TRANSCRIPT
I want to talk about this idea of love your enemies. This is a concept attributed to Jesus in the New Testament of the Bible, where Jesus says something along the lines of, well, other people, other religions previously that came before, talk about loving your friends. Well, what makes us special, my followers, me, is we need to love our enemies. And to me, even though I wouldn’t really call myself a Christian, what I would say is that is a unique idea, and that really got me thinking, such that I wanted to make a video about it and talk a little bit about this idea of love your enemies.
Often when I hear Christians talking about what makes Christianity different and all these different ideas, really fundamentally, my reply when I think about it is really it’s the only religion I know that says you should love your enemies. Love the people who hate you. Love the people who treat you badly. Love the people who are not your friends. And really, it’s a revolutionary idea because not very many people nowadays think this. And I certainly don’t know very many Christians either who really think and put a lot of energy into really loving their enemies and doing more than loving in just in word, but loving in deed.
Well, do I love my enemies? Sometimes I have. Sometimes I do. Sometimes people who really have treated me badly, I do love them. And sometimes it can change them, and it can be revolutionary for them. People sometimes who have never been loved at all and don’t treat me well and can be very disrespectful. And sometimes I have the strength within me, the maturity to be respectful to them, to be loving, to be caring, to listen to them, even though they’re not listening to me. Maybe they want to harm me, and I’m not trying to harm them. I’m actually trying to help them and be useful. So in that way, I think there can be value in loving my enemies.
But then there are other times where I think when I was a child and I was being abused by my parents, when I was being disrespected and violated and traumatized by my mother and my father, I had no choice but to love them. And they were harming me. They were breaking me down in all sorts of different ways. They were creating all sorts of hell and hassle inside of my life, making me hate myself. And I couldn’t escape. I needed them to love me. And the best way I could get them to love me more and to not treat me with so much harm was to love them. And I loved and loved and loved them no matter what. I turned the other cheek, and I forgave them.
And for me back then, when I look at it in hindsight, all these decades later, I didn’t really have a choice. It was just a strategy for me to try to survive, to love them. And no matter what, to love my parents who were traumatizing me. And in a way, I was an expert at loving my enemies. I was an expert at forgiveness. And so when I first read that years later, when I first read the Bible in my 20s and read about loving your enemies, it’s like I didn’t know if I bought it exactly. I didn’t know if that’s what I wanted to do because that’s what I had done, because I had no choice. In a way, I was a child with Stockholm Syndrome. I was like kidnapped in a way by my family. I couldn’t escape, and I had to love them to get them to love me more.
If I didn’t love my enemies, because my parents in many ways were my enemies, they were the ones who were harming me more than anyone. If I hadn’t loved them, I was in big trouble. I would have been hurt so much worse. Standing up and fighting for myself and not turning the other cheek might have gotten me killed, or at the very least, it really would have gotten me rejected way, way more severely than I was already being rejected. And that rejection might actually have killed me because I knew it when I was younger. I learned early on my parents’ rejection was like a death sentence for me. I had to do anything I could to keep them loving me.
So as I got older, I started thinking, no, no, no, no. Once I had the strength to get out of the family system, when I had the skills to survive in the world, when I had friends who didn’t treat me horribly, I stopped accepting that kind of abuse. I’m not gonna be so loving to people who are horrible and violating of me. I am going to have boundaries now. I don’t know what the Bible meant when they said love your enemies. Is that just a translation? Maybe it meant something totally different. But it’s still interesting to contemplate, especially since some I have found it as an adult in my life to be of great value.
But then there’s one other thing, and this is a key point for me. When I consider this idea of love your enemies, an area where I think it really is very valuable, and I don’t think this is what the Bible meant, and I don’t think this is what Jesus, whoever Jesus was, I don’t think this is what he meant, or maybe it is. I don’t know. The idea of loving your enemies, where to me has incredible value, is that when I was a child in my family system, where I did have a sort of Stockholm Syndrome, where I did just side with my aggressors because I needed them to love me, because if I didn’t side with them, they would hurt me, reject me, kill me maybe. Well, what happened is I became a lot like them. I internalized them. I internalized a lot of their bad, bad behavior.
And what happened to me is as the result of the abuse and trauma that I suffered, part of the way I coped with it was by hating myself. And in many ways, my greatest enemy as I entered adulthood many years ago was I became my own enemy, and I hated myself. I really hated my inner child, and I was an enemy to myself. I treated myself badly in so many ways. I treated my friends badly. I wasn’t always honest. I was cruel. I was harmful to my own body in all sorts of different ways. I took a lot of stupid risks. Not all over the place. In some ways, I still always did love myself a bit here and there, but in a lot of ways, I was my worst enemy. And I feel comfortable saying that I think a lot of people are also their worst enemies.
Just the other day, someone wrote as a comment here, and then maybe they wrote it as a message to me somewhere. They said, “I hate my inner child.” And I thought, what do I say to someone who says they hate their inner child? It’s like that’s someone who’s telling me overtly that they are their own enemy. And so for me, with the concept of love your enemies, this actually has been my salvation as an adult. This is the in which I have found value in my life and turned my life in a completely different direction. And that is learning to love myself, learning to honor how I was abused, and learning to look at that person who hates myself and to love myself anyways, to love me, to love the person that I am, to love all parts of myself and to say, “Oh, why did I become my own enemy?” I became my own enemy because I had no choice. That’s what I learned, and that’s what I had to do to survive. And I can love that person who hates me because that person was so traumatized. That part of me was incredibly traumatized. Nobody hates themself unless they were traumatized. No one treats themselves badly unless they were harmed along the way. No one becomes their own enemy unless they had enemies.
So for me, when I do think about this concept of loving your enemies, it’s the only area where I can universally say yes, I believe it’s a wonderful thing to love your enemies. Nothing to do with Christianity or religion at all. This is about self-healing. This is about loving the parts of myself that I have internalized that are not healthy, not self-loving, and learning to love all parts of me.
They came from and grieving what happened to me, making sense of my history. Meaning making, meaning out of my history, making meaning out of the awful ways in which I treated myself along the way. Really learning to care for myself and learning to take those sides of myself that are enemies and convert them into sides of myself that love me, fight for me, and value me, nurture me.
What I found more and more and more is the more I’ve loved that internalized enemy that came out of my traumatized childhood, the more I don’t have much of an internalized enemy anymore. There isn’t such an enemy, and that I live a life that I’m more self-loving. I’m more consistent in my respect for myself, my nurturance of myself. I honor myself. I have more empathy for myself, for my history, for my bad behavior that I’ve done, for the stupid things that I did that got myself in trouble, the ways in which I harmed other people.
And that I don’t have to be ashamed for the bad things that I did. I don’t have to be ashamed for the bad ways in which I mistreated myself. And that yes, life can change, that I can change, and that I really can become a self-loving person. And that also other people can do the exact same thing.
[Music]