How to Cope When Others Hurt You

How to Cope When Others Hurt You
'More hearts pine away in secret anguish for unkindness from those who should be their comforters, than for any other calamity in life.'
- Edward Young, English poet (1681-1765)

We don't think in terms of hearts "pining" away these days. But then, Edward Young lived some time back.
Today people are sad, depressed, withdrawn or just plain "hard to get along with." We take pills, eat too much, go dancing, join clubs, watch endless reruns on TV. Or we just mope (pine away).
Loneliness and poorly developed social skills no doubt play a large part in people pining away. It's easier to pine away and be lonely if you don't know how to make new friends. Edward Young brings our attention to one cause we would all rather not think about. Living with someone who is unkind or who doesn't care enough to make life really worthwhile. In most cases, a person suffering this fate reacts the same to each of the two because they can be the same problem with only slightly different faces.
What is an unkindness? It sounds bland and meaningless, unless you're the victim. An unkindness is an act of behaviour by one person that hurts another. It's not the intent of the doer, but the reaction of the receiver that matters. Neglect can also be an act of unkindness.
Of course you may be tempted to think that something considered an unkindness is personal, that, as some believe of happiness, unkindness is a personal choice. In that case, if a person chooses to see the action of another as an unkindness, it is, but if the person chooses to ignore the act, it's not an unkindness. Choose to see something as unkind or choose to not think anything of it.
It doesn't work that way in real life. Unfortunately, it's not that simple. What one person considers unkindness seems beyond their control. If an act violates the basic life values of a person, that person is incapable of controlling their reaction. If the unkindness is in the form of neglect, that may be outside of their control as well.
What's the choice? The choice is to consider unkindness from someone we care about as not worth time or thought. Just ignore it. But ignoring behaviours that used to hurt stuns the emotions, makes them "cold." No one who is capable of deep feelings for others wants to lose that, to become cold, to maybe lose the ability to love in the process.
Therapist offices fill each day with people who feel others have been unkind, are unkind, continue to be unkind to them. They don't know how to cope with a problem they believe rests with the other person. More lives are ruined by an inability to cope with problems than for any other single reason.
So is living with or being close to a friend, neighbour or workmate who is unkind--who commits unkind acts--hopeless? It is if you believe it is.
If the unkind person is someone you live with and you want to continue that relationship, you need to show the unkind person more love. That doesn't necessarily mean you have to love them more or have sex more often. We humans assess the weight or value of the love that others have for us by touch. The more someone touches us, the more we feel that person shows their love. The touch may be casual, such as touching the other's arm as you pass. It could also be a lingering touch, such as when you watch television sitting next to each other or do something else together. Just don't linger long enough that the touch seems fake or contrived. That's turns people off.
Of course the touch method of assessing love works both ways. But many people don't know that. In fact, some people find touch--even loving touch--in some circumstances almost offensive. That kind of person lacked love and touch as a child. Learning to touch and to be touched may take that person years, but they will come around. Consistency and persistence matters. They can change if they want to and if the other person tries hard enough for long enough.
Friends, workmates and neighbours can also find ways to touch each other casually. Often that involves a hand touching the arm of the other as a means of emphasis in a conversation. That kind of touch is always brief, never more than a second or two. Longer than that could cause alarm or suspicion.
Dealing with a situation of repeated unkindness almost always involves doing something you are not accustomed to doing. If you were doing it already, the unkindness may never have occurred.
Will this method work for everyone? No. Some people are emotionally cold and can't be changed. The choice then is to stay or leave, keep the friendship or find other friends. Staying with an emotionally distant mate does not necessarily mean living a life in the belief that the other person doesn't love you. It means accepting what you can't change and doing something differently yourself.
Join a group or activity where touching is a part of the activity. Take dancing lessons, for example, or join a group where close contact is the norm. Or help others. Many volunteer situations involve circumstances where two people touch in the course of an event. Volunteering can help both the person who needs help and the volunteer. Both benefit.
Often people who need help from others have found themselves in that situation because they could not cope with their life circumstances. Sometimes those life circumstances involve needing loving touch and having no way to get it. Lives can literally dribble away when people need love and touch, don't know it, and waste their life away looking for something they don't understand in places they will never find it.
Any problem you may have with another person may be very hard to cope with. Now you have a choice. You have a way to improve the relationship between you. Or you can leave. The latter choice may not be easy, especially if the other person is a spouse or life mate. It doesn't guarantee eventual happiness either, especially if leaving means finding yourself in a life situation where you need social assistance just to survive.
Learning coping strategies may be the best answer. It isn't easy. Life problems and working through them never are.

Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for people who need to learn what they missed as children or who want to teach their own children what they need so they won't grow up to be socially or emotionally unbalanced adults.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/

The Secret Of Love

Animals have these advantages over man: they never hear the clock strike, they die without any idea of death, they have no theologians to instruct them, their last moments are not disturbed by unwelcome and unpleasant ceremonies, their funerals cost them nothing, and no one starts lawsuits over their wills.
- François Marie Arouet (aka Voltaire), letter to Count Schomberg, August 1769

As admirable as Voltaire's reasoning ability was and as impressive his observations about human nature, I wonder how he reached the conclusion that animals know nothing of the power of life.
An avowed dog person for most of my life, I became servant to a household cat some 18 years ago. Since then my wife and I have had two other cats, one of which has epilepsy and has gone deaf.

The most impressive--dare I say shocking--lesson I have learned in my years of observing the behaviour of cats is that they are remarkably similar to humans in their needs. I don't mean just the needs for food, shelter and security, which all living things share.

Our cats do hear our grandmother clock strike because it gongs on the hour and half-hour. It means nothing to them because neither the ticking of the clock nor the gong itself serve any purpose toward satisfying their needs.

What does a clock add to our lives? At most it serves as a reminder that we must perform actions, usually in the service of others. Cats can be altruistic at times, but they are clearly not into servitude. Cats would have disappointed Pavlov.

Our cats know when they want to be fed because they are hungry. If they aren't hungry, they don't care if food is available to them or not. They don't overeat, nor do they eat in front of the television. They will, however, eat as a form of comfort, if their problem is not of a severely emotional nature.

They clearly know when they need to be touched (petted). Not only do they make their needs known to the petters, they allow little to stand in the way of their satisfying that need when they have it, if humans are around. They prefer petting from the humans they know, but will accept it from strangers who happen around at the right time.

Humans do not do that. We seldom know when we need to be touched by another, even though it's a need so fundamental to us that regular lack of touch can alter our personality.

Children almost never come to mommy demanding to be held. They may come, but they don't ask in words. The closest they come to asking is when they hurt themselves. Being held by mommy when they hurt does nothing to help the hurt, it's a way of (an excuse for) demanding to be touched without using words (we don't use words to express that need, sad to say).

Voltaire says that animals have no idea of death. I disagree. When our epileptic cat has a petit or grand mal seizure, he wants to be alone in an enclosed area, secure that he won't explode all over the place. However, for days before and after the seizure, he seeks touch and comfort many times each day. He knows when he will have a seizure, days ahead. He seeks the security he wants and needs ahead of time.

People seldom know they are about to have an epileptic seizure until it happens, or maybe just a brief period before. Cats are more sensitive to their bodies. Most of the time they do what they must to heal themselves. Only their owners insist upon taking them to vets.

For months before our oldest cat died, she came to me many times each day, to sit on my lap or to cuddle in the crook of my arm as I lied in bed napping. This was uncharacteristic behaviour for that cat, though it isn't for the epileptic one now. I don't doubt that they would know when the end of their life is near. Maybe they don't dream of heaven, but who knows?

Voltaire's reference to the clock striking, of course, refers to the death knell, not to the regular striking of a gong or ticking of the pendulum. His point is that we make much of a charade of death, most of which serves no real purpose but to make the grieving ones feel worse.

My point differs from Voltaire's in that I want us to pay attention to the characteristics and needs of animals that we share with them, but that they do better than us.

We know that dogs and cats love to be petted. We call them pets for that reason. They need touch and they demand it from those who can best provide it. To a dog or cat, brushing the fur is nothing more than another way for them to be touched.

