Tiny Buddha

Tag: forgive

  • Trapped in Shame: How I Found Mental Freedom After Prison

    Trapped in Shame: How I Found Mental Freedom After Prison

    “If you put shame in a petri dish, it needs three ingredients to grow exponentially: secrecy, silence, and judgment. If you put the same amount of shame in the petri dish and douse it with empathy, it can’t survive.” ~Brené Brown

    I was in two prisons.

    One physical. One mental.

    The physical version was Otisville Federal Prison.

    I was living so out of alignment with who I was and who I wanted to become and self-sabotaged in a colossal way, defrauding one of the largest tech companies in the world.

    My mental prison, my personal hell, was the all-consuming power of shame. Hurting the one I love, disappointing my family, and letting myself down. Ignoring the voice inside that told me not to commit the fraud.

    I believed with all my soul that I destroyed the most extraordinary gift life has to offer us: love.

    I was trapped in my head and couldn’t see a way out or even a reason to try.

    With every ounce of my being, I believed, “I am undeserving of love, happiness, forgiveness, and peace. I destroyed love and will never be worthy of it again. I deserve a lifetime of punishment.”

    This was my prison. This is where I lived, falling further into darkness every day with no end in sight.

    Shame is an insidious disease that lives, breathes, and grows in the darkness. Shame thrives in isolation, separation, and disconnection.

    Shame wants to be alone.

    Unless we do something about it, it will eat us alive from the inside out.

    What do we do with something that lives in the dark? Something that craves isolation, separation, and disconnection?

    We shine a light on it. We shine a light on it by speaking about it. By being open, by having the conversations we’re afraid to have.

    Shame withers and dies in the face of vulnerability.

    When we are vulnerable, not only do we shine a light on our shame, but we also give others permission to do the same.

    When we shine a light on shame, when we are vulnerable and open up, we take the first step out of the darkness.

    And we realize that we are not alone.

    I couldn’t jump headfirst into vulnerability; I was too afraid. But I knew that if I allowed shame to consume me, it would never release its grip on my life.

    How did I get to where I could be vulnerable, open, and share?

    Here are the first three steps I took.

    Accepting Reality

    I spent my days in prison wishing I wasn’t in prison.

    I spent my days wishing I hadn’t made the choices I made that landed me in prison.

    I wished and dreamed for life to be anything other than it was. I was fighting against a past and circumstance that couldn’t be changed.

    I would never have freedom from shame if I continued to fight for what couldn’t be changed. I had to do what I was so afraid to do.

    I had to accept reality.

    I didn’t want to. It felt like giving up; it felt passive. Fighting equals progress. But does it? What was I fighting against? As much as I wish there were, there is no such thing as a time machine Delorean.

    Accepting reality isn’t giving up; it isn’t passive. It was an act of courage for me to say, “I accept that I betrayed myself and chose to commit a crime. I hit the ‘enter’ button, the single keystroke that started it all. I accept I made the choice to continue in the face of the universe screaming at me to stop. I accept that I am in prison. I accept that I hurt the woman I love, my family, my friends….”

    A weight lifted off of me when I wrote that. I wasn’t trapped in the past. I felt something I thought was impossible in prison: freedom.

    Self-Trust

    I lost trust in myself. How could I possibly trust myself when I am the one who did this to himself?

    There is an emptiness that is all-consuming when you don’t trust yourself.

    It’s a horrible feeling.

    One day, scrolling through Twitter, my friend posted, “Surest path to self-confidence I know: making and keeping commitments to ourselves.”

    That struck a chord. My friend walks the walk; this wasn’t just lip service.

    From that one tweet, I committed to facing my biggest fear: public speaking. It took five years, but I eventually delivered a TEDx.

    The TEDx was incredible, no doubt, but there was so much more than that. It created a way of life for me.

    When you make and keep commitments, you change your inner narrative to one that’s empowering.

    You change your story to being a person who TAKES ACTION.

    You build trust because you kept your word to yourself. When we trust ourselves, we have confidence in ourselves.

    When we have confidence in ourselves, we believe in ourselves. We trust ourselves.

    Forgiveness

    Forgiveness is hard. It’s one of the hardest things I’ve done as I’ve rebuilt and reinvented my life.

    I had to forgive myself for the choices that resulted in my arrest by the FBI and my sentence to two years in federal prison and cost me everything: my marriage, my homes, my cars, my sense of self-worth, and my identity.

    I had to forgive myself for planning on killing myself.

    I didn’t think I was worthy of forgiveness. Who was I to let myself off the hook with all the damage I had caused?

    I had to take the first two steps of acccepting reality and cultivating self-trust.

    When I took those first two steps, I understood that forgiving ourselves is one of the biggest acts of love and compassion we can do for ourselves.

    When we forgive ourselves, we demonstrate that we are worthy of love and compassion.

    Forgiveness cultivates our self-trust as well.

    Forgiveness liberates you from a past that cannot be changed. You learn to let go of that baggage weighing you down.

    There’s great freedom when we let go.

    From these three steps, I reached a place where I could be vulnerable and, in turn, walk out of the prison of shame.

    When we own our story, we own our life. When our story owns us, it owns our life.

    Huge difference.

  • How I Freed Myself from Anger by Owning it Instead of Blaming Others

    How I Freed Myself from Anger by Owning it Instead of Blaming Others

    “The opposite of anger is not calmness. It’s empathy.” ~Mehmet Oz

    In December last year, I went to India to study yoga and meditation. About a week into my training, I noticed I was becoming increasingly angry.

    I thought that coming to this peaceful and supportive place would be all about gentle healing while perfecting my yoga practice. Instead, I was furious, very negative, and frustrated with everything.

    Eventually, I talked to my teachers and shared what I was going through since I was becoming worried. They explained that since the training was intense and we were doing lots of activities to purify the mind and body, any stuck energy within would want to be released. This cleansing process could manifest in unwanted negativity, fatigue, emotional imbalances, and more.

    Although it comforted me, I had no idea what to do with this anger and how to deal with it. So I asked myself: “What am I thinking when feeling angry?”

    The answer was quite straightforward—other people.

    Since I removed myself from everything and everyone I knew and was familiar with, there was a sense of silence around me. This allowed my anger to become extremely loud.

    My initial thoughts were about everyone who didn’t support my decision to go to India, at least not at first. I replayed all the scenarios when people tried to change my mind or tell me I should do something else.

    A few days later, older situations began to come up. Things that happened six months ago, when someone said something that hurt me, and I stayed silent. Or when people told me I couldn’t do something, and I believed them.

    After two weeks of this internal rage, I thought my head was about to explode, then one day, it felt as if it did. I woke up with an extreme fever and sinus infection that hurt my face. I was crying all day and couldn’t even attend classes. Eventually, I ended up in the emergency room.

    I remember meeting an Ayurvedic doctor with orange hair and a gentle smile. He gave me some ayurvedic medicine and said I would feel 100% in four days. I couldn’t see how that could happen, but I felt too weak and mentally defeated to protest, so I took the medicine.

    I spent the first two days in bed with a high fever and almost zero energy to even move. On the third day, the fever was gone, and I could eat. On the fourth day, I felt energized and ready to continue my studies.

    The most amazing feeling was the lightness I felt after I got healthy. My anger radically decreased, and I was more patient and happier.

    This state of peace and joy prompted me to look at what had happened to me. First, I knew that my sickness manifested because of accumulated negative energy seeking its way out. Frankly, I was grateful that I was able to release it.

    However, the anger still dominated my days. At first, I began looking at everyone who I believed had wronged me in any way. I tried to forgive them and rationalize their behavior while developing the understanding that everyone acts from their level of perception. Although I could ease the feeling of anger, it was still very present in my life, and I felt it every day.

    Then one day, as I was sitting in meditation, a profound realization came to mind. I couldn’t let go of the anger because I wasn’t angry with others but myself.

    Since I’d allowed things that I didn’t like and never spoke up about them, deep down, I knew I was betraying myself. However, my need for validation and inclusion was stronger than my desire to stand up for myself.

    Since taking responsibility for enabling such behaviors was confronting, I turned my anger toward others and blamed them.

    Although this realization was uncomfortable, it gave me a sense of strength. Realizing that my power was in self-responsibility made me feel empowered.

    Over the next few days, I battled with myself, feeling like a victim at times and, at the same time, refocusing on my new epiphany.

    Here is how I decided to proceed and begin letting go of my anger once this emotional turmoil slightly settled and I could think clearly.

    1. I focused on where my power was.

    Since I had a habit of feeling like a victim, taking responsibility for what I tolerated was new, unfamiliar, and uncomfortable. Therefore, I often slipped into victimhood.

    Once I observed it, I refocused and reminded myself how amazing and freeing it was to live from a place of responsibility. Eventually, I felt less like a victim and more like a healthy individual who could make her choices.

    The most common reason why we shy away from taking responsibility for our thoughts and emotions is because we think it means letting people off the hook. We want them to realize how they wronged us. We want them to validate our feelings, and we believe it will happen if we just stay angry long enough.

    Ironically, we are the ones who suffer. The word responsibility is derived from the word response. And that, we can choose. In the same way, we can choose to set boundaries while defining what we tolerate and being responsible for ourselves.

    After a few weeks of this mental ping pong, I knew there was a component I was missing.

    2. I decided to forgive myself.

    There was no way I could go through this process without forgiveness since I judged myself profoundly for what I had allowed.

    Self-forgiveness was the hardest step. Although I practiced self-forgiveness in the past and was quite familiar with it, forgiving myself for sabotaging my mental and emotional health was a hard pill to swallow.

    Every time I closed my eyes and began speaking my forgiveness affirmations, I started crying. I realized that I didn’t believe I deserved forgiveness—a belief that stemmed from my traumatic childhood—so I decided to incorporate inner child work into this practice.

    I created a vision of my adult and younger self meeting on a bench. Every time we met, I would ask her to forgive me for letting her down and hurting her so much.

    After one week of this conscious practice, my heart began to soften, and I could look at myself with more compassion and empathy instead of harsh criticism.

    This created a huge shift within my healing since I realized a fundamental truth when healing anything in our lives. In order to let go of anger, guilt, shame, judgment, or any other negativity we feed, we must go on the other side of the spectrum and embrace emotions of care, nurturing, understanding, and empathