www.tarabrach.com/good-othering/
Tara is helping me navigate some lingering, inconvenient emotions (okay anger) about a certain person. No, not my ex. This person, Tara reminds me, can't help that he was born with a silver spoon up his ass. Nor his propensity to lie under oath despite his Ivy League pedigree. It's not his fault that he has to hide in his spacesuit, having drowned his gold with Jack Daniels (hidden in the garage) and deception. His secrets, from cross dressing to infatuations with women other than his wife, are the least of his issues, when considering his blind, boundless ego.
All of which make him fodder for thinly-veiled fiction, perhaps as here.
My therapist, through EMDR, allowed me to see him as a deeply sad person. Then as a young bully who--like the bullies in every movie we've ever seen--has been a victim of bullying (which would explain, but not excuse, the aggression and cheap shots on the soccer field well into his adult years). Then as a flawed human ... afraid of loss, of disappointing others. And in that, surely there's a modicum of goodness and gold, no matter how adept he has become at suppressing it.
"Write about it; move it through and out of you," my therapist said.
Done.