WHO ARE OUR NEIGHBORS?

Virtually all spiritual groups, including all major religions, support the idea that we are all meant to love our neighbors and that everyone is our neighbor. So why is this considered so important for all of us to follow when it also seems impossible to follow, especially when we are told that we are to include our enemies as our neighbors. Why isn’t ok to hate some people or at least consider them as not our friends and maybe our enemies? So many people seem to feel that it is ok to have enemies and even to judge others. Many of these people report that they feel better if they have enemies and yet do they? To have enemies is to defer our anxiety and stress to those that we see as our enemies. This is not a helpful way of managing as we have to repeatedly distract ourselves from stress by trying to put the stress on others and since this really doesn’t work very well we end up feeling lonely and still anxious and so we then continue to blame others as the enemy even though it does not help.

So, why is it so hard to stop blaming and hating others even though it seems to make us lonely and continue to feel stressed. Maybe it is because the alternative would be to stop blaming others and take responsibility for ourselves. This is something that many of us are frightened of as we feel we must keep doing the same thing so then we know we what will happen every day. So many of us are frightened about what will happen next in our lives so we perpetuate the same thing as then we know what will happen each day. Sadly, if we were able to choose to stop blaming others and then see what happens each day we would be much happier. However, our brain is likely reinforcing our blaming others as this has been the way that we have been coping with stress and naturally our brains would think that we still need to cope that way unless we are able to tell ourselves very clearly that we no longer need to cope by blaming others.

Sometimes, for us to be able to stop coping in the same way we need help by therapy such as eye movement desensitization and reprocessing [EMDR] treatment and some medications [propranolol er, low dose lithium, prazosin and low dose naltrexone] that can successfully reduce anxiety related to why we cope the way we do.

Therefore, we may need help changing our usual way of coping and then with this help we might be able to actually love our neighbors. What do you think.