We need to recognize our own need for touch. Life without touch is not easy and life with a decreasing amount of touch from a loved one is even harder because we feel the lack of touch and our increase in need. The death of a spouse may be hardest on those who benefitted most from loving touch from the dead mate for many years.

Hospitals (not all) and nursing homes have found the benefits of having people with pets visit so that patients can touch them. Nurses stroke their patients and touch them more than ever in the past because it helps the patients to feel better, even to heal faster in some cases.

Voltaire's quotation was not about animals after all, but about satisfying our own real needs instead of trying to play act unnecessary stuff while ignoring what is really important.

Now, while you think about it, go give someone you love a hug. Do it several times a day if you can. Don't miss a day.

One of the mysteries of love is that we can't measure it. Think not? Most of us, without being aware of it, measure how much others love us by the amount of loving touch we receive from them.

Remember, it's not just the amount of touch we receive from others that's important. It's just as important to those we love that we give loving touch to them so that they can keep track of how much we love them. It works both days. We measure love by the amount of touch we receive, they measure love by the amount they receive.

Now you can understand why the so-called Empty Nest syndrome of parents whose children have grown and left home can be so severe. And why people who consider divorce do so because their partners and they have "grown apart."

Love is an emotional word we use to describe our basic need for loving touch. Celibate nuns and priests receive little human touch, but when they devote their lives to God and to prayer the parts of their brains that trigger the feel-good response activate the same way that ours does when we are hugged by a loved one. Loving God fully can give people the same physical effect as receiving loving touch.

So, have you hugged someone yet?

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to grow balanced and well loved children.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

Where Has All The Nature Gone?

The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity ... and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.
- William Blake, English poet, painter, printmaker (1757-1827)

Living as I do in a forest, beside a lake, I have the opportunity to see nature at its finest and its most agitated. Just today, for example, our electrical service returned after being off for two days due to a storm that caused so much damage and brought so many trees down over so many electrical wires that the repairmen had to travel each line looking for problem after problem.

Yet each morning my wife and I sit in our living room, with our morning coffee and a little "morning cake" and look out over the lake to a scene which has never been identical for any two days we have been viewing it for the past 12 years. City people who own cottages in the area would say that the scene changes only from dark to light and from season to season. We see differently.

As of this year, for the first time in human history, more people will live in cities than in rural settings. What does it mean? If greenhouse gases really are responsible for global warming, the problem begins in cities where people have very little to do with nature on a regular basis. Our atmosphere, our oceans, our disappearing forests, our desertifying drylands, our increasingly liquid Arctic, on the other hand, are almost completely devoid of people. People don't care much about what they can't see.

My wife and I struggle to live in harmony with our trees and the rest of nature. They destroy our roof shingles in half the expected lifespan the manufacturers suggest. They prevent flowers and other plants from growing in some places, with the pines even making the soil alkaline (toxic to some plants) by dropping needles all year long. Raccoons, birds and other assorted animals mess up our compose as they chow down on food matter we couldn't eat. That's just for starters.

The city folks at their cottages don't have such problems. They cut down most of the trees ("to let in more light"), forgetting that trees provide natural cooling in summer by keeping sunlight off the roofs, as well as creating oxygen. They plant their denuded properties with grass, in an effort to make them look more like the aristocratic mansions of England (which they envy).

Then they build the mansions themselves, most of which exceed 2000 square feet--some up to 10,000 square feet--far more space than they can possibly use or keep clean on thier weekend visits (they hire cleaners). But the properties impress visitors (also from the cities) who Ooooo! and Aaaaaa!, make noises of praise and drink up all the offered alcohol and drugs.

Meanwhile the wilderness transforms into ghettoes of nature as the cottagers turn long term walking and hiking trails into paths for their all-terrain vehicles, their snowmobiles and their 4 x 4 SUVs (aka "Jeeps") unfit for human walkers and places to avoid for deer, bears, foxes, coyotes, moose and heaven only knows what else.

