I’m having seriously hard feelings toward someone today. A stranger. A stranger whose work I have appreciated and promoted to others. And I’m feeling utterly irrational about it..as happens every time in my life that my integrity has ever been questioned.
Some people say it’s not spiritual to have bad feelings, but that’s hogwash and I think we do ourselves a physical and emotional disservice to believe that. I don’t swallow bad feelings any longer because it’s just not a healthy thing for any of us to do. Much better to work through it and release it in a healthy way than let it fester inside. The problem is figuring out the trigger. You can’t release it once and for all without knowing where the feeling began because the seed of it will be there to grow all over again, some other incident, regardless of how silly or minor.
Rite of Reckoning — a Southern witch returns home to secrets that won’t stay buried. Available direct from the author →
I thought I was doing someone a good turn. I thought I was acting supportively. Right now, I’m trying to bandage those metaphorically bitten fingers, but at the same time, I’m still trying to figure out why I cannot let go of integrity issues and just shrug them off as someone else’s opinion.
So let me show you how I work through this, and you’re welcome to try this yourself on your own most volatile emotions.
I’m a stickler on copyrights (having had my work pirated before) but I ran into someone today who’d put the wrong license on his copyrighted photo. I’d followed the license exactly as provided but he didn’t understand the difference between a copyright and a license. I was happily sharing and recommending his work and flowing my readership to him, as my blog stats will attest.
And that’s where this current burning sensation started with a really distressing morning wake-up email accusing me of theft. Right now, he’s full of righteous indignation (as am I) and he seems intent that people are out to do him wrong but that’s his cross to bear.
If anything will get me riled up, it’s having my integrity questioned. And yes, I get riled to the point of being over the top, apostle of fire-type angry. Why? I’m not completely sure but I think I know the answer.
It’s just two questions, this process. First, how does having my integrity questioned make me feel?
Angry, helpless, defensive, enraged, heart-pounding, just life or death upset.
That brings me to the second part: When was the first time I remember feeling this way?
I remember two incidents where, as a very small child, I found myself having my integrity questioned. The latter of the two incidents, I was attacked by a vicious dog that went for my jugular and caught my jaw instead. What I associate with this long-ago event is Daddy not believing me when I said I was just petting the dog. My daddy questioned my integrity at a time when my fight or flight survival instincts were highest.
The other time was a few years before this, when the ground under my sandbox gave way, and I was buried alive in dirt and muck until my mom could race out of the house and across the yard to pull me out. I also remember someone in my family implying I’d done something to cause the situation. I knew the feeling of being questioned as a wrong-doer at a moment when my fight or flight survival instincts were highest. I couldn’t distinguish between the two.
So I guess it’s no surprise that having my honesty questioned brings back those feelings of “MUST SURVIVE THIS.” The best I can do is to know the root cause of those feelings and understand that it often has nothing at all to do with the current event.
A Southern witch returns home. Secrets won’t stay buried. A chance to confront and heal or face the consequences.
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