How You Become Like Your Enemies

You have to be stubborn as a mule to budge this stubborn mule.

See the first post in this series:

Love Your Enemies (i.e. Love Yourself)

In a previous post, I talked about how loving your enemies is the key to finding your own wholeness—and ultimately loving yourself. The people we consider our "enemies" often—if not always—represent a projection of what we dislike in ourselves. Therefore, loving them affords us the opportunity to love and accept the broken pieces of ourselves.

On an energetic level, you can't oppose someone without being like them. It's actually impossible! 

Look at this example: Imagine if someone is on one side side of a wall attempting to push it down. You get on the other side of the wall and resist them. In order to do this, you have to push back on the wall in exactly the same way that they are pushing. The two of you may be pushing in opposite directions, but you are pushing in exactly the same way. This is a model of what happens to us whenever we oppose someone and call them our "enemy."

I noticed this when I—literally—had a turf war with a former neighbor. This man had little regard for anyone else's boundaries. He would police his own yard strictly but would overstep into our yard, claiming pieces of it as his own. In order to stand up for ourselves, I found myself quickly spiraling downward until I ended up guarding our yard as strictly as he was guarding his. I got sucked in and sank to his level. 

I grew up in a rural area where there was plenty of land. We had only a vague idea of where our yard ended and our neighbors' yards began. I used to roll my eyes at "city folk" who squandered their time squabbling over inches of yard in dispute. Yet, there I was doing everything short of stretching out a measuring tape to check if we still had all we were entitled to have.

It is healthy to set boundaries, but something went wrong here. The relationship became oppositional—I wasn't just respecting my boundary, I was opposing him. That was a subtle but extremely significant difference. I labeled him my "enemy," and in doing so, I started acting like him. One of us could have overpowered and outsmarted the other and technically "won," but the real story is that we both were in the same space. I lost simply by playing the game. I didn't just lose a conflict, what I lost was myself. I stepped away from my values and took on the values of my "enemy."

I wasted so much time and energy focusing on a small section in the back of our yard, a section that in normal circumstances would not have occupied much of my attention. Whether I became like my neighbor or whether my neighbor brought out a piece of myself that was lying fallow is a curious question to consider. The truth is probably both are in play whenever we go down the path of enemy-making.

So then how do we respond when people legitimately trespass against us? As stated before, it is healthy to set and maintain boundaries. It is not good to be a doormat for bullies. The radical self-sacrifice of the Gospel is not the same as having no self-respect or boundaries. But it is also risky to respond to fire with fire.

I think this is what Jesus was warning us about when he told us to turn the other cheek. A punch in the cheek seems to demand a punch on the cheek in return. However, whether you "win" or not by punching the other person, the other side has controlled you and gotten you to play their game. Play this out long term, and you realize there is no winning as life simply deteriorates into an endless game of king of the hill where no one stays on top for long. You refuse to play their game when you turn the other cheek. You set and live by your own values. Your center is solid and unmovable by others. It doesn't mean you become a doormat. It just means that a peaceful person remains a peaceful person even if others around you are not. It is actually a position of amazing strength.

I think the key in the situation with my neighbor would have been to focus on my own values rather than focus on opposing him, keeping my attention at as high of a level of consciousness as I could imagine. Compassion and patience should have factored in heavily, too. Long term, I could see the opportunity here. Obviously, there was something about my neighbor that made it difficult for me to stay on the high road, fears or old triggers of some kind, and this interaction was a chance to become aware of that and work on it. 

If a situation absolutely demands that direct resistance is needed, try to spend as little time at that as possible. Spend most of your energy creating a new paradigm rather than fighting on someone else's turf (no pun intended).

I'm reminded of the Pink Floyd song, "Get Your Filthy Hands Off My Desert" off their brilliant anti-war album, The Final Cut. The title is a sharp critique of maddeningly endless geopolitical wars over—quite literally—completely arbitrary lines in the desert sand.

Love Your Enemies (i.e. Love Yourself)

from Matthew 5:44

Have you ever noticed that people hate the same qualities in other people that they themselves have?

Bossy people can't stand other bossy people. Nosy people are irritated by other nosy people. Hyper-sensitive people seem to lack patience with others.

You shake your head and think, "you just can't make this stuff up!"

Psychologists call this behavior projection. It is only one of many dysfunctional habits, but in my experience, it's positively uncanny how I see it just about everywhere.

Eastern religions would classify this under the energetic relationships of "karma." I think they are onto something. These patterns run like clockwork, and they are as predictable as Newton's Laws of Physics.

This form of projection helps me to understand the command of Jesus to "love your enemies" (Luke 6:28; Matthew 5:44)

You should love your enemies, because your true enemy is yourself. The qualities in others that offend you so much are keys to missing pieces of yourself.

We like to portray a glossy picture of ourselves—whether it's our resume, online dating profile or Facebook page. But those documents rarely tell the full story of who we are. It's easier to think about the qualities that we like and ignore our less than noble features.

When we hate other people, there is a reason why they irk us so much and get under our skin. There's some unfinished emotional business there. We may try to disassociate ourselves from the parts we don't like to admit that we have and project those traits onto others, instead.  It's a form of denial.

The people who offend us offer us a key to our own wholeness. Because if it is true that our hatred of others is a projection of our own internal baggage, then when we attempt to cut ourselves off from them, we are also cutting ourselves off from a part of ourselves—a messy, dark, dirty part of ourselves, but a part nonetheless. We can't be truly whole unless, by definition, we accept each and every part of ourselves. And in accepting those pieces, we find wholeness—Shalom—Peace—A peace that surpasses all understanding.

You cannot hate someone without turning into them. Even if your dislike others else does not start off as a projection of yourself, if you continue the process of hatred, you will eventually turn into them—at least, the qualities in them that you hate. It's Greek Tragedy. It's what happened to Darth Vader. You are what you hate. The only way out of this inevitable trap is to not hate them:  Love your enemies. Do good to those who hurt you. Prayer for those who persecute you. It all makes sense. Hated will take control over you, which is why love is the path of true freedom.

Jesus brings us to a unity that is both cosmic and microscopic, external and internal. Yes, Jesus is calling all of creation into oneness. But in doing so, let's not forget he is also calling each individual person into wholeness with her or himself in the process.

Our enemies always tell us something about ourselves. Therapists and other healers know that our enemies are always a key to our own growth. Our enemies are our best teachers.

Separation is myth. Oneness is the ultimate reality that Jesus pointed toward. That truth is evident in many shapes and ways, but to me our tendency to project our self hatred onto others shows me the wisdom of Jesus.

I will be further exploring these topics in upcoming posts, stay tuned!