Zimmerman: when self-contact and self-management are lacking
Self-Help Question #3 ~ What Consequences?
July 15, 2013As Sick As Your Secrets?
July 17, 2013Two people meet – one of them is unable to manage his own impulses.
Caught up in his own unboundedness, he does not stop himself, and his grandiosity unfolds into an enactment that can not be taken back.
A wise person once told me that if one had to choose, it’s far better to be the victim of another’s injustice than to be the perpetrator.
Even though anyone who has lost a loved one unjustly knows that inconsolable pain, even though each of us who has experienced the victim side can choose to deeply ask, without self-punishment, “is there something I could have done differently,” the truth is that perpetrators have to live with what they’ve done.
So George Zimmerman will live for the rest of his life with the fact that when it mattered the most, he was incapable of self-contact, nor had he developed self-management.
Self-contact gives birth to empathy. With empathy, we step outside our own point of view and walk in the shoes of others. Self-management plants the seeds for maturity. This ability gives us the capacity to wait, to delay gratification, to act in ways that are far more likely to lead to satisfaction.
Together, they form a conversation of containment, rather than the chaos he chose to instigate by refusing to follow the boundaries made by those with greater expertise. Together, they say, “Oh, what is this situation, I recognize that I’m afraid and this affects my judgment. I do not have to handle this alone and I do not have to deal with this right now. I will listen and wait for support.”
Trayvon Martin’s parents encourage us in more promising directions, to have faith in the universal life force that holds us all, and yet to also take appropriate action, in the words of their attorney, to “make sure that this doesn’t happen to anyone else’s child.”
Although most of us do not create Zimmerman’s kind of destruction, don’t we all have something of him inside us, as well as something of Trayvon Martin? This could be a time for us to reflect on our own missed opportunities – the times we acted out of fear or panic or anger or some other flooding, and harmed ourselves and others; the times we were powerless to stop someone from actions that threatened us both.
As I consider this, I am emboldened to continue growing my own capacity for self-contact, and as best as I can in each day to manage myself in a way that is life-affirming.
If you choose to respond, please honor this intention.
This article was also published on ezinearticles.com
2 Comments
Thank you for this very thought-provoking article and for sharing your unique insight into this tragic incident that resulted in what was clearly a completely avoidable loss of life of a young person. From early on as this story unfolded in the public sphere of awareness, I knew that it had to be significantly based on some primal deficiency in George Zimmerman. But I had not thought of it in the terms you pose here – Mr. Zimmerman’s inability to establish and maintain an effective and healthy contact with “the self”. Wow! What an insight!
I feel sorry for Mr. Zimmerman. Clearly he is a human being who is “broken” on a very fundamental level. A lot of healing and hard work could possibly heal this and put him back on the path to a healthy and fulfilling life. (The story of Amazing Grace calls this mind as a good example of what is possible for such an individual.) But I doubt that Mr. Zimmerman has the wisdom or self-awareness to even realize who badly he needs such healing, let alone seek out the personal help he would need to begin the process.
Of course, tragic incidents such as this do not happen in a vacuum. During the crucial moments leading up to the killing of Trayvon Martin, Mr. Zimmerman was directed several times by his own dispatch to break off contact. Instead, he proceeded with his own aggressive self-directed plan of action leading to the tragic and 100% avoidable outcome. This seems to be an uncanny mirror of U.S. Foreign and Military behavior for at least the last 4 decades. I would submit that incidents such as this are made more likely and happen with increasing frequency as a direct, even if subtle, result of US national policy and actions, and the fact that so few in our nation question this approach to interacting with the nations with whom we share this small planet.
When will we wake up to the reality that leaders such as Buddha, Martin Luther King, Thich Nhat Hanh, Nelson Mandela and others have been urging us towards for millennia: Peace, reconciliation and the awareness and acknowledgment of our human connectedness to each other form the only hope we have for survival as a species?
Love your thoughts, Jeff. My intention with the “blog” part of this website is to connect what we think of as strictly personal with the larger issues in the public sphere. You have made that link most succinctly!