PART 4 — THE INSIDE-OUT

There was always a reason for my behavior.

That’s different from saying there was always an excuse.

This distinction became incredibly important in my healing.

From inside my own mind, I knew things nobody else could see.

I knew how afraid I was.

I knew how badly I wanted to be understood.

I knew what a person’s silence reminded me of.

I knew why rejection felt enormous.

I knew I wasn’t deliberately trying to hurt somebody.

I knew how desperately I sometimes wanted a situation to become okay.

That was my Inside-Out.

The problem was that for a long time, it was almost the only perspective of myself I had access to.

If I was yelling because I felt terrified someone was going to leave, I knew the terror.

The other person heard the yelling.

If I explained something for an hour because I desperately wanted someone to understand me, I knew the desperation.

They experienced an hour of being pushed to understand something.

If I brought another person into a family conflict because I thought, “Do you not see what’s happening?” I knew I was looking for understanding.

Someone else could experience me as involving people who didn’t belong in the conflict.

My internal experience was real.

But it wasn’t the only information that mattered.

That’s something I couldn’t understand until much later.

The Inside-Out tells us something incredibly important:

What did this feel like to me?

But healing eventually required another question:

What was I actually doing while I felt it?

Understanding the first question gave me compassion for myself.

Learning to ask the second gave me accountability.

I needed both.

Shared from lived experience, not professional advice