The Value of Grievance

In spiritual growth, one is asked to periodically review their sense of values in order to locate or confront destructive beliefs or patterns that are operating by habit instead of by a conscious choice.

This made sense to me once I realized that our values are developed early in life through the eyes and mind of a child influenced by parents, family, schools, television, society and sometimes religion.

These values become very important to us and some values even become sacred to us, meaning they cannot be questioned.

As adults, we are not taught to periodically reevaluate or upgrade these core values through a more mature and experienced perspective in an effort to improve our lives.

A recent contemplation of my values revealed something I had been in denial of, which is that I value my grievances. In fact, I use my grievances as a type of currency. I use them to define my experience, to entertain myself and others, to show my value, and even to show my superiority as to how much insult or injury I can endure without punching someone in the face.

I was both fascinated and a little disgusted with what I saw in myself through this lens of illumination. The cherry on top was that I use my past grievances to treat other people poorly at times, like I have a right to get even with whomever crosses my path and dares to provoke me in any way.

My belief system was holding onto my past hurts as if they were precious gems that have great value and cannot be released so it hangs onto them.

My mind was flooded with understanding as to why there was a video recording inside my head that constantly replays all the times I have been done wrong in my life. Each time one of those past incidents plays in my head, my emotions re-energize that feeling of injustice and a desire to get my pound of flesh back.  

Of course, getting even with others or taking a pound of flesh nowadays consists mainly of microaggressions and indignant comments to each other, but it is apparent to me that I was not the only person to be taught that grievances are valuable and can be used to gain unfair advantage.

Our society has long been teaching grievance as a value system to all of us. I believe it's time that we as a society, take responsibility to start changing, upgrading and improving this destructive value model to something more constructive.

Ironically, that evening’s newscast featured a clip of Donald Trump claiming his many grievances and vowing unrelenting revenge against his wrong-doers. At that moment I understood why Trump has the support of so many people. They all want to get payback on their grievances through this man.

The cold hard reality is that grievances are based on emotions, not logic. Emotions are anything but logical and should not be what we use to decide how to live and act. Our emotions are not more important than our logic and we can all do our part to evolve this activity.

For me, letting go of the importance of my grievances is a challenging and ongoing process. Grievances come in all sizes, some big, some small and most of mine are on the small side with a handful of whoppers from childhood.

While I am not what people would call a menace to society, I have been inadvertently using emotional negativity for its entertainment value.

Turns out, I love to complain because it’s fun to poke at all the twists and turns and craziness we encounter on a daily basis, but I can admit it’s not constructive to the bigger picture and serves no valuable purpose.  It’s a habit based on grievance that is hard to stop.

From a logic perspective, grievance seems like a pretty low bar to set for myself. So now I practice not expressing my distaste or displeasure of life experience. It’s a discipline that will take time, but I am committed to letting go of grievance so I can have something better.

Some people might see complaining or even aggression as harmless but from an energetic perspective we are generating a negative electrical charge which isn’t in itself a bad thing. We just have way too much emotionally generated negative electrical charge being created by humanity right now that has contributed to an imbalance in our collective thinking and thought process.

What will help the situation is for all of us to generate a constructive or positive electrical charge with our thoughts, words and actions. We can do this in small ways or big ways as long as we make the choice to act with a sense of purpose to help things be better.