Chances are you've heard a million times
about the idea of responding instead of reacting.
Chances are also, especially if you listen to my material,
you will already understand the importance
of validating and understanding someone's perspective.
Today,
we're not going to talk about any of those things.
Instead, we're going to talk about a shadow
that has piggybacked on these concepts.
And it's a shadow that you would do best to keep your eye on.
React Positively OR ELSE!
So you can understand this shadow,
let's imagine that a man has a wife
but he's fallen in love with another woman.
He decided to tell his wife
who has been trying to encourage him to
authentically share himself and his truth with her.
When he tells her that he's in love with another woman,
she gets really really angry and also cries.
But the man says to her:
"See this is why I can't be truthful or honest with you."
"I can't be myself because this is how you react to my truth."
Though we can always get better
at making our time-space reality
a safe place for us to share our truth,
meaning, let's say we can decrease the consequences
so that people feel more capable of being authentic,
there are two glaring problems
with what just happened in this scenario.
The first is, is that this man is making the sharing and the owning
in the expressing of his truth,
completely dependent upon getting a positive reaction.
The second is,
he is making absolutely no space for a negative reaction.
What this means is,
is that he's actually operating from a "your truth or mine",
"your feelings or mine" approach to life.
There's no way to have a relationship
when that's the way that you're going about things.
Because you can't make enough space in the relationship
for two people who feel
and two people to think what they think.
I want you to imagine how painful it would be
if your partner just walked in the room
and said they didn't want to be with you anymore.
But then if you reacted negativity to that,
they instantaneously deflected and said: "See you're the problem."
"You're the problem for the reaction that you're even having to this right now."
You don't get to have a reaction
or else there's something seriously wrong with you and you're the problem.
You're the bad guy.
Now let's go one step further,
imagine that the same person said:
"You know this negative reaction is the exact reason why
I had to cheat for so many years, instead of just
tell you I didn't want to be married anymore."
I actually literally watched
two clients of mine do this.
Let me tell you what the message behind this shadow actually is;
It's react positively, or else!
React positively or you're the asshole.
React positively or you're the narcissist.
React positively to the painful truth I'm telling you or...
I won't tell you the truth.
React positively to a truth that hurts you
or you're the reason I can't be me.
React positively to any truth I share
or you're the one who doesn't see things from an enlightened enough perspective
and definitely you're the one that doesn't unconditionally love me.
We have an impossible time
understanding unconditional love,
because we see love as a positive emotional state
as opposed to what it really is,
and by the way, if you're interested in understanding what love is
you can actually watch my video that's literally titled:
What is Love?
But we obviously by the same vein,
have this tendency to interpret
unconditional love as unconditional positivity.
That has nothing to do with unconditional love.
Therefore if we tell someone a truth about ourselves
that hurts him or her and they react negatively,
we decide they don't unconditionally love us.
We decide they don't love us as we are.
This is ridiculous, if you really think about it,
because it means that we make unconditional love
something that somebody feels towards us
regardless of how much we may hurt them.
I'm gonna give you another example.
I knew some people a while back
and they already had two children,
but the wife decided,
after already having these two children,
already creating a life with them.
Having told him that she wanted to be a stay-at-home mother,
that she really didn't like it.
And what she wanted to do instead was to be an actress.
So she decided, without involving him,
that half the year she was gonna live in Hollywood.
Obviously when a woman walks up to her husband and says:
"I've decided that I'm gonna be an actress,
and so I'm gonna live half the year in Hollywood.
Have fun taking care of the kids."
The reaction isn't going to be positive.
But when he got upset about it, she said:
"See this is the reason I can't be me."
"It's because you always get upset about it."
Suddenly the entire thing was deflected away from the fact
that she had not actually told him the truth about herself.
Which was that she didn't want to be a stay-at-home mom,
nor did she want to have children.
It was deflected away from the fact
that she was basically choosing for half the year to abandon the family.
Instead it was put on his reaction to her sharing that truth.
"Basically by reacting negatively,
you are discouraging me from being my true self."
Look, it's totally understandable
why we learn to be complete chameleons.
It's totally understandable based on childhood.
It's understandable why we lie.
It's understandable why we're inauthentic.
In our childhoods our entire existence
is completely dependent upon people.
If we upset them in some way,
with our personal truth,
there are massive consequences for that.
So obviously,
many of us choose to completely abandon our personal truth
for the sake of these people.
I get that!
Everyone should get that and have intense compassion for it.
It is terrifying to consider doing the opposite.
It's terrifying to consider being
open, truthful, authentic... whatever else.
The thing is, is that,
if we live our entire, especially adult life
making our personal truth dependent upon
the reaction that we get,
we're literally screwed.
Not only this,
it means that we're requiring another person to be inauthentic,
so we can be authentic.
There are many times in our adult life
that we will find ourselves in scenarios
where some truth we need to share about ourselves
or some best interest we need to stand by
will negatively impact other people.
This is especially true if we've committed to the path of authenticity.
The reason that I say this
is because if we're committing ourselves to the path of authenticity
after being well socialized,
the chances of us already having built a life,
especially in our adulthood,
that is based on inauthenticity,
is very very high.
You know if I got into this marriage
not based off of something true about me
but something that I decided to do for the
happiness of my parents, for example,
chances are living an authentic life
means that marriage will most likely end.
So like I said,
very high likelihood
that us living in alignment with our authenticity,
in the beginning at least,
is going to have a negative impact on other people.
We cannot make them wrong for having a negative reaction
and we cannot make the telling of our truth conditional upon
them reacting positively towards it.
This is a really bad game of leverage.
With this shadow, what we're doing
is putting a muzzle on people
and making them believe that that's the only way to stay good in our eyes.
Is if they keep that muzzle on.
So we can just express our truth
regardless about inauthentic they have to be for us to do it.
This is especially the case with anger.
I mean so many people on the planet
have been taught that anger is enemy number one.
And anger is such a bad guy,
basically, that most people have no tolerance
for expressing their personal truth
or owning their best interests or any of that type of stuff,
if anyone could possibly feel angry.
We also tend to require
that they don't express or feel any anger
in order for us to be safe enough
to be ourselves.
Getting into this there, is a common misconception,
especially in the spiritual field,
and that is that if somebody's responding
instead of reacting,
it's always going to be positive.
I mean, it's crazy, you wouldn't believe
how much people actually think that that's the case.
But it's not the case.
Even after somebody is no longer in the reaction phase,
when they've taken time to think about it,
when they have integrated, even,
there's a good likelihood
that the response is not going to be positive
or what you hope especially.
Though it is perfectly understandable
why somebody reacting negatively
would be a massive discouragement
to you being authentic in some way
or telling your truth in some way,
from universal perspective,
no one is to blame for you not being able to own your authenticity,
except for yourself.
The reason is,
is that even if you're unconscious of it,
from universal perspective,
it is still a choice being made to be inauthentic,
for the sake of avoiding a consequence.
One thing I want you to accept here
is that people are going to react to things.
We can hope that they will respond,
but regardless of whether it's a reaction or a response,
neither of them may be positive.
To expect somebody to react positively
is illusion.
To expect people to not react is also illusion.
So if we base our whole capacity
to express ourselves and our truth
on that type of expectation,
we're looking at a life worth of pain.
This may not be easy to do.
And let's be honest,
all of us may face situations
where we will choose consciously,
based off of the consequence,
not to express one of our truths.
That being said...
We must also be aware that owning our truth
is a decision we can make
regardless of negative reactions.
Throughout history
there have been so many people who have figured out
that they actually do have this choice.
To stand by their truth regardless
of what consequence they're facing.
A lot of people have lost their lives as a result of it.
Now most of you might say:
"Well my god, exactly, you're basically proving my point."
But here's the thing,
if you talk to a lot of those people, in those types of scenarios,
the reason that they chose that
is because living a life out of alignment with that
particular truth that meant so much to them,
was no life to live at all.
A person is a programmable being.
It is obvious
that negative reinforcement and reward
they work in order to create a pattern within a person,
and within a person's mind.
However, consciousness
is fully capable of transcending that patterning.
And consciousness is fully capable
of finding intrinsic motive which trumps
external motivation.
Whether it's punishment or reward.
One thing we've got to accept here
is that expecting someone to dance on the tables,
clap their hands and congratulate us
when a truth of ours
is perceived by them to be painful to them,
especially if it's out of alignment with their best interests,
is cruelty on our part.
If you have difficulty
sharing your truth because you feel like you need,
let's call it, the healing experience
of having such a safe container for you to express that truth in,
then you have just figured out
why a good therapist is worth their weight in gold.
It's because that person is not going to experience
any negative effect
based off of what you tell them in that room that day.
Obviously, if this isn't the wife
who has based her entire life on you for the last 20 years,
then she's gonna have a different reaction isn't she?
To when you tell that truth.
Your therapist is gonna be like:
"All right, let's look at that. Why does it make sense?"
when your whole life stands to fall apart
as a result of something being said,
believe me, the reaction and the response
are going to be quite different.
So for this reason,
it's a really good idea to be around people
and to be in a setting,
even if it's hiring a therapist,
where you can practice
standing by a truth and being safe enough to do that,
that you can then take that truth
into, let's call it a
"less receptive audience".
So here's the message;
If you need to express a truth that is going to negatively impact people,
expect them to react and negatively.
Don't make them responsible
for you being able or not able
to speak your truth or be yourself.
Accommodate their negative truth
about whatever you have expressed,
in the same way that you're expecting them
to accommodate the truth that you are sharing with them.
Which they perceive to be a negative truth.
Anytime you show or tell someone a truth about yourself,
it will cause them to become more clear about their truth.
And we have to develop the capacity to make room for both truths.
This includes negative emotion as well.
Don't muzzle the people in your life,
by expecting them to react positively
to truths which may very very well
negatively impact them,
any more than you muzzle yourself
by only telling personal truths
when you can guarantee that it's going to be met
with a positive reaction.
Have a good week.
Subtitles by: Tanya Duarte www.tanyaduarte.com