Q. When trying to practice tough love in not putting up with other’s dysfunction, I’m faced with the following dilemma:
Because they don’t have my perception, they can’t understand how I can be so “cruel and intolerant” when they “do so much for me and love me so much.” It seems unkind to treat them from my higher vantage point when they can’t see what I’m doing from their lower vantage point.
A. There are many root assumptions in your question that are not well-founded in reality:
People that ‘love’ you while being in ego-consciousness simply cannot actually feel love for you. Ego-identification sees through the colored lens of itself. The innate connection that feels intent heart-to-heart is too obscured to connect with you. In the absence of such connection love cannot occur.
When you point out another’s dysfunctionality that he or she does not acknowledge, they mistakenly think you are cruel. When you don’t point out another’s dysfunctionality, you are indeed cruel because you rob them of the opportunity to get off the treadmill of their self-indulgence. It takes someone with a higher perception to see dysfunction for what it is. If you both have the same low viewpoint you would be jointly swimming around and around your fish bowl of illusion.
The tremendous error that beings of high consciousness make, is to attribute their pristine motives to those around them. This is a tendency that serves no one. People call a kaleidoscope of shades of dysfunction, ‘love.’
Example: A young teen-ager ruins a parent’s day by being sullen, disrespectful and defiant all day and treating the parent with his worst behavior and their friends with the best. At night when they go to sleep, they hastily kiss the parent and whisper, “I love you,” making all right in most parents’ slanted perception.
Unfortunately the child is being taught to pacify with words. “I love you” in this instance is a hook that says “I treat you as poorly as I want to, but this is permissible because at night I throw you the crumbs of my perception.”
By allowing this, are we really instilling the best values in our children?