From “It Happened TO Me” to “It Happened FOR Me”
There is somebody who is important to me in my life who is not talking to me. It’s painful. It’s painful because I love him, and I’d really like to have him in my life. It’s also painful because my inner critic strongly believes that I should be able to fix the relationship. Recently, I have put effort into offering space for this person to share his perspective in the hopes that we can find a path forward. These efforts were turned down, and as a result, my resentment began to build. The fact that I felt wronged created the initial resentment, and then the feeling of resentment further convinced me of just how wronged I had been. It was a self-perpetuating cycle that felt impossible to break, especially in the absence of communication.
More recently, I’ve lost hope for reconciliation, at least in the near future. It sucks. The silver lining is that the loss of hope has given me some space to reflect, rather than constantly being in the mode of strategizing how to fix the relationship. This space for reflection led me to ask some deeper questions about what I did and what his experience of me must have been that led him to cut me out of his life.
It might seem like I should have asked these questions right off the bat. They certainly crossed my mind at points in the process, but it took the pain of being cut off and the helplessness I feel in being unable to mend the relationship, for me to look at these questions in a more honest way. With this introspection came discomfort from seeing some of my ugly tendencies: difficulty loving and being kind to the people closest to me, a self-serving need for control, and a competitive way of relating to people which creates disconnection and can sometimes make others feel small.
It is a wake-up call. These tendencies aren’t new discoveries. In fact, some versions of them were all mentioned on my kindergarten report card and came up consistently in my annual reviews during my time in the corporate world. But the consequences I am facing because of them (broken relationship + pain) are something I have never experienced – I’ve never been cut off.
Because the consequences are severe, they have been a catalyst to learn a bunch of lessons about how I want to be in this world and how I want to relate to others. I am learning that I need to put more energy into being kind to people close to me, such as actively trying to find out about and honor my family members’ preferences, rather than being so focused on my own. I am learning that when I try to control a situation by controlling others, it feels really bad on the other side and has the opposite effect of what I intended. This lesson has been important in my relationship with my partner as we navigate the challenges that come from being first-time parents together and having very different parenting styles. And I am learning that my “innocent” competitive way of relating to others, such as when I make fun of a friend’s sense of direction in a situation where he makes a mistake getting somewhere (which comes from a place of trying to feel superior), isn’t always so innocent because of how it can affect people.
These lessons might seem straightforward, but just because something is straightforward doesn’t mean that we get it. My partner Hari often likes to quote Aeschylus: “Man must learn by suffering.”
When I got to a place of more tangibly experiencing these lessons, something shifted. The whole question of whether he is wrong or right began to feel less important. The resentment gradually subsided, and it was replaced by a feeling of gratitude not only for the lessons, but also to the person responsible for the lessons. I started to feel gratitude to him for doing something bold that must have felt really awful to do. And gratitude to him for, knowingly or unknowingly, being my teacher.
As humans, we are story-making machines. We are constantly telling ourselves stories about who we are, who other people are, and why our circumstances are as they are. In my example, there is one story that says I was wronged. There is another story that says this situation is a gift. The first story may or may not be true. It could very well be the right decision for him, and I am trying to trust that it is right for both of us in the long run. The second story, the one that says this situation is a gift, might feel overly optimistic, especially when there is pain, but with a little time and space, it has become obvious that it is true. And not only is it true, but it is also a lot more beneficial than the first story because it has the potential to become a catalyst for change.
As I have continued to digest the lessons, the gratitude has grown. These are lessons I need to grapple with in order to live more aligned with my best self. Without them, and without the person who taught me them, I’d have less information and less inspiration. For this reason, I have come to see the situation as something that happened FOR me, rather than something that happened TO me.
Beyond the lessons from this specific situation, there is the meta lesson that the presence of just about everyone we encounter in our life is a gift (with the exception being when we are victims of evil). This is not to say that we should keep challenging people in our life because they teach us stuff, but if we are open to seeing them, there are nuggets of gold for us to mine in every situation and with every person we encounter. The reason this is true is because when we have an experience with someone, we relate to what happened and that person in some way. That experience is never independent of who we are. How we relate to what happened tells us a lot about ourselves and what kind of work we need to do in order to become a better version of ourselves. They are a mirror that we can choose to look at or choose to ignore.
For example, if you get a challenging review from your boss that contains comments from colleagues that you feel are unfair, you might have one story that these colleagues don’t understand your intentions and that it’s in their best interest to disparage you. Instead, what if you tried the perspective that there is a 2% truth in their comments, and that the 2% truth is necessary for you to take the next step in your development?
Or, if an overweight person were to sit down in the seat next to you a few minutes before takeoff for a five-hour flight, you might tell yourself a certain story about the situation and about who the person is. But what if you tried something different? What if you tried the perspective, however uncomfortable it might feel, that this is an opportunity for you to internally examine the judgments you felt when you first saw the person approaching? And what if you tried opening yourself up and connecting with the person, and then reexamining your preconceptions?
Understanding what story we are telling ourselves gives us the opportunity to see where our egos might be trapping us and holding us back. It gives us the opportunity to zoom out to choose a perspective that might be more aligned with the best version of ourselves and one that is closer to reality. It also gives us the openness to tap into the truth that every person has the potential to be our teacher. And it allows us to appreciate that the most challenging people for us can often teach us deep and impactful lessons because of the intensity of our experiences with them.
This can't be purely an intellectual exercise. It has to be an authentic experience of getting how our story is only one possible story, grappling with the lessons that are available, and then letting it sink in that only this person at this particular moment in time could teach us this particular lesson.
When we take the time and put in the effort to have this authentic experience, the cliché, “Everyone is my teacher,” stops being such a cliché and becomes a lived experience that has the potential to help us make meaningful shifts in our lives.
