Zen Habits posted a list of tips for loving our enemies the other day. Actually, it was “loving thy enemy,” which prompted a little discussion in the comments about why it should be “thine” (apparently it’s the difference between “a” and “an”) and prompted me just now to realize what sometimes bothers me about that site: it’s generally phrased as “here’s what you should do,” not “here’s what I do.” The tips are things that the blogger has been doing, but they’re written out in a way that’s prescriptive, rather than descriptive.

It chafes me a little because I’m used to people speaking from their own experiences, because we rarely know what our audiences are already doing, whether what has worked for us will work for them, or whether they’re way ahead of us in some areas. And I think that writing that way cheats us out of sharing a lot of our own experiences. Writing from my own perspective gives me a chance to learn more and process more of them as I go, and to learn that just sharing my life can benefit others. And personally, it helps me get off of the codependent soapbox that I love so much, from which I think that I have to fix everyone’s problems, say everything perfectly, anticipate their objections and knock those out of the ballpark too, and just generally take everyone’s inventories and tell them what to do instead.

So, there were some interesting – and I think very common – objections to the idea of loving our enemies. One person insisted that resentment was good for us and that it’s a “poison that exfoliates our soul”, which didn’t make a lick of sense to me – although the idea of clinging to my resentments sure did. Another shared her experiences with an extremely abusive family, with a sister who is undergoing brain surgery as an eventual result of the addictions caused by that abuse, and with her own ongoing rage around these things. She said, “What if as a result of how you were raised their actions continue to torment you, your siblings as well as themselves?” and shared the pain of her ongoing anger “simmering below the surface” as it ate away at her. I wrote the following reply in comments and wanted to share it here. Forgiving our abusers: is it insane?