Distortion as Part of the Creative Process
The best place to start this story is back when I was 10 years old. My parents had seen a lot of troubles in their time. As a child, I didn’t understand the pressures that came with the adult world. All I knew is that something wasn’t working the way that it was supposed to. At that young age, I started trying to figure out what was wrong with my parents marriage. It turned me off to relationships and on to deep inner work. Now I know that it is totally possible to evolve and grow with a partner, but that is not the path that I chose through life. I wanted to solve the distortions that I saw within myself. The distortions that I knew would cause me to replicate my parents relationship in my own.
What is a distortion you might ask, and so I have an answer for you. The answer is simple. A distortion is anything that another person does to make you angry. In the interest of clarity, let’s examine that a little bit closer. You see, nobody can make you angry. There are only behaviors that hook into parts of ourselves that we have not yet healed. That is why, for example, jaywalking bothers some people and not others.
Now that isn’t to say that we can’t draw boundaries. And sometimes that is necessary. Other times we are able to be more relaxed. The deep inner work though, at least for me, is in the realm of distortions. I am currently reading “Creating Union” by Eva Pierrakos & Judith Saly. It’s inside this work that I discovered the term distortions.
It’s one of the first concepts that I have brought into my inner world from the book. Distortion grabbed hold of me and has become a part of my language in a very short time. What happens with distortion? As I go through my day, I experience many instances where another persons behaviour, or circumstances that I find myself in cause a negative emotional reaction in me. I interpret the negative emotional reaction as distortion.
Once I identify the reaction as distortion, I can trace the distortion back to the unresolved source of the emotional feelings and install a new set of emotions. Perhaps by searching the memory or experience for any possible source of positive emotions. I can then magnify the positive emotions and increase their power. This way, when I encounter a situation that would usually trigger the negative emotions, the new, practiced vibration begins to take over. The more often that I practice the new vibration, the more the new emotions that I chose become my default reaction to situations that call up those emotions.
What happens when you start paying attention to the distortions in your life?
