We tend to forgive a partner much less than we would forgive a son or daughter. Just imagine your reaction if your partner were to behave like your son or daughter…perhaps even like your teenage son or daughter!
How long would you be willing to accept his/her mood swings for? His constant demands for attention, his constant need for approval? Not long uh?
A partner should be someone who, after the 1st level along the thanking process, is able to:
Handle his/her own anger
Accept moments of frustration
Listen and have others listen to him/her.
Basically, he or she should be someone who is ready to interact with others and grow with another person. However, most times, it isn’t so: on the contrary, usually we look for someone expecting him or her to fill our own voids.
At the beginning, all is perfect. Passion, in fact, is an excellent “doping agent” and pushes us all beyond our limits. In those moments, we don’t show our best selves…in those moments we are NOT ourselves but the image that we would like to show about ourselves.
This is not negative per se (trying to improve ourselves is never negative). It becomes negative, in fact, when our source of love and awareness is too small for us to be able to live a life according to such rhythms.
It is not a bad thing to admit that we have limits. It is actually delightfully natural to do so! Problems arise when we exceed limits for too long. From that point on, a great anger starts building up inside of us and we are faced with two possible choices:
1) Acknowledge that we have behaved like idiots
2)Blame the other person for our physical and psychological exhaustion.
Which do you think will be the obvious choice? The second one of course!
Admitting that we sometimes behave like “First-class Idiots” seems to be something that goes beyond our abilities, but it is essential to accept it if we want to reach Level 2 along the Thaatt path.
A possible way to express them could be: “What you did/said made me angry. I am not mad at you but, right now, I am very angry”.
This whole sentence could be summarised in a single word: “Fuck you!”.
Even if this can seem like a strong insult, it is not so if both partners interpret it as an outburst and not an attack.
Obviously, after such a “fuck-everyone phase”, a phase of anger processing and one of confrontation must follow, first with ourselves and then with the partner. After, the “processing” is over, if we have avoided attacking our partner successfully, we discover that it isn’t the word “Sorry” which we need to say but the word “Thank you”. And believe us when we say that the difference between the two words is huge.
The weaker your Level 2 is (or that of your partner), the more you will feel attacked by him or her and the harder it will be to achieve the needed inner peace that will allow you to see those attacks not as a threat to your survival but as an opportunity for growth because emotions are exclusively yours and belong to nobody else but you … nobody else has the power over you … if you are centered, nothing can upset you.
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