Cities, despite the efforts in recent years by planners to provide some semblance of nature for their un-natural (sometimes nature-phobic) denizens to enjoy, have become sterile places where nature is treated like zoo specimens, something to be viewed in small doses on rare occasions.

Does the dearth of real nature in cities cause people to lose their imaginations, as we might use as a corollary to Blake's quote? Not necessarily. But if you want to demonstrate your imagination in the city, you had better have money to support yourself, be prepared to endure the hostility of others toward your efforts (or create in silence) and possibly endure the odd visit to a courtroom (as defendant).

Is there a solution to this dissociation or alienation of city dwellers from nature? Yes. We need to teach children about nature so they know that everything they eat comes from it and every excess they enjoy will have a negative impact on it.

When children have the opportunity to be close to nature, to appreciate it and learn from and about it, they gain a treasure and a spirit toward nature that they will not lose for a lifetime. Without that early contact with nature, the most involved that many people will get is to grieve over the warming of our planet. But not while they drive their SUVs to the cottage.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book about how, what and when to teach children the lessons and skills they need to live healthy, well balanced and well adjusted adult lives so they know they are part of nature not separate from it.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

Prejudice: Its Deep and Early Causes

"I'm interested in the fact that the less secure a man is, the more likely he is to have extreme prejudice."
- Clint Eastwood

What right does a Hollywood type have to an opinion on such an important subject? As much right as anyone else. Being a man involved with the public in many ways for so many years, Eastwood likely has a better perspective about how people act than most of us because he has been exposed to so many insecure people in filmland. Hollywood is a Mecca for insecure people.

Assume his observation is correct for the purpose of this discussion. What we have are two important parts to his statement: insecure people and those with extreme prejudice.

Why would anyone be insecure? A genetic defect? A nasty mother? Abuse as a child? The number of people who suffer from feelings of insecurity suggests that the cause is more pervasive than any of these. Almost everyone feels insecure about some things, or they should because they cannot know enough about every problem or situation they face to be able to cope with it effectively and efficiently.

The kind of insecurity that Eastwood was speaking about is basic, far deeper than not knowing enough about the kind of flat screen TV to buy. This kind goes back to childhood, specifically to unfulfilled needs.

A baby spends nearly a year in the womb before birth, 40 weeks in constant touch with its mother. After birth, the need for constant touch continues, but the amount of touch time between mother and child decreases dramatically. As the child gets older, the need continues, though not to as great an extent as before birth. The child can look after itself in childhood passtimes. A fair amount of touching is still needed. It continues throughout our lives.

That need for touch in adults is vastly underrated by most people. How it affects single people (unattached to a cohabiting other of any kind), married people who become separated or married people whose spouse dies or becomes alienated in another way is seldom addressed to the extent it deserves. A man whose wife leaves him may be a bomb waiting to explode because he doesn't know how to cope with the loss of touch as well as the loss of a way of life.

Studies have shown that we each need the equivalent of 12 hugs per day to be satisfied with our lives. The ideal would be 18 hugs. But who has time for that?

Most of us do, if we make time because we know how important touch is to our welfare--both emotional and physical health. It doesn't always have to be a hug. It could be a touch while passing in the hall, holding hands while having coffee or walking together and sleeping next to each other. A kiss and huge when leaving each other and when meeting again counts as two each.

An insufficient amount of touch will make anyone insecure to some extent. The degree will vary and it's hard to measure. In general, all unhappy people lack sufficient touch from a loved one to satisfy them. Those who have extreme prejudice have accommodated themselves to insufficient touch for many years. They may even deny their need for touch.

A prejudiced person needs someone to hurt, just as bullies do. The unfulfilled need for touch for far too long has caused them to want to hurt someone else the way they have suffered themselves. They seldom want to talk about how they hurt or about their need.

Prejudice and bullying function at an emotional level, which is where our need for touch comes in. Lack of sufficient touch shows itself in emotional hurt, which may demonstrate itself in inappropriate behaviours. Sometimes the inappropriate behaviours involve touching the other person.

Now you know something about human needs that most people do not. Use your knowledge wisely and productively.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, striving to bring important human needs out of the closet.
Learn more at http://billallin.com