On Turning the Other Cheek II

17 December 2022

We left off, last week, with the conclusion that congruent growth comes through honouring the self.  In terms of cheek turning, that means that to grow as yourself, and not based on another’s judgment or direction, you must freely subscribe to that idea.  In plainer terms, if you are told by a teacher or aunt that you must always turn the other cheek, turning that cheek is not a behaviour you have graduated to—based on your own judgment—it is an untested, onboarded behaviour that has the potential to turn you away from your own soul.  In terms of the first principle highlighted in Matthew 5, neither resistance to evil nor compliance with evil are bad in themselves—contextual knowledge is all.

I’ll repeat the passage from Matthew 5 below and then tackle the second principle.

38 Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: 39 But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on they right cheek, turn to him the other also…43 Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy.  44  But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; 45 That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust (Holy Bible, King James Version, 1957). 

The second principle is hatred versus love as an active social force.  I have not known enough haters to know this as a statistically valid fact, but I suspect that hatred is an acid that corrodes from the inside out.  A question frequently raised in therapy is: Is this behaviour helping or hindering your efforts to live your values?  If you can honestly say the hatred is helping you to live your values, I would then question the direction of, and motivation beneath, those values.  In simpler terms, hatred destroys. 

One of the values that hatred destroys is order.  And that is what I believe Matthew (New Testament, above) might have been seeking to further: peaceful order.  Hatred seeks vengeance and vengeance enacted is almost always returned.  That hatred-induced cycle is an entropic or chaotic force.  Chaos, while it can be regeneratively creative in nature, destroys what people and communities have voluntarily built for generations.  If you’re caught in a cycle of hatred and retribution, your life vector is pointing downward (https://understandings.ca/2020/06/03/resilience-5-the-bounce-back-virtue-act-tenaciously/).

On the other hand, love is constructive and supportive.  Love aims to stabilize, build, and to foster growth.  When love becomes directive, problems arise, and this goes to an issue that often pops up in discussions of addiction.

If you want your daughter, who addictively uses drugs, to grow into sobriety and an ordered life, your values are half helpful and half unhelpful.  The direction in your love will be resented and often rejected harshly.  But another frequently discussed value comes into play: acceptance.  If we accept that it is not our role to direct the life of any other person, then your love, for your addicted daughter, becomes love that says I care about your welfare and person more than you may know.  When and if you are ready for recovery, I will help but I will not further the entropic chaos of active addiction.

In that case, you are accepting that the agency, the choice and direction of actions, is your daughter’s, not yours.  When I seek to direct the action of another person, and call it love, it is conditional love, love on my terms, and it usually turns sour and fosters chaos rather than the order I had hoped to create. 

This is a tricky issue and one I have grappled with as a novice psychotherapist and as a SMART Recovery facilitator.  As a therapist, my role is to unconditionally accept my client where she is currently found.  If she wants to continue her addictive behaviours, my job is to ask, “How can I help—what are you seeking from therapy?” 

If I said I could not treat her because she was using addictively, I close the door on that relationship—a relationship whose possibility may never flourish again.  If I accept my new client, on her terms, but ask questions of her history, lived world, goals, and sense of day-to-day life, there’s a decent chance she’s going to open the door to change herself—people don’t come to therapy for kicks. 

How does this dynamic play out in the friends and families of a person with addictive issues?  Kinda the same way: the shrewd money is on acceptance of your loved one on their terms while gently but firmly sticking to your boundaries in that relationship i.e., not financing, enabling, or promoting more addictive behaviour but also not rejecting the person suffering those behaviours.  There is the person and there are addictive behaviours.  They are not synonymous.

I wish there were a script I could give to all of the people grappling with both sides of this issue.  If we return to our theme of hatred versus love as an active social force, I hope it’s clear that love, but precisely “boundaried” love, is one of the requirements of fostering order.  In this specific instance, you are not turning the other cheek, you are stating that striking you on the cheek is unacceptable and will be dealt with accordingly but not retributively. 

Dan Chalykoff is working toward an M.Ed. in Counselling Psychology and accreditation in Professional Addiction Studies.  He works as a supervised psychotherapist at CMHA-Hamilton where his primary focus is trauma.  He writes these blogs to increase (and share) his own evolving understanding of ideas.  Since 2017, he has facilitated two voluntary weekly group meetings of SMART Recovery.  Please email him (danchalykoff@hotmail.com) to be added to or removed from the Bcc’d emailing list.

References

King James Bible. (1957). Collins’ Clear-Type Press. (Original work published 1769)