THE MATCH AND THE CONFLAGRATION / OR HOW TO DISCERN A TRIGGER FROM A DISASTER

“You only hurt the one you love…”
Makes no sense, and yet a genuine phenomenon it is in our lives. The words flown out of our mouths we would give anything not to have uttered, the disconnect of the phone when the other is speaking, the storming out and slamming the door in the other’s face, and—yes, it happens—the push, the shove, the slap we horrify ourselves with. How could we have let things go that far, how could we have done / said anything so terrible?
Let us step back for a moment to our feelings just before we spoke and / or acted. Likely, we were experiencing out-of-control feelings of rage, which were in reality covering up feelings of grief, fear, shame, humiliation, sorrow, loss, fear of loss, threat, rejection, abandonment, and so much more pain. Pain we have known before in our lives, unless we have been living under a rock.
Pain that happened to us long, long ago, before we were able to deal with it, defend ourselves, know that it was not about us at all, but about someone who was wounding us grievously. And perhaps more recent pain, because those of us who were wounded early on, tend to attract ourselves to people who will wound us again—yet that is the topic of another “musing”.
Time after event after occurrence after drama, again and again, we mistake the trigger, which might be symbolized as a “newly struck match”, with its small, sweet flame, for a conflagration. And rather than respond with a breath drawn in and quickly expelled to extinguish the match’s flame, we react, seeing not a tiny match flame, but rather envisioning an inferno descending upon us, and usually, we react badly, saying and doing the hurtful things we regret.
If only we could learn to discern the tiny flame for what it is, and realize that the conflagration is actually from so many painful experiences from our past.
When a trigger is pulled at work, or in traffic, or by a neighbor or casual acquaintance, we are so much more likely to experience that appropriate match flame, rather than a fireball headed our way, and “deal with” whatever actual hurt, fear or anxiety the trigger effected / produced. No, not always, otherwise desk rage and road rage would never have entered our vernacular. Usually, however, because we do not hold the same stakes with those more distant folk and experiences, our reality check resources are more firmly in place.
Yet when a loved one pulls a trigger, we frequently do not even see, feel or experience the tame match flame. Because we have great stakes in giving ourselves over to love—of spouse, lover, partner, child, friend—we are vulnerable, and everything we see, feel and experience is magnified. Ignited into threatening flames.
Because we invest such magnitude of resources upon those we love, we make ourselves vulnerable to them because we fear losing them.
All that fear, loss, abandonment, fear of rejection, shame and so on appear as a bonfire to us, and we are incited to stamp that fire out with an arsenal of hurtful words and actions.
Again and again.
Resistance to going back in time and blaming families of origin and others who wounded us early on abounds, but I am not talking about any moral or ethical or even theological motivational issues here. All parents do the best they possibly can with us and for us, given who they are and what resources they have and what experiences they are going through themselves. Ditto all the other hurtful folk in our younger years. Simply recognizing and acknowledging the results of our early experiences within our families, neighborhoods and schools liberates us to experience all those old pains as the bonfire, and see clearly the tiny match flames in our present.