It’s easy to make other people the focus of our attention isn’t it? Women, especially, are raised to do so. We judge, we criticize, sometimes audibly; through anger, manipulation, shame, or guilt, we try to control the people sharing our journey. I have news for you. These are always wrong choices and never ‘the work’ we have been called to do.
Focusing outside ourselves and attempting to control other people is a clever avoidance technique; temporarily, at least, it helps us escape having to look at our own sometimes troubling behavior. The irony is that we always see in others the behavior that we need to pay some attention to in ourselves. Always!
The people in our lives–family and friends, neighbors, even the strangers at the grocery or ahead of us in the traffic jam–are mirrors that reveal who we are. our reactions to them show us what we need to work on in ourselves, and as we release them to live their own lives, we can get back to the business of controlling the only thing we really can control: our own responses of life.
- Karen Casey
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