We are all vulnerable (and in that lies our hidden strength!)

To be human is to be vulnerable but so many would rather deny it.. Vladimir Putin comes up a lot lately when I meet with friends who know more about Eastern European and Russian politics than I ever will.. Dad sadly thought that studying was not a good thing for a girl who was only going to get married and have babies (little did he know THAT WAS NEVER GOING TO HAPPEN). I cry over it a lot lately but its not too late to admit I would love to possibly learn even more about what I do not know.

I have friends who have suffered a lot of trauma who try to say that Putin is only doing this to cleanse Ukraine of dark elements and somehow its necessary and justifed. Talk about siding with the abuser. The more educated among you possibly know this is not true, it is propaganda, and is a way also of manipulating others who on some level also feel powerless but would rather wound and hurt than take that on board and experience their own vulnerability.

I recently saw a photo of Putin on a lamp post somewhere I was walking in the photo his eyes seemed to be set back far in his head and were full of emptiness and darkness. A friend yesterday says she does not feel all wantonly homicidal dictators did had an abusive childhood, were in fact born as bad seeds, something therapist James Hillman believes.. I am not so sure. But Jung did say one powerful thing.. that the opposite of love is not hate but the will to power over and perhaps dictators only reach for that due to a lack of love and empathy shown to them.. Both Alice Miller and astrologer Liz Greene make this point about some of the most aggressively damaging men who enacted such pain upon the vulnerable souls in Nazism.. Surely the roots of that approach (a strong and steely defense against experiencing their own vulnerability lies hidden both in their personal and ancestral past.. I do not know I will have to do my research..

I think denying our human vulnerability may be the worst crime of all, denigrating the so called ‘evil’ dark shadow carriers may in some ways miss the mark but I may be wrong.. It is a crime to have a heart of compassion even for those who approve crimes against the vulnerable such as rape of innocent women and killing of children?.. And what happened to Putin’s inner child to make him shut down so and become subsumed by his own holocausted inner core?

I just met with a friend and we were discussing this. She is not a fan of men, sees them as the perpetrator of so much evil on this planet, often putting woman down and disallowing them valid emotions in order to feel strong and it may be a fact as Lundy Bancroft observes in her important book on male abusers Why Does He Do That : Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men that that kind of emotional and physical violence comes from someone only projecting and deeply in flight from their own inner wounded feminine.. I got that book after being put down for over 3 years by my ex partner whose parting shot was to call me an insecure, flighty, screw up of a person. Its taken me well over 8 years of therapy now to try to turn that kind of self hatred and self blame around while also not running from the places in me where i also feel powerless, weak, flawed or vulnerable.

The fact is if we do not own our shadow we will not only project it but keep meeting it, but in our hatred of it we may like Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Putin and countless other toxic dictators also end up enacting that rage upon vulnerable targets.. This is not a world we kind ones want to live in, but lately it seems to me that even we need to wise up if we do not want to be hurt.. For in being too vulnerable at times we will allow ourselves to be overtaken and humiliated, shame dumped and put down by those who actually have not one shred of interest in seeing us or themselves as just innately human if flawed beings trying our best to live and grow and learn in consciousness. And sadly for those of us denied empathy as kids and blamed, becoming what Jungian analyst Sylvia Bretton Perrera labels scapegoat identified the inner persecutor will come to live inside of us as a toxic force always putting us down and sending up such big storms of anxiety when we try to come alive that it may feel we will die if we try to find the courage to defy and move through them. And yet to be free, is this not what we must do.

https://objectsanddistance.com/2022/06/20/poetry-reading-when-the-storm-is-over/