What I Couldn’t See From the Inside

There is an old saying that holding onto anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.

I understand that saying differently now.

Because I drank the poison.

And it almost killed me.

For years, if you had asked me what was happening, I could have told you exactly what I was experiencing from the inside.

Pain.

Anger.

Rejection.

Fear.

Empathy.

Confusion.

A desperate need to be understood.

I knew I had a good heart. I knew I cared deeply about people. I knew how much empathy and sympathy I carried. I also knew that things had happened to me that I did not deserve.

All of those things were true.

But eventually I had to face another truth:

What was happening inside of me and what other people were experiencing from me were not always the same thing.

I could hold things in for months and convince myself I was “being the bigger person”—until I couldn’t anymore.

Then I would explode.

I would blame.

I would become defensive.

I would bring up everything that had happened before.

I would desperately try to make someone understand why I was reacting the way I was.

And because I knew the pain underneath my behavior, I couldn’t understand why everyone else couldn’t see it too.

From the inside, I wasn’t trying to hurt anyone.

I was hurting.

But from the outside, people couldn’t see everything happening inside my mind.

They could only experience my behavior.

That distinction became one of the hardest things I ever had to face.

For a long time, I studied words like toxic and narcissistic by looking outward. I could recognize those behaviors in other people.

Healing eventually made me turn the mirror around.

And I didn’t like what I saw.

Not because I diagnosed myself with Narcissistic Personality Disorder. I didn’t.

But because I could recognize behaviors in myself that I had previously associated with toxic or narcissistic patterns: defensiveness, blame, emotional explosions, needing to be understood, difficulty tolerating rejection, trying to control situations when I felt unsafe, carrying yesterday’s pain into today’s disagreement.

I had explanations for every one of them.

Some were very legitimate explanations.

But an explanation and an excuse are not the same thing.

That realization crushed me before it freed me.

Because underneath everything was a person I still knew existed.

Me.

The person with the beautiful heart.

The person who loved deeply.

The person who wanted to help people.

The person who could be incredibly kind and empathetic.

And increasingly, my behavior didn’t always match her.

I hated that contradiction.

I struggled with my soul because I knew who I believed I was, while simultaneously becoming someone I didn’t recognize when the anger, pain and ugliness came pouring out.

Then came August 2024.

Another job had fallen apart.

Another environment had become filled with conflict.

And this time something inside me broke.

Because I couldn’t explain it away anymore.

I remember realizing:

This keeps happening.

Different people.

Different places.

Different circumstances.

But I was the common denominator.

That realization didn’t make everything that had happened to me suddenly my fault.

It meant something very different:

Maybe what happened to me and what was now happening inside me were two different questions.

And I couldn’t bear the thought of continuing this pattern with the people I loved most.

I reached a place so dark that I made a decision to end my life.

By the grace of God, I did not finish what I set out to end.

And what happened afterward changed the direction of my life.

I will believe until the day I die that God had another plan for me.

But that plan wasn’t simply about surviving.

I had to learn how I had gotten there.

For most of my life I had explanations and diagnoses for what I experienced. When I was young, I heard the language of a “chemical imbalance.” Over the years, different symptoms seemed to fit different mental-health descriptions.

But eventually I became interested in another question:

What had my mind learned?

What had repetition taught it?

What had fear taught it?

What had anger taught it?

What had the environments around me taught it?

What had I learned simply by watching other people?

What had I practiced so many times that it eventually became automatic?

And what had I learned without ever realizing I was learning it?

That last part is what I now call invisible learning.

I cannot point to one person and say, “You created this.”

I cannot point to one relationship.

One diagnosis.

One childhood experience.

One marriage.

One workplace.

One traumatic event.

There were things done to me that were wrong. There were environments that were unhealthy. There were things I witnessed, experienced and learned that affected me profoundly.

But healing eventually stopped being about building a case against the people who contributed to my pain.

It became about understanding what I was carrying because of it.

That is why I use the words unhealthy mind when describing my own experience.

I am not using that as a medical diagnosis, and I am not claiming it explains everyone else’s mental illness.

It is the language that finally helped me understand myself.

Something had happened between the little girl I once was and the adult woman I became.

My thinking changed.

My expectations changed.

My reactions changed.

My beliefs about myself changed.

My beliefs about other people changed.

And because those patterns developed over years, they felt normal to me.

I didn’t recognize them as unhealthy.

I recognized them as me.

That may be one of the saddest things I understand now.

I eventually believed the pain was my personality.

It wasn’t.

Over the last two years, I have worked on changing those patterns.

And healing hasn’t made me perfect.

It has made me aware.

I can recognize a thought without automatically believing it.

I can feel hurt without making someone else pay for it.

I can be disappointed without turning disappointment into rejection.

I can acknowledge what somebody did to me without allowing it to determine what I do next.

I can take accountability without deciding that accountability means I am a terrible person.

I can have boundaries without exploding.

I can walk away without needing everyone to understand why.

And I can look at something unhealthy inside myself without hating the person looking back at me.

That, to me, is becoming healthier-minded.

I still learn.

I still grow.

I still catch things.

But today my behavior is becoming more aligned with the heart and soul I always knew were there.

And my faith tells me I am becoming more of the person God created me to be.

The greatest surprise of my healing wasn’t discovering everything everyone else had done wrong.

It was discovering that eventually I didn’t need to keep looking outward.

I needed to understand what had happened within.

Because there is an enormous difference between saying:

“Look what they did to me.”

and finally asking:

“What did all of this teach me—and what am I going to carry forward?”

The first question helped me understand my pain.

The second helped me change my life.

And that is the conversation I believe we are missing.

Shared from lived experience, not expert advice