Violence

It used to seem straight forward to me, what violence is, physical aggression being the obvious and at most I would stretch the definition to encompass prejudice.

Through the work Im doing in forensics, my personal definition of violence has expanded. It could be anything from hate speech, manipulation, oppression, dominance, splitting, bullying, taking, damaging someone sense of self, lying, ignoring, malicious intentions and so much more.

Daily we sneak violence into our interactions, its not just the bad people who get locked away that engage in these behaviors. We all do it. We want to do better than someone else, talk about someone we dont like, take something because we beleived we deserve it, sqeeze people out of social circles. Its everyone, everywhere, an intrinsic part of human nature we teach ourselves not to notice. As a society we play the game of believing we are all good and justify who we are and what we do with traditions, laws and self righteousness. All this so we can remain deluded to the truly cruel nature of human beings- ourselves.

We put the scary people in cages and point at them through the use of exacerbated newspaper titles and feel a little better about our own existence.

Violence is always there, we ask the convicted to change their ways in a society so warped and deluded, often they do not know what they are aiming for. Either the person becomes the ridiculed or the ridiculer, and how do we exit this? Splitting and paradox are complex and we are so easily seduced by wanting to be the 'good' we create more conflict through the interplay between good and bad. The only way forward is to own the shadow, know our own darkness and only then we can tame it enough to be a truly kind and compassionate person.

To do this we need to hear the painful, sit with the feelings and understand those parts of ourselves that are cruel to others, including cruelty to ourselves. As we see our shadow, our bodies and minds revolt and try and convince ourselves its not true. However it is, we all have the capacity to be cruel and we all do it. Whether its directly or through omission, if we are not active in owning it, we are unconciously being driven by it.