When we look at anger and other manifestations of powerlessness, when we open ourselves to how we really feel when they arise, we may find that we feel hurt more than anything else.[124] Our identity does not wish to show our vulnerability inherent in our hurt, so our ego chooses anger and other responses and actions to express the hurt and aggressively defend from more hurt. This works to some extent, but it generally does more harm than good as the phrase goes. When we stop later and think about it, such a response and the actions that follow cut us off from fully making sense out of the incident in which we are involved. This happens especially in terms of the other person involved, including ourselves.
When we feel anger toward another, we immediately turn that person, including ourselves, into an It in an I/It relationship. In abandoning our I/Thou relationship with another person, including ourselves, we may well lose our ability to heal from that hurt, cause hurt to the other, and make ourselves even more vulnerable in the future. We can also use such incidents of anger and hurt reactions as a way of developing a new meaning perspective which we consciously, and less than consciously in some way, create through which we will from then on see the world and respond to it. Such a meaning perspective will keep us in the past we just experienced. With this new meaning perspective as the motivating factor, the defensive ego will rise up in such situations, take command, and eliminate our finding anything else from that situation other than hurt and the accompanying sense of identity vulnerability we encountered or even produced before and chosen. We just get torqued all over again even if we're mistaken altogether.
My life has offered any number of occasions where feelings of hurt and vulnerability happened to me. After five years, a woman with whom I thought I was living told me that she had never loved me and summarily dumped me. She had lied to me for all those years on her own report. She did so, she said, "For your own good." Out of that incident, and the hurt that followed, I developed a perspective that I developed very consciously and with due critical reflection. It didn't involve protecting me so much as others. I decided that people have a right to know what we think is in their good before we act on our assumption—no surprises. That still makes sense to me today, even more sense given other ideas that I have gotten from my other experiences and learning in life. Doing something for another person only when we know from that other person what they want fits nicely inside the moral sphere and the end principle. When I ask what someone wants or how they respond to my idea of their good, I treat that person as an end in that person's self and not a means to my end. This choice of response left me with more personal power to act effectively and do so not out of defense but out of my becoming self which acts not out of having position power but allowing my personal power to live and work with the personal power of others. That highly conscious response to this critical moment motivated me to question previous meaning perspectives and make a very clear choice about my conduct in the future.
This experience also tempted me consciously, and less than consciously, to develop a meaning perspective by which I would act unquestioningly in the future. This would happen without critical reflection and find its basis on some previously developed meaning perspectives about vulnerability in terms of betrayal and defense against such perceived betrayal. I might have come to a meaning perspective that told my hurt and unquestioning identity the following: "All women are liars." That might have seemed to keep me safe from betrayal, from anger, from my essential vulnerability. Of course, it would have also kept me from experiencing anything like unconditional positive regard or love with another woman or even compassion with or for one. Both love and compassion work as unconditional, so I would have cut myself off from both love and compassion with the permanent and unshakeable judgment about all women as liars. That would become one of the meaning perspective screens or lenses through which I saw the world.
When I met and got to know Silvia, whom I have loved for twenty years or so and with whom I am now married, I would have seen none of her remarkably fine qualities except, perhaps as a ruse moving toward betrayal. I would have seen her as a woman, and I would know for certain that all women are liars. I would have rejected her out of hand, and my life, and my becoming self would have been immeasurably impoverished. If that were the case, the critical moment I might have chosen to produce something of a transformative response would become something quite diminishing. I would have chosen, at a low level perhaps, to make it transfixitive, stuck myself permanently on the lesson I chose to learn, stayed transfixed in that lesson, and remained stuck in that past possibly for the rest of my life. That choice would also have deprived me of a great deal of personal power to act out of my becoming self in any unconditional manner possible.[125] In the end, in response to the person who did me harm, whatever her rationale for that harm, I would make her memory a very decisive presence in my now transfixed life. Paradoxically, in order to protect myself from the kind of hurt she offered, I surrender much of my freedom of being and personal power to her memory. Happily, I knew and felt enough about choice to keep free of such a meaning perspective. I could choose otherwise.