CLEAR ALL
We cannot make another person change his or her steps to an old dance, but if we change our own steps, the dance no longer can continue in the same predictable pattern.
4
People’s sense of self-worth is pivotal to their ability to look clearly at the hurt they’ve caused. The more solid one’s sense of self regard, the more likely that that person can feel empathy and compassion for the hurt party, and apologize from an authentic center.
Questioning ourselves for being ‘oversensitive’ is a common way that women, in particular, disqualify our legitimate anger and hurt. . . . The fact that some of us feel more vulnerable than others in a particular context does not mean we are weak or lesser in any way.
3
Only through our connectedness to others can we really know and enhance the self. And only through working on the self can we begin to enhance our connectedness to others.
7
If only our passion to understand others were as great as our passion to be understood. Were this so, all our apologies would be truly meaningful and healing.
1
Respect the fact that all you do and are now has evolved for a good reason and serves an important purpose.
When forgiveness experts talk in binary language (’You either forgive the wrongdoer or you are a prisoner of your own anger and hate’), they are collapsing the messy complexity of human emotions into a simplistic dichotomous equation.
When we do not put our primary emotional energy into solving our own problems, we take on other people’s problems as our own.
2
Anger is a tool for change when it challenges us to become more of an expert on the self and less of an expert on others.
Avoidance will make you feel less vulnerable in the short run, but it will never make you less afraid.