I think we almost always have the option to "get rid of that person" or to get away from them, but the trouble is that to do so, so often comes at a price that we might not be willing to pay/suffer, neither in the short term nor for the long term.What about ongoing injustices? Then, do we need ongoing acts of mental justice? I know you guys will say— then just get rid of that person. But sometimes you can’t. I think perpetual injustice is tough for TMS recovery.
For example, if it were a boss regularly causing injustices, then one can quit one's job, but then there wouldn't be any food on the table or money to pay the rent until one finds another job, if one can find another job (or somehow generate an income by working for oneself or whatever). It's like choosing between 'a rock and a hard place' and you don't know whether getting rid of 'the rock' or moving away from it and opting for 'the hard place' will be even worse, or actually might turn out to be a decision that leads to better things and no or far less anger/rage. I think that it's fear that often keeps us in a bad and/or difficult situation of suffering continued or perpetual injustices.
When I first joined these forums, I asked a similar question to your two questions above, and I was told by a number of people that it's often sufficient TMS recovery-wise merely to recognise your anger/rage and that you don't necessarily have to do anything to get away from a person or change a situation that's causing you it... Well, I've had a lot of anger/rage and recognised it in situations where I've been 'between a rock and a hard place' and not taken the risk of moving from 'the rock' to 'the hard place', and I don't know how much purely recognising my anger/rage has actually helped me to get to the point where I am now - that point being that I'm so much better TMS symptoms-wise than when I was bed bound, but I've not yet fully lost all of my TMS symptoms. So, for me, the jury is still out on that one.
I guess in the example of working for an awful boss, it could be sufficient to imagine blowing them up with TNT every time they do something enragingly unjust, but it might not work as it might cause anger/rage because you're having to keep doing that, and another factor, of course, would be just how bad those injustices are and how regularly they occur etc... imaginary detonation might not be sufficient and regularly endeavouring to going through the stages 1-4 detailed in this thread time consuming and exhausting in relation to perpetual injustices.
A couple of alternatives to 'TNT blasting' are to relinquish the matter (the injustices) to a higher power (if one believes in one) or to forbear. I was reading about forbearance recently, it being putting up with the wrongdoing for the sake of the relationship or group harmony. Forbearance does not, however, have to mean that we cave in and 'do turtle' to keep from ruffling our partner’s, boss’s, or work colleagues’ feathers. Forbearance can actively embrace refusal to respond negatively so that we benefit our relationship. I'm not religious but I like this quotation from the bible which I think is likely to be helpful to remember if one chooses the path of forbearance: "You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they can see your good deeds." If someone is bad mouthing you, then shining your good light may mean that others that they are bad mouthing about you to will take little or no notice of them or will eventually come around to doing that.
Also, I'm currently reading a book which suggests mentally sending those that wrong us wishes that they be happy, even when you don't feel inclined to do so. In my own life there were a couple of people who for many years made my life miserable with their unjust behaviour towards me and at the time I felt powerless to do anything about it because going from 'a rock' to opting for 'a hard place' also meant suffering and I didn't know how long that suffering might go on for and whether or not things would eventually get better for me. Purely because of a change of circumstances on their part, I encounter those people infrequently now, but when I do or they enter my thoughts (because something reminds me of them or of the circumstance I was in with them) I have recently tried mentally sending them wishes that they be happy... and to my astonishment, it works!... I go from figuratively gnashing my teeth to letting go and feeling peaceful again, and any time I think of them now, my anger/rage is noticeably less intense and, time will tell, but maybe it will at some point go altogether. It would have been interesting to see if doing this would have worked at the time of those people being majorly in my life. In the aforementioned book that I'm reading (Joy on Demand by Chade-Meng Tan) it says the following (the words in the brackets in the abstract are mine that I've just added for clarity):
"To simply think that I wish for one other person to be happy makes me happy. I suspect there is an evolutionary reason behind this. We survive as a species because we are capable of living and working closely together in large numbers. My friend the psychiatrist and author Tom Lewis, has a funny way of talking about ultra-sociality. He said he was at the local zoo looking at the tigers when a zoo employee told him they cannot put two male tigers in the same space because they will kill each other. Tom suddenly realized there were ten thousand visitors in the zoo that day, and none of the five thousand human males were killing each other. That, he told me with an impish grin, is ultra-sociality. In order to have ultra-sociality, we must have the neurological mechanism for ultra-sociality to exist, and I think the ten-second exercise (of mentally wishing for another person to be happy) illuminates the underpinning of that mechanism: the joy of loving-kindness, that simply being on the giving end of a kind thought is intrinsically rewarding. If that is true, we may have just discovered one of the most important secrets of happiness."
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