PART 7 — BEING RIGHT DIDN’T MAKE MY RESPONSE HEALTHY

This may be one of the hardest lessons healing taught me:

Being right about the problem did not automatically make my response to the problem healthy.

For a long time, those things were tangled together.

If someone genuinely hurt me, I believed my reaction made sense because of what they had done.

Sometimes it did make sense.

That still didn’t necessarily make it healthy.

I could have a legitimate concern at work.

I could appropriately bring it to a supervisor.

But after feeling repeatedly dismissed, I could start bringing up everything.

The original problem.

Something from months ago.

Another person’s experience.

Every example I could remember.

Eventually my desperate attempt to prove the legitimate problem could make the actual problem harder to see.

The same happened in family relationships.

I could recognize something unhealthy and ask:

“Does nobody else see this?”

Sometimes they did.

But another adult seeing it didn’t mean they could change the person doing it.

I didn’t understand that.

So I kept trying.

Healing eventually separated two things:

What belongs to them?

and

What belongs to me?

Their behavior belongs to them.

My response belongs to me.

That isn’t blame.

That’s where I finally found some power.

Shared from lived experience, not expert advice