Emotional Poison in Relationships — What It Is and How To Stop The Cycle [Excerpt]

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Excerpt: Emotional poison in relationships is created by our reaction to what we consider injustice. Read this Excerpt from Don Miguel Ruiz for more.

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Emotional poison is created by our reaction to what we consider injustice. Some wounds will heal, others will become infected with more and more poison. Once we are full of emotional poison, we have the need to release it, and we practice releasing the poison by sending it to someone else. How do we do this? By hooking that person’s attention.

Let’s take an example of an ordinary couple. For whatever reason, the wife is mad. She has a lot of emotional poison from an injustice that comes from her husband. The husband is not home, but she remembers that injustice and the poison is growing inside. When the husband comes home, the first thing she wants to do is hook his attention because once she hooks his attention, all the poison can go to her husband and she can feel the relief. As soon as she tells him how bad he is, how stupid or unfair he is, that poison she has inside her is transferred to the husband.

She keeps talking and talking until she gets his attention. The husband finally reacts and gets mad, and she feels better. But now the poison is going through him, and he has to get even. He has to hook her attention and release the poison, but it’s not just her poison—it’s her poison plus his poison. If you look at this interaction, you will see that they are touching each other’s wounds and playing ping-pong with emotional poison. The poison keeps growing and growing, until someday one of them is going to explode. This is often how humans relate with each other.

By hooking attention, the energy goes from one person to another person. The attention is something very powerful in the human mind. Everyone around the world is hunting the attention of others all the time. When we capture the attention, we create channels of communication. The Dream is transferred, power is transferred, but emotional poison is transferred also.

Usually we release the poison with the person we think is responsible for the injustice but if that person is so powerful that we cannot send it to him, we don’t care who we send it to. We send it to the little ones who have no defense against us, and that is how abusive relationships are formed. The people of power abuse the people who have less power because they need to release their emotional poison. We have the need to release the poison, and sometimes we don’t want justice; we just want to release, we want peace. That is why humans are hunting power all the time, because the more powerful we are, the easier it is to release the poison to the ones who cannot defend themselves.

What is important is to have the awareness that we have this problem. If we have the awareness, we have the opportunity to heal our emotional body, our emotional mind, and stop the suffering. Without the awareness, there is nothing we can do. The only thing we can do is to keep suffering from the interaction with other humans, but not just with other humans, the interaction with our own self, because we also touch our own wounds just to be punished.

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The above was an excerpt from the book, The Mastery of Love by Don Miguel Ruiz. If you enjoyed this story you can find more quotes, resources, and info from the book below: