When we make it difficult for others to protest and why we need to in order to affirm a strong foundation self love

It takes a secure sense of self to allow the criticism or feedback of others and not feel injured by it, to come to grips with the truth that not everyone will see, understand or care about us. We are all different in the values we hold and the ways we relate, often we need to express these difference via protest in order not to lose touch with our own strong foundation of self. The following excerpt comes from Robert Karan’s book The Forgiving Self : The Road from Resentment to Connection

There is no question that we make it difficult for one another to protest.. We inhibit each other with implicit threats : Don’t criticize me. Don’t disapprove of me. Don’t get angry with me. Don’t make demands on me. To say to a friend “when you talk to me like that, I feel like I don’t want to know you,” can be an extraordinarily powerful positive, connecting thing to say. But we fear the response, (Go fuck yourself, you’re always complaining.) This fear gets in the way of many of our most dynamic communications. “You’re being condescending, and I hate it when you get that way.” (You’re too sensitive, you don’t even know when I’m kidding.) “I hate your depression.. It feels selfish and self absorbed and like you don’t really care that I’m left out in the cold.” (Wow, that makes me feel just great.) “I was crushed by what you wrote. It felt like a stab in the back.” (That’s because you can’t take criticism.)

The controlling response, or even just the fear of it, has the power to hold us hostage, especially when we’re dealing with people who mean a lot to us. It activates our shame. It activates our guilt. And so we rush back into prison – we apologize, we hold our tongue, we get into bitter efforts to prove ourselves right or place the blame on the other.

This is, of course, is just another way of describing a continuing pre-occupation with a punitive inner parent who did not welcome our protests and demands as a child. So we become overly dependent on the receptivity of others (whom we inevitably confuse with that parents.) We don’t have our own entitlement – it has to come from them. This places too much power and responsibility in the hands of the people for whom our protest is meant. Under such conditions, protest is either inhibited (“I’ll kill you if you disagree”). It can can’t come out right. It comes soaked in dependency and a clinging animosity that often manifests itself in the horrible need to convince.

Freeing ourselves from such enmeshment can take years of hard work, because it means extricating ourselves from the psychological structure that got laid down for us as children. But people are right, I think, to feel that this is a fight worth fighting, even it if never gets finished.

In the end, protest is something we do for ourselves. A receptive climate makes the job easier. That’s always true, and no one is immune to the need for that. But, all the same, if we don’t protest, or if we do it poorly, the failure is ours and so is the loss.

When protest comes from a healthy, entitled place, it is strong, clear, and catalytic. Even if, concretely you get nothing for it, you’ve gotten a lot, because you’ve performed a vital function. You’ve spoken what you needed to speak. In doing so you’ve moved far away from your persecutory dramas and towards self love; I’m okay and I want to take care of myself.

In this way, good protest is related to both separation and mourning. You’re not clinging to the ungiving parent, waiting earnestly, eternally, bitterly, for his (or her) approval or affection o his finally owning up. You are connected, symbolically, to the love of the loving parent and other loving figures in your life and to your own lovingness. So that even if you get met with coldness, incredulity, argumentativeness, or anger, neither your point of view, your entitlement, nor your sense of okayness is lost. You may feel hurt, you may feel sad, very sad; but you live in a world where you are cared for, even if not by this person at this moment. It is, in effect a shift towards secure attachment, towards relocating the realm of security that exists within you, and acting creatively from that place. In all this, protest is fundamentally different from and anti-thetical to blame.