After reading what Charlotte said in her letter, I found myself being able to see good motives behind actions that I had thought were selfishly motivated.\u00a0 Here\u2019s an entry from February 93:<\/p>\n
Yesterday I discovered that good and positive and generous motivations lie hidden under all the garbage and habitual self-judgement.\u00a0 I was reading a passage from Dec ’86 in which I quote “the desire to be helpful is really a wish to control”.\u00a0 I don’t buy that completely for myself, but I do end up judging my desire to help as disfunctional.\u00a0 Now I see that it is not my desire<\/span> to help that is disfunctional, but my distorted ideas of what constitutes “help” and my compulsive desire to help even at the expense of taking care of myself.\u00a0 My desire to help is that generous child’s impulse and should be honored.\u00a0 Then as I struggle with the issue of trying to help Beverly, distrusting myself and my motives all over the place, blaming and judging myself for being self-serving, what shines through strong and clear is my willingness to work on my own stuff in order to be truly helpful to my friend, and the fact that she did find it helpful.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
It interests me how quick I am to assume that my motives were selfish.\u00a0 My mother was very good at hiding her selfish motives behind pretensions of virtue, and I could see that wasn\u2019t true.\u00a0 I was so afraid of doing the same thing, that I tended to think the worst of myself.\u00a0 It\u2019s also true that mother treated me as though I was selfish, as though my actions were done deliberately to hurt her, etc.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
After reading what Charlotte said in her letter, I found myself being able to see good motives behind actions that I had thought were selfishly motivated.\u00a0 Here\u2019s an entry from February 93: Yesterday I discovered that good and positive and … Continue reading