Hatred

    I've got several clients dealing with extreme hatred over their spouse or the other party in their dispute.  Raging, hateful anger.  With each action, each side begins to hate the other side worse.  There isn't movement occurring to reconciliation.  In each case, I actually see that one side is acting with more dignity and taking reasonable positions.  The other side is acting like a jerk actually.  That's from an objective side-line view. 

    What I gather is that there are people functioning in survival mode who fail to look inward and see the reasonableness of the other side's position.  They fail to look at themselves and see where they have contributed or how they could modify their position to leave the other side with something.  Going after "everything" for me  rarely leaves room to explore the position where both people benefit. 

    Resolving conflicts where there is one winner and one loser is attracting bad karma in my book.  Sometimes things don't even out in the present moment but that accumulation of poor behavior adds up.  It eventually begins to compromise the quality of life that the other person experiences.

    Unfortunately, we don't always live in a world that operates on principles of fairness.   Our President has supported statutes that eliminate a person's right to defend himself in situations where he has been accused of terrorism.  He agrees to torture.  Chief executives rob employee pensions and don't get very stiff sentences.  A clueless substitute teacher faces 6 years of prison because she didn't know how to block the porno sites popping up on the computer screen the day she was substituting. 

    Sometimes the world doesn't run on rules of fairness.  Criminals in Texas get a $3,000 defense if they can't afford a lawyer and high numbers of accused persons on death row are proven to be innocent via modern DNA testing not available before. 

    I assume there is some greater evening-out of the score.  But does that really happen?  Do the bad actors really suffer their choices somewhere along in life?  I believe these principles very deeply.  But have you seen it?

     Do the bad guys and bullys really win?  I like to think that they suffer within the tortured prison of their own soul and personality.  Portable prisons, so to speak.