Spirituality: Is Being Mean to Others Part of “Being True to Myself”?

I’ve often described spirituality as the personal process of always being true to yourself, or at least involving this to a large extent.

However, in trying to be genuine and respect your feelings, you may at points find yourself at odds with your own anger, resentment, frustration, and so on. Emotions can be strong, powerful, intense, and may at have you question if these should also become a part of being true to yourself. And how legitimate it is to express them.

First things first. I don’t care about what anyone says about spirituality or enlightenment: in this reality you will experience anger, fear, distress, uncertainty, etc. no matter your spiritual progress.

You aren’t incorporeal: you are human. You are living in a human body, navigating a human-shaped reality, dealing with human things, yours and of others. On one occasion you’ll be blissfully detached in during peak spiritual moments, on another you’ll feel affected by the person at the store not replying to you how you’d prefer.

Feelings — and feeling things — are part of being human. The rule of thumb here is that trying to dismiss, deny, control, and/or suppress your feelings will never wield beneficial results, in an emotional/spiritual sense. Note that this doesn’t mean every single thing you feel is relevant in an equal standing; but you should take care not to ignore/suppress systematically how you feel.

Thus, a core component of spirituality is the willingness and sometimes challenge of a) acknowledging how you feel and b) handling your feelings and emotions, responding to them on a need-to basis and using your discernment: expressing them, letting them be, moving beyond them, shifting your beliefs, interpreting them as a sign a situation doesn’t serve you anymore, being a motivating factor for change… and so on. Whatever the situation asks for. Whatever is a suitable answer.

Now, whenever you hear about the importance of being true to oneself, what this generally means is the principle of honoring your inner truth, as opposed to suppress or ignoring it. Which can include being authentic in term of outward expressiveness relative to what goes within, and honoring the truth in your heart when it comes to choices and behavior.

Spiritually, the heart by definition *never* wants to hurt others. It isn’t part of your heart, or spiritual essence if you will, to go about creating suffering for others. The heart is the seat of the soul, and the soul is never invested in making others feel anything other than what’s constructive, productive, benevolent. The heart only ever aims at potentiating the personal progress, yours and of others, or benefiting another’s experience in some way. This is how the soul wants to serve.

The heart can also consider restoring justice in situations of unfairness. This is when the heart spiritually knows truth has been critically compromised, and a spiritual desire arises to restore that truth in the situation. In spiritual terms this can be something of a grey area between a “peaceful” heart and an outwardly acting one, but generally you remain in integrity for as long as you stay within the boundaries of what makes the situation unfair relative to the truth of the heart.

The point where you can step out of the truth and integrity, and you may begin to consider inflicting suffering onto others, is where the line is crossed between being authentic/fair and VENTING.

This is, for example, when you’re in so much pain to the point you wish to direct that pain to others, perhaps so they can finally feel what you’re feeling. This desire to push pain onto others is born out of suffering and despair, but it is not coming from the purity of the heart or its sense of justice.

It’s just that the heart may have been hurt to such an extent that hurt is all you can feel. So there may come the time when you’ve gone through such neglect, suffering, toxicity, and unfairness, that the only thing you can be left to feel is wanting to let it all out. Perhaps to the point of having others “taking it” instead of you. Especially when you’ve spent a long time pretending you were okay and nothing was going on with you, all the while you were experiencing pure neglect, pure lack of support, pure disconnection, and being expected just to carry on doing so indefinitely.

In such circumstances, the discovery of the possibility of VENTING can feel so good that you mistake it for authenticity and/or for what your heart and Soul want. Further, you don’t want to go back to bottling everything up inside again, and so you may forego any self-moderation to mind the sensitivity of others. In such circumstances, the principle of moderation will just feel like the old habit of invalidating yourself.

This is where you may go and something like “well, sucks to be you, I’m just being myself!”

Don’t get me wrong: VENTING can be nice!

VENTING, in the specific sense of outwardly expressing and giving body to your pain and anger, *can* be part of your spiritual process.

