Author: Doris Deits
Today I want to discuss the concept of personal violation. It’s an important topic because I believe feelings of violation are at the core of our unhappiness and a key motivating factor of aggression in our society.
We have to ask ourselves, why, as human beings, do we have to fight so hard for our personal rights, for respect, for boundaries, for equality, for the freedom to walk through life unmolested? It’s as if we are ALL fighting our way out of a weird slavery mentality that exists all over the world.
Humanity is still at a very primitive stage where violence is king. Violence is the foundation for much of our entertainment! We’ve done a great job at refining the violence, making it more subtle and then patting ourselves on the back proclaiming our civility.
In my opinion, what society has done is created acceptable levels of violence by calling it ‘aggressive’ behavior. We are finally getting a handle on the basics of “just don’t kill each other.’ We’ve even made progress on the ‘stop raping and tormenting each other, too’ front. Aggressive behavior is acceptable because it’s not as bad as killing or maiming.
It’s a mistake to pretend that our ‘aggressive’ behaviors don’t have a significant impact on our emotional well-being and the quality of our lives. The difficulty is that it’s easy to miss the subtle but potent effect of the hundreds or thousands of smaller, less noticeable aggressive and hostile attacks that we endure on a daily basis.
From an energetic perspective, a violation occurs anytime something is taken or forced upon us without invite or provocation. Someone grabs a pen out of our hand, that’s a violation. A false accusation, that’s a violation. An insult is a violation. Sarcasm. Criticism. Deceit. Theft. Rape. Battery. All are abusive. All are violations.
Energy violations eat away at a person’s sense of value or self-worth. This is what the emotional nature of each human being values the most, because a sense of confidence, value and worth is POWER. If I can steal your confidence, I get your power from an energetic perspective.
We can look at this as if emotions, feelings and actions are units of energy. We exchange energy whenever we interact with others. Sometimes we feel good after the conversation, sometimes not. This is how we can tell what kind of energy was exchanged and whether or not we experienced a loss of power. If you feel a loss, there was a violation. Something was taken from you (energy) without your consent.
Becoming aware of how we experience personal violation is an adventure into understanding the depths of our emotional nature. Our emotional nature controls our impulses, thoughts and feelings. If IT ain’t happy, YOU ain’t happy. When a person’s emotional nature becomes wounded, it feels a loss of power. If someone does or says something that makes you feel bad (violated), they now have the ability to undermine your sense of self-worth. No self-worth, no happy.
At some point, your emotional nature is going to lash out in an attempt to get that sense of lost power back by saying or doing something that makes the other person feel ‘less than.’ A snide comment, a criticism, accusation, an insult masquerading as a ‘joke.’ This cycle of wounding continues below our threshold of consciousness.
If we can begin to understand this concept/cycle of perpetual wounding, we can begin to heal it and create a happier, healthier us and a happier, more progressive society. The key is awareness. Once our mind understands what we are dealing with, it can now recognize the behavior and change it.
It can be hard to confront our own power-grabbing behavior, but realize that it’s just a natural part of human behavior. Humans are constantly evolving and getting better. If we make the effort, we will get better at relating to each other in a healthy way.