“Clarence Darrow once said, “The most human thing we can do is comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”
Self-Energy has the courage to do both.
One might think that Self-Energy’s “it’s all okay” sense of grace would lead to a detached passivity and acceptance of the injustices of life, but that’s not the nature of Self-Energy. The clarity of the Self-Energy makes it hard for people to deny injustice and ignore suffering. The compassion of the Self-Energy leads people to resist tyranny and fight for the oppressed. The words of Self-Energy bring hope to the hopeless. The Energy of the Self seeps into the cracks in the tyrant’s walls and gradually erodes them.
Consequently, oppressors attack people whenever they show any signs of Self Energy-Leadership. Abusers know that this is the way to control people, which is why virtually all people who have been severely sexually abused report that any time they acted in a spirited, spontaneous, or independent way, they were either verbally or physically punished. As a result, they came to fear Self-Energy and keep it out of their body.
Thus, rather than making people passive, confidence and grace have the opposite effect. If we don’t fear attack because we are as vulnerable and trust that we can handle the consequences, courage is much more accessible to us. If we know that everyone is a wave in the same ocean, we will challenge injustice without judgment. As Martin Luther King, Jr. expressed, “We must realize that the evil deed of the enemy neighbor, the thing that hurts, never quite expresses all that he is. An element of goodness may be found even in our worst energy.”
Elsewhere, he wrote:
[Nonviolence] does not seek to defeat or humiliate the opponent, but to win his or her friendship and understanding . . . it avoids not only external physical violence but also internal violence of spirit. The nonviolent resister not only refuses to shoot his opponent, but he also refuses to hate him. At the center of nonviolence stands the principle of love . . . if I respond to hate with reciprocal hate, I do nothing but intensify the cleavage in a broken community. I can only close the gap in a broken community by meeting hate with love. (King, 1994, pp. 211-214)
Courage is not only about being a voice for the disenfranchised. It often takes more courage to recognize the damage we do to others and try to make amends. Clarity helps us to see what we have done and, if we have confidence, to understand that mistakes don’t mean we are bad people. We will have the courage to listen to the other’s story with curiosity, apologize sincerely, and ask what can be done to repair the damage. The Self-Energy-Led person dares to act and has the courage to be accountable for acting.
As a person’s Self-Energy emerges, he or she increasingly demonstrates another aspect of courage — the willingness to go toward his or her pain and shame. A person’s internal journeys often involve entering the most frightening places in their psyches. There, they often wind up witnessing events in their past that they had tried to minimize the impact of or forge entirely. This witnessing often leads to a clearer view of key relationships in the outside world and the determination to change those relationships. These changes sometimes involve financial and emotional risk. It takes courage to look and act on what we see.” —
From Dick Schwartz, Internal Family Systems Model, pp. 42-44
With great appreciation for Level One Training and IFSinstitute.com