You can reach such levels of stored pain that expressing that pain is the only option left for you to acknowledge it. And there will be appropriate times for catharsis, for letting it all out – and even for telling it “how it is” to another, without the process of doing so necessarily becoming a harmful, destructive action.

There will be certain moments where you’re supposed to own your truth as it is while expressing it to another. Where not doing so will be a disservice to the other person, who will need to see, hear, and know your truth. Other times you may simply be unable to stuff things within any longer, and it all just comes pouring out in an unintentional, involuntary, and/or emotional way.

I would say that in the spiritual path there can be leeway for adopting a more frank and straightforward manner of communicating that bypasses many of the more superficial, pointless modes of behavior more prevalent in society. This will lead to a balancing act of expressing yourself assertively, avoiding falling back into old patterns of self-dismissal, while also not crossing the line of disrespect and aggression towards others in the process of doing so.

This is a balancing act and learning curve that, I would say, are normal in the spiritual path. “In speaking my own truth, how far can I go in being honest, and past which point am I being inappropriate?” This is a normal question, the answer for which often isn’t about finding clean yes/no lines but rather involve a consistent process of rigorous self-evaluation.

Finally, one way of venting/processing pain is creativity. Art can be cathartic; art has always been a fertile arena that allows individuals to express their invalidated pain, which is connected with and thus validated by its audience, without aiming those feelings directly towards/against any one individual.

In short, dealing with stored pain isn’t easy. Admitting its the existence may only barely the first, often difficult step. After which there will have to be a path, a process, that aims and coping with that pain. And in that process, a degree of assertive energy and/or creative expression can sometimes develop, and even be an inevitable consequence, as one finally tries to bear the brunt of their pain (as opposed to suppressing it), without this meaning that intention is going to be inherently, systemically, harmful.

VENTING only becomes harmful to a meaningful extent when it creates unfairness with others, and when you start leaning onto it as a crutch.

The assertive energy that is sparked when VENTING, especially when doing so onto others, can be construed as a form of power, as well as relief, pleasure, etc, since it’s how it’s going to feel. From here you can adopt it as a method that you can use recurrently to deal with the pain.

Because of this energy of relief and/or power, this recurrent usage of venting is where you may be tempted to use your own suffering to justify being harmful to others. Doing so may offer you the impression VENTING is finally lending you the power you felt you never had.

And this is when you become the “mean person”. When you’ve adopted a belief that justifies and encourages being harmful to others, and has you act on it consistently.

When you become used to coping with your pain by expressing outwardly in anger, in your thought process — possibly heavily affected by that same anger— part of you may think like this: “This is how I feel, so it must be genuine; it must come from the heart”. Or perhaps “I feel this way, so that in itself gives me legitimacy to express outwardly”. The feelings of anger within are construed in and of themselves as legitimacy to act, and to push what is within onto others in its “original” form.

But this is a fallacy.

Pain and suffering are indeed stored in the heart. But that same pain and suffering can block the inherent values of the heart rather than being a genuine part of them when acted upon without integrity.

In a spiritual sense, nothing can be used as a justification to cause harm — not even your pain, for all its depth, for all its unfairness. Any belief that justifies lack of compassion towards others has crossed the line between owning one’s truth and stepping outside of integrity.

There are healthy ways of VENTING, and then there are ways to do so that only serve to propagate more unfairness outwardly. With the former you’re responding to the calls by the pain in the heart to cope with it and heal it. With the latter you’ve decided to become part of the problems in the world rather than a part of the solutions.

VENTING can be a necessary part of your spiritual process, and in your spiritual path there may be leeway to discover and explore it.

There will always be ways to be true to oneself and express what goes inside. But in expressing yourself you must have the strength to hold tightly to your discernment, never letting go of it under any circumstance. That effort will show you where the balance between sincere expression and compassionate respect lies.

But suffering can’t become a justification to bypass the need to hold on to that discernment. The moment you do so, you’ll start veering towards toxic, harmful, and destructive behavior.