, there is a huge difference between holding a fond memory of someone and knowing them. 

I believe rather there are people that I used to think I knew, but who in hindsight turned out to be people I really did not know at all.  More and more I realize that the people who have abandoned me, I clearly did not KNOW them. 

If I really knew them I would have known they were unhappy,

If I really knew them I would have known they were upset with me,

I would have known that they had issues with something I had done; because when you really KNOW someone you have a relationship with them where they tell you things!  

The fact that they did not tell me things, that they kept secrets about how they really felt about me, meant I did not really know them at all. I only knew the mask they chose to wear while in my presence, I only knew who they pretended to be when with me.

And after they left, I only know the thoughts they harboured about me as I discovered from the names they called me and the way they talked about me behind my back.  

NO, that is not “knowing someone”.  


That is having been in someone’s life and not knowing them at all. 

That is having someone leave your life and discovering how little you meant to them and what they secretly thought of you.
It means discovering that they did not care enough about you to consider your feelings.  
And sometimes it even means discovering how little respect they had for you. 

Sometimes we get to know the truth of them, only from the manner in which they leave us.

Renate Dundys Marrello
2018 – 10 – 05

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My Daily Reflection: Respect

A quote I read today:  

“treat people the way you want to be treated, 

talk to people the way you want to be talked to. 

Respect is earned not given”

I can see the wonderful optimism of this quote however I can also see that it is not reality.  We can only choose to give respect, to live our own actions of respect.  We cannot control whether others will reciprocate. 

Even if we do everything right we cannot always earn respect. Yes we may deserve respect but not everyone is willing to give respect even to those who have earned or deserve it.

We can only control our own behaviour but we cannot control whether or not others will give respect to us.

Respect is a gift that some give but it is always their choice!

There are others who withhold respect in an effort to control us or manipulate us into giving them something they feel they are entitled to.  They withhold respect because they use respect as a currency to gain them something they feel they deserve or some expectation they have.

Some of the most painful moments in my life came from expecting to be treated with respect simply because I did the right thing or the good thing.  Only to discover that others did not feel the need to treat me with respect even though I acted with good intentions and with integrity.

Those are the people who use withholding of respect as a weapon to gain something for themselves.

It would be nice if respect were something everyone felt was a universal gift.   But sadly, there are those who do not live the golden rule. They expect respect to be given to them but treat others with disrespect.

Human nature and human behaviour remains very challenging for me to understand.

Renate Dundys Marrello

2018 – 10 – 03

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My Daily Reflections: Pondering Responsibility

Quote I read recently:  
“no one wants to take responsibility”

I am starting to wonder, if everyone waiting for someone else to take responsibility first, is part of the problem in relationships?

Here is me all these years hoping that others would just somehow know that I wanted to be treated better, and hoping that they would start to treat me better! But I never bothered to do the work until now to figure out how to teach them how to treat me better.

So does that mean that in some small way I am complicit for being treated badly because I did not take responsibility for learning and doing what I needed to do to create a better platform for respect.

If I had done the work I am doing now when I was in my twenties and my thirties, how would my relationships have been different?

I can't go back obviously in to the past and make changes, but I can take ownership that my failure to do so actually contributed to the relationship problems that I experienced. I allowed it to happen.

That is a hard pill to swallow.

But if I can accept that I was remiss in not doing what it took to change me, can I continue to blame others for not changing their behaviour when they did not get any clear indication from me that their behaviour needed changing?

My expectation was for them to change, and I felt hurt when they did not change, but in concealing my disappointment and in not expressing my needs with clarity I actually implied acceptance of their negative behaviours.  OUCH!

If I had given them clear indications of my needs and then had those needs rejected, I might have lost the relationship.  I think it was the fear of losing the relationship that transformed into a lack of my taking responsibility for changing me and correcting my “route of least resistance”; which was to accept that which was unacceptable.  

I think taking personal responsibility is hard work.  It is challenging work. It is scary work!  But I do believe it is an important part of healing work. 

Renate Dundys Marrello

2018 – 09 – 26


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My Daily Reflections: Pity the Bully

So many bullied people 

It means there are so many bullies.

