Ch. 4: What's Wrong with Everyone Else? Grievance, Resentment and Blame
If we took a random snapshot of our attention at any given moment on any given day, there's a strong chance we'd find it comfortably entrenched in thoughts of how to control to control and change the people, places and things in our personal world. We love to ruminate on the people, places and things responsible for our life not being the way we want it to be. The way it should be. We delight in rehashing all that's to blame for our discontent.
It's a negative thinking loop that rages against grievance and assigns blame. In a word, it is our complaints. This particular flavour of negative thinking was my personal favourite. When I relapse, it's still my flavour of choice. I spend more time than I'd like to acknowledge rehashing the situations and people I was most bothered by. How certain people were blocking me from being happy and what I needed to do about it. How I was going to fix it.
I argued many cases in the courtroom of my own mind, proving why my frustration, anger and discontent was justified. Why it all made sense. I missed a lot of present moments, lost in this tsunami of what I didn't like and what I was going to do to change it while life was passing me by.
Railing at others harms us most. Each time a situation arises that we don't like or agree with, we are convinced that this is THE situation. This situation is at the core of our suffering. If we can solve and control this one, get the other person to understand and change what they were doing wrong in this situation, then we would be happy and free and done with having to control and fix our situation. Then we would be okay.
Unfortunately, every grievance is the ONE, and we wouldn't dare let go of any of them. We never get to the bottom of the pile and the time never actually comes when we can stop trying to control and fix our situation. When we are trapped inside a blaming loop, we are shoring up our convictions about what's causing our suffering. Solidifying our rightness and the others wrongness. Essentially creating our own hell.
With all our righteous rightness, we succeed only at building ourselves a cage of anger, dissatisfaction and victimhood in which we then have to live. We've proven our airtight case against the other but at the expense of our own wellbeing. The other person, situation or institution may be wrong as we see it, but we are the ones suffering, no matter who's to blame. We keep lighting ourselves on fire hoping the other will die of smoke inhalation.
An Endless Search for Pain Relief
So, what are we trying to accomplish with all this self-inflicted suffering? Is there a positive intention anywhere in this painful process? Yes. Obsessively rehashing our grievances is a primitive and flawed attempt to make ourselves feel better. In relentlessly thinking and talking about who and what that we didn't like, we are trying to understand what happened and get it into a narrative that feels manageable.
Through our replays, we are trying to transform a negative situation into something acceptable. Trying to get okay with what doesn't feel okay. Our complaining are simultaneously an attempt to empower ourselves. We feel aggrieved, mistreated or bad and so we puff up our chest with our righteous indignation and chime on about how wrongly we've been treated. It's a way of proving to ourselves and whoever will listen that we are deserving of better treatment. We matter and should not be treated this way.
We keep thinking about it until we prove it to ourselves, which sometimes never happens. When we are feeling small and life feels unfair, we focus on who's to blame. How we are right and they are wrong, all in an attempt to feel less victimized, bigger and better. Ruminating on what's causing our unhappiness is an attempt to contain and compartmentalize what hurts. If we can get the right conceptual packaging around our hurt and anger, we'll be able to get it into a tidy box, put it on the shelf and keep it there.
If we can understand and explain what's making us feel bad and why, the hope is it might not feel so bad. When we're busy griping to ourselves, we believe that somewhere in this rabbit hole of complaints, maybe way down at the bottom of it, we'll find the relief we desperately crave. But the more we scratch, the itchier and bloodier it gets. The deeper down the rabbit hole we plunge, searching for relief, the farther away we get from it.
In some elementary way, we are wired to obsess over what's bothering us, because as Eckhart Tolle suggests, we associate complaining with getting what we want. As children, if we throw a temper tantrum it will often lead to a change in the situation we are railing against. If we complain loud or long enough, we can usually wear our parents down so we get what we want. As adults we operate within this same framework. If we whine enough about our situation, eventually this situation will change.
Someone, somewhere, maybe the universe or god, or the other person involved will do something to make it better for us as it happened in the past. But because it's no longer our parents we're fighting with, who presumably care about our unhappiness or at least don't want to have to listen to it. Because it's reality we are pleading with, a reality that isn't interested with our complaints or will be worn down, we are fresh out of luck. Our endless complaints remain within us, against us and against reality. Useless when it comes to improving our situation.
Rehashing our grievances is a way to get our suffering heard and understood. By obsessively revisiting what feels unfair, we provide ourselves with an undivided and unconditional audience for our complaints. Something we don't often receive from those we believe we should care. In serving as an ear for our own suffering, we're offering ourselves concern, validation, affirmation and ultimately love. Our grievances are grieved within the presence we desperately crave, one that never grows tired of our upset. Yet, despite the positive intentions behind our incessant self complaining, we benefit more if we take a good look at whether it's accomplishing our goals.
Ask yourself: Is it true that I feel more validated as a result of thinking about what hurts? Is it true that I feel more empowered by thinking about what's unfair? Does thinking about my discontent, free me from my discontent? Do my angry thoughts transform my anger into something more peaceful?
If you're like most people, the answer is a clear NO, all around.
Fighting Reality Internally Doesn't Change It
Like the Greek God Sisyphus, who is condemned for eternity to roll a giant rock up a steep hill only to have it roll back down each time he neared the top, we mortals chase after a life in which everything is exactly the way we want it to be. But like Sisyphus, we never actually get to the top of that mountain or create that life in which we agree with or are pleased with. As soon as we are pleased with one thing, another thing falls apart. And so life goes. The bad news is that life will always continue being life with it's joys, sorrows, irritations and satisfactions. The good news is that when we change our mind, change our relationship with our thoughts, how we experience life's lifeness also changes.
Furthermore, when our attention is focused outward, thinking about what's making us miserable, we are perpetuation an unhealthy dependence on external circumstances. The belief that our wellbeing is at the mercy of our situation leaves us powerless and frustrated in a constant state of fragility because we can never control our external reality. Convincing ourselves that the rest of the world is forever the cause for our internal agitation, leaves us desperately trying to control everyone and everything and orchestrate a life that always goes our way. IOW, a life that doesn't exist.
As long as we are focusing on what's wrong with our external world, we're perpetuating our own misery. There's only one thing I know that's true 100% of the time, when we fight with reality, reality wins. We use our grievances as weapons to fight reality and true to form, reality wins - always. Which means we lose.
Freedom from your grievance-focused thinking becomes possible when you discover that your internal fight with reality has not, and is not going to change it. When you stop living in a state of aggression against the way things are, bracing against what is, you discover acceptance and a different level of peace. It doesn't mean you stop trying to change life when it's not to your liking, but it does mean you choose to stop fighting against the fact that life is the way it is right now. This is reality - like it or not.
Whatever is bothering you on the outside, no matter how juicy a problem, is really a doorway to something threatening you on the inside. We change our relationship with our thoughts when we turn our attention away from what our thoughts are talking about, who and what we resent, and turn towards ourselves and our experience. The idea here is not to shift from blaming someone or something else to blaming yourself, but rather to use your grieved thoughts as opportunities to get in touch with your own feelings and fears and gain a deeper understanding of the real problem.
Once you accept that you're suffering is not actually caused by the newest object of your discontent, you're less likely to feel victimized by life situations and less inclined to suffer. When you stop believing the thoughts that are telling you that the other is the problem, the other is making you miserable, the other needs to change for you to be okay, then the other becomes less problematic. When a complaint or resentment next appears, turn your attention away from the object of disapproval and what you think is causing you unhappiness. Look within and ask yourself 1) what feelings hurts and fears this situation or person triggering in me? Does this situation put me in touch with humiliation, inadequacy or loss? Does it make me feel unloved, unseen and unimportant? Or how? What does this feeling remind me of?
We don't experience suffering, rather we suffer our experience. Our situation is NOT what causes us to suffer. What I'm suggesting here isn't meant to minimize the brutality of what we sometimes have to live through. Our situations can be monstrously challenging. I've walked through situations that were so painful I wasn't sure I could get through them. And likewise, I've accompanied others through such circumstances.
More than anything else, what determines whether or not we consistently suffer, whether or not we are okay, is the way we interact with our life's situations, which ultimately reflects the relationship we create with our own experience. Your grievances are your teachers here to show you what your real suffering is about and where real freedom can be found. Contentment becomes possible when you give yourself permission to stop focusing and fixating on who and what stands in the way of it and get on with the business of creating contentment no matter what anyone else is up to.
By paying attention to your own side of the street as opposed to cleaning up all the other streets in the neighbourhood, you will discover that you can be content in a life that includes things you don't like and wish were different. Stop thinking so much about the problem. Taking everyone else's inventory. Diagnosing and repairing the cause of your discontent and instead turn your focus to your own responses and attitude. Attend to who you want to be in a world that will always be not entirely to your liking. Then you can create a good life without changing anyone or anything. Challenges then become opportunities to do something different, be somebody different within it and stretch beyond your habitual patterns.
You can even learn to look forward to problematic situations and people as opportunities to practice being who you want to be - your best self. When you turn the lens back on yourself, you reclaim your power and regain the right and dignity to choose what your participation in life will be.
Failing our way to Freedom
What starts us on the path to freedom is failure. Very little of the obsessive thinking, rehashing, ruminating, rehearsing, proving, scripting, controlling and mock dialoguing that goes on inside our echo chambers actually makes much of anything better in the relationships or situations we are obsessing about. Almost none of it creates real change. In fact, our ruminating makes relationships worse as we are more entrenched in what we perceive as wrong and less present and available to what is actually happening.
What do we accomplish through all the hours and days spent thinking about what bothers us? Making ourselves even more bothered. We fail ourselves first. Despite believing at some level that you're helping yourself by searching for solutions to your problems. Nonetheless, you're likely also exhausted, bored with your own thoughts and sick and tired of feeling the way you feel. It's only when you can't stand to keep doing what you are doing, can't take listening to the same storylines, that you'll make a commitment to yourself. As soon as you notice an old or new grievance arising, promise yourself that you'll deliberately do something different.
Exercise - Moments of Choice
The next time you are about to dive into the mud with your thoughts, pause for a moment and make a different choice. Follow these steps:
1. Acknowledge the muddy thoughts themselves, do not get involved in their content but consciously note the complaints are here.
2. Remind yourself that if you follow these thoughts, go for the ride they are offering, you will suffer. This is certain.
3. No matter how compelling and believable the negative thoughts may feel, choose to say no. To refuse their invitation. Say the words out loud. I will not do this, will not feed this story with my attention.
4. Take a deep breathe, check in with your senses, corral your attention into the place where your feet are planted.
5. Do this OVER and OVER and OVER again.
It's crucial to initiate this practice as soon as you first detect the rumblings of negativity. To catch the thoughts at the gate before they gather strength. The longer your thoughts rumble and make their case, the more likely they will hook you in and then once again you will need to claw yourself out of the rabbit hole. So start this practice early, be consistent and be fierce.
Through this simple and radical practice, we discover something surprising. That is when we consistently turn away from the negative thoughts and stories in our head we actually feel freer and happier. So to, we feel guided by a greater source of wisdom, and even love. Just the act of making this simple choice for ourselves and wellbeing, feels like a moment of grace. In the process, we stumble into the process that we can change our life by how we relate to our thoughts. We can all create the inner environment in which we want to live.
