Humanising the Monsters
When we are hurt by people, our instinct is to construct a narrative of villainy. It is easy to look back and cast them as calculating, malicious monsters. That anger is entirely natural; it is our protective reflex against future wounds. Yet living in perpetual resentment is exhausting. It keeps our nervous system locked in high alert long after the door has closed.
A while ago, my daughter Ebony faced this reality while navigating the job market. Living with Multiple Sclerosis, she was offered a position and subsequently made an honest disclosure of her health requirements. As a result, the prospective employers abruptly and unfairly withdrew the offer.
Ebony was understandably upset. But as we sat down and talked through the disappointment, we looked at the dynamic from another angle. Their defensive reaction was not born from cold, deliberate malice; it was born out of fear and ignorance. In fact, their panic was nearly identical to the uncertainty Ebony herself had felt on the day she was first diagnosed. They were not comic-book villains plotting harm; they were frightened, uneducated human beings operating in survival mode.
When someone hurts us, we only ever witness their external actions—a tiny fraction of the full picture. The unseen ninety-five percent—their private anxieties, their conditioned defensiveness, and their emotional fragility—remains hidden. Because we cannot look directly into another person’s inner world, the sinister motives we assign to them are very often our own internal inventions. To make sense of the wound, our protective instinct inflates human weakness into a terrifying monster.
In an ancient Buddhist teaching, a man angrily insults the Buddha. Rather than retaliate, the Buddha calmly asks: “If you offer food to a guest and they refuse to accept it, to whom does that food belong?” The man replies that it remains with the host. Hostility, contempt, and unfair judgments function in precisely the same way. You are under no obligation to take delivery of someone else’s ignorance, fear, or emotional baggage. If you decline to accept it, the burden stays with the one who offered it.
Humanising those who have wronged us is not about excusing harm, playing nice, or becoming a doormat. Boundaries and physical safety must always come first. But once safety is assured, do we want to keep running in fear, or do we want to heal?
True peace begins when we demote the monsters in our memory back to ordinary, clumsy human beings. When we realize that those who wounded us were simply acting out of their own blind fear, they lose their power over our inner peace. The fortress of bitterness dissolves, and we finally take our freedom back.
Reverend David Moffat
Swedenborg Community Victoria
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