Our brains like to make sense of things. It’s why as children, if we experience abandonment or trauma, we often internalise it as being our fault, because our brains need answers and our cognitive ability isn’t able to understand the wider context.
We take things personally often because again, we want to understand why something has happened or why someone has treated us a certain way. We want some seeming control over our lives and if we blame ourselves, we get to do something different to prevent it next time.
The world and the people in it very often don’t make sense to us. We have a totally different and very limited perspective. We can take things personally and try to figure out what we did that was so terrible that we deserved what we got or we can make someone else wrong or bad….or we can work on accepting that it just doesn’t make sense, and to try to understand is futile.
I come back to my recent posts about how we can choose to respond to a seemingly crazy world, and that everything is either love, or a call for love. That can be really challenging when it feels like all your buttons are being pushed for no apparent reason.
When I feel like that I ask myself: ‘and if I choose to see this as an attack, if I choose to make it my fault or someone else’s fault, what then? If I attack, what will that do? How will that help me?’
I can’t bury my feelings. Sometimes my judgements, lacking in all the information though they may be, make me feel really angry and hard done by. I want to shout at someone that it’s not fair and I want things to be different. So I take my time and acknowledge those judgements and ask for a miracle. I ask to see things differently. Sometimes I share my feelings. Sometimes I work through them on my own. Ultimately I do my best to respond with love, because that’s the only thing that will make anything any better.
When nothing makes sense
