How to Recover From Verbal Abuse
You can refuse to feel hurt
“Gregg, only someone like you could fail at something this easy! You're worthless!”
That really hurt. How could I be so stupid?
For most of my life, encounters like this were devastating. I knew they weren’t true, but I still cringed. I felt down for the rest of the day. And if I was already depressed, this just made it worse.
This has probably happened to you. Like me, you envied people who were never bothered by this kind of verbal attack.
Here is a story, a Buddhist parable, that can help you.
The Buddha was walking along a path in the forest, when he was confronted by an angry man. “Who are you to tell me how to live?”, he yelled. “Your ideas are stupid, and you are an idiot!”
The Buddha waited calmly until the man finished ranting, then he said:
“If you buy a gift for someone and they don’t accept it, who does the gift belong to?”
“Well,” the angry man said, “it belongs to me, of course.”
The Buddha answered, “Sir, you are correct. And so I do not accept your anger. It does not belong to me, it belongs to you. You are only hurting yourself.”
When I first read this parable, I decided that it would help me shield myself from somebody else’s anger. I could say to myself, “this anger belongs to you, not me — I refuse to be harmed by it.”
And this reminds me of a famous quote by Marcus Aurelius:
“That to expect bad people not to injure others is crazy. It’s to ask the impossible. And to let them behave like that to other people but expect them to exempt you is arrogant — the act of a tyrant.”
People are going to be angry, and you can’t do anything about that.
But you don't have to accept their anger — it belongs to them.
