Active Amends

When I was healing my relational patterns, I was doing lots of active amends.

Most of this, in practice, looked like inviting complaints about me from my loved ones and then shutting up and listening.

I literally prayed to god "please help me be in love. Please let me listen."

I was all ears for the smallest complaints from my loved ones. I wanted them to bring it all to me, and I listened for what of me was being unfair, was not considering them, was not appreciating them, was not loving them well. All the ways I was controlling, the ways I used blame, the ways I interrupted and didn't hear them out.

In particular I listened for a long time to how I didn't listen. I know it was true because it felt like a long time to listen to all they had to say about me not listening.

In truth, I woke up to how they were right. How they could be right, how they could have been right all along.

I dropped my obsession with how I was right and received the miracle of someone else's rightness, and how following their advice could help me change my life.

I was living active amends, I was eagerly changing things about my life, ways I was relating, patterns I had learned. I was opening my heart to what felt like knives but they were scalpels for a surgery I chose every moment to have, eyes wide open.

My loved ones' complaints about me were exactly the information I needed to make my life right, to make myself right with the life I was living. I felt grateful. I experienced that we were on the same team, just figuring out the truth.

All the complaints had value, and I found it by deeply listening to them, depersonalizing them to my identity (because I was leaving the identity that made those choices and enacted those behavioral patterns) and humanizing the other person, really empathizing with the other person. I was genuinely curious about who I was being in the world and who I wanted to be. I was genuinely fascinated to learn how my loved ones experienced me and what they wanted from me.

From there, I came to sort out in my life—who has a practice of complaint, who has bad boundaries and then blames me for their bad experience, and who rarely complains but always has valuable truth for me?

When I was problematic, I was surrounded by people who complained, because only people who are willing to complain will allow themselves to be around problematic people. Now that I listened long enough to be more of a passive problem than an active problem, my life is full of people who don't seriously complain, who complain for the pure fun and drama of complaining, but don't keep anything around to really complain about.

Still hungry for the truth about myself, I happily receive it gently, from pleasant practices, from those in pleasant practices. My housemates are welcome to roast me about the ways I'm annoying in the house. I'm here for it. I annoy me too, and I can't get away! That's about the spiciest it gets. It doesn't have to get spicier because we all have good boundaries and pleasant proactive practices of adjustment.

I am still alert for the smallest complaint, for what it has to show me about myself and my own ongoing process of integrity, and about those I've let close, and their practice of seeing me. I'm still enjoying finding my way to more integrity, reveling in others rightness, seeking to hold doubled standards, which is to say holding their highest standard along with my own highest standard.

And lately, when someone finds me problematic,

it's fine with me,

I get it.

and

I'm probably

just not for you.