Why oh why are there so many bullies?

What sorrow creates the bully?

I heard once that the child who is bullied

By their emotionally wounded parents

Becomes a target for the school yard bully.

But imagine, what pain the bully

Must have had to endure

To become a bully.

Bullies all around

Bullies at home

Bullies in friendships

Bullies in families

Bullies at school

Bullies in the workplace

So many bullies

Bullies all around

Why does our society work on this level?

Why do people like to exert their power?

Why do the sensitive souls have to languish

In anguish?

The struggle to survive all the bullies

Seems at times insurmountable!
Bullied all my life I strove

To reach my children with love,

To teach empathy and compassion

And yet I raised another bully,

Who started bullying me at age of 7. 

I thought it was just childish ignorance

A lack of comprehension.

Teaching kindness did not work

Unconditional acceptance failed

Love lavished never solved anything

Demonstrations of compassion failed

Or maybe I failed to make myself understood

The taunts got worse as she matured
Always comparing me to other parents

Always I was the least satisfactory of all.

Always I was the one that caused her

Embarrassment simply for being me.

Always the message that I was not good enough

Always the message that if only I were different

Then maybe she could tolerate me.

Bullies, bullies all around me.

First the elders

Then the peers

And finally the younger generation

The common denominator me

What is it about me that invites

The bully to enact

Their hostility upon me?

Is it my meekness,

My humility, my desire to get along?

Is it my lack of boundaries

Or my desire for peace?

Why can’t we all just get along?

Why must my spirit be stomped beneath

Cruel words of judgment and comparison

For you to feel relief?

Slowly I learn that maybe my pain

Is less than your pain. 

My pain is to suffer at your hands.

Your pain is that you only find relief

When harming me and others like me.

My pain evaporates when I recognize

My strength,

My empowerment,

My ability to rise above your taunts,

To walk away.

As I recognize the value

Of my own goodness,

My kindness,

My ability to love even when hurting

As I heal

I transform

Things become more clear to me

On my path of love and compassion.

Your need to cause me pain

Is an illusion that never ends.

You believe that you prolong my torment

Never realizing

That in doing so

You are the source of your own torment.

 

Your only relief is finding another to torment

And then another
And then yet another.

For the hole of emptiness within,

The one that drives you to hurt others

Is a never-ending pit of self-deception.

Unexplored reasons for your anger

The invisible rut of your existence.
Suppressed and unexpressed emotions

Leaking out in hurtful speak.

I used to feel sorry for myself

Until I came to understand

That your life is worse than mine.

I only experience your hate filled

Excretions of pain

On those occasions when

I am in your presence.

When the vileness

Of your inner thoughts

Passes your lips

In outward condemnation.

Or sometimes

When I reflect upon,

Our past together

And the nature of the hurting things

You said or did to me

You however live it constantly

Unendingly,

Even in your unknowingness,

Your buried hate is your soul mate,

It is your constant companion.

You have no relief.

You cannot walk away from yourself.
Every time you look into the mirror

You see that person who copes in life

By tormenting others.

Do you ever wonder

Why you drive people away?

Do you ever wonder where

Those mean thoughts originate?

Do you ever wonder about

Your own dissatisfaction?

Or does hurting others make you blind

To your own deep inner hurting?

How would you respond

To know that I pity you?

To discover that I

Would rather be the victim

Of your bitter spitefulness

Than live with the anger

You carry buried

Festering away inside, 

The way you are doomed to do.

I can compassionately love you

My tormentor

Knowing that my torment

Though open and apparent

Is healable, transmutable,

Transformational.

Whereas yours is deceptive,

The cesspool of existence

You call your happy life

Influenced by unresolved issues

Things you fear to look upon

Things you keep buried in darkness

Because they are the essence

Of who you have allowed

Yourself to become.

Your vindictiveness

First a place to hide away from

Emotions too scary to face

Has become your prison.

I pity you,

The bullies of my life.

And I am grateful every day

To be your victim,

And especially I am thankful

That I am not you.

  
By Renate Dundys Marrello
2018 - 09 - 15 


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