Deepak Chopra
Question: About 2 months ago I tried to have a conversation with a friend. We had a disagreement and hadn’t spoken in a while. During the call she swore at me was insulting and made it clear she was angry and did not want to repair the friendship. She hung up. She has influenced others to no longer speak to me since that time. I have not and will not engage anyone else in this and don’t believe in speaking against her. What has been difficult is putting it behind me. I never really got to respond to all she said and at times I am angry at what she said and how she said it. I have said out loud that I forgive her and want to forget it but honestly, it still bothers me. We live close by so I still occasionally see her and a few former neighbor friends now don’t speak to me. How do I let this just go? How does one cope with negative people when trying hard to be positive and loving? It’s such a challenge!
Response
First look at how holding onto these feelings is making you miserable and twisting you up inside. You may think that you are holding on to these feelings because you are in the right, you were insulted and therefore you can’t let go until these wrongs have been righted, or been apologized to. But that may never happen, and that effectively means you have given the power of your happiness and well being over to others, and that is a powerless position to be in. So forget about the insult and getting the cold shoulder from others, and focus on reclaiming your self-determination of your own happiness for your sake, and not for trying to right some injustice. Next, and this is the hard part, you need to discover what about the break with this friend that is the most painful. A situation like this must have a history or precedence in your past. Your job is to locate the original hurt that made you sensitive to this recent episode and then find and label the ways you interpreted that original injury. Those interpretations were incorrect, because they were based on a faulty sense of your true self. By correcting those interpretations and beliefs that built up around them in terms of your mature and developed self now, you will heal that old hurt and reclaim a sense of happiness and freedom that is not dependent upon what others do or say.
Love, Deepak
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