Broken people do broken things

It is funny how we expect damaged people to treat us the way we want to be treated. We don’t do that with anything else in life. If a fruit has gone obviously rotten and smells bad we don’t eat it and then ask why it tasted funny.

We do not drive a smoking clunker and then wonder why it stranded us on the side of the road either. No one drinks rancid milk on purpose (unless they are so thirsty or hungry they have nothing else).

Yet we do this with people all the time

We see the warning signs, we hear the thumping engine that does not bode well and somehow think we can fix them. Worse yet, if we are co-dependent- we seem to go out looking for others just like them.

Can you imagine doing that in any other area of your life? You don’t say, “Well, that one looks really broken, let me see if I can stand having no A/C in 114 degree heat.” Instead, you quite sensibly run away from those kinds of things in any way you can.

So why do we choose broken people? There are many reasons, but often it is because we are damaged too, just in a different way.

Maybe, we are just that thirsty for love, that hungry for acceptance or feel deep down, in some way, it is all we truly deserve.

Abusers can spot hunger. They can pick out a need at a hundred yards away. For them, it is the power they crave. Like a vine that leeches away the nutrients of the tree it climbs, they suck out that juice, that power over someone, to satisfy a perverted craving with themselves.

In one sense they are a toxic, narcissistic lock and we are the bent key that needs to be needed. We may keep going back or giving because we think we see a beautiful soul in pain. That may be, but we need to have just as much compassion for our needs, more in fact, than we do for the people who seek to break us again and again.

Like an overflowing teacup that is jostled, we all spill out that which is already inside us. The truth is, broken people do broken things. Period.

They do not suddenly, as a rule, stop doing it because they are still broken and do not know any other way to be.

That does not mean that we have to remain in their path (or make excuses for them). It does not mean that they are not accountable either! It simply means that we can have compassion, both for ourselves and them, even as we step (or run) away.

There is another part to this as well. In order to truly access the healing we need, we have to learn to forgive. That is often a tall order indeed. Think of it this way though, hating someone, refusing to forgive or release the pain shackles us to the very suffering we want to escape.

An Unwillingness to release or forgive it pins us to the train track of victimization- again.

If we cannot forgive and release the pain, we remain tied the emotional wreckage for however long we continue to carry the burden.

It is one thing to be victimized once, to carry the scars forward and another to suffer over and over in a mental nightmare that keeps us chained to the same pain throughout our lives. We must then, love ourselves enough to cut the cords.

We all are who we know how to be.

No more, no less. When we make a decision we do so because it fits into our logic, our level of understanding, our view of the way the world works. We understand our decisions because we feel and remember whatever it is that we have experienced or come to understand as our reality.

Most of us, thankfully, are not sociopathic unfeeling robots. Those who are will never know the sheer joy of what it is to care, to touch and to love. Some of us have been the victims of monsters, but at the same time, we do not have to remain victims. We can become survivors. Overcomers.

We can (and we must) rise up, raise up, take back our power and live with as much dignity as we can muster.

It takes an amazing amount of courage to overcome our pain and not return hate for hate, evil for evil, blow for blow. Only the bravest of the brave manage to do so. I hope that you are brave today, as brave, maybe braver than you know you are. And if you have children, do it not for your sake, but for the ones who look to you to understand how life should be.

Something to think about. Namaste. Peace to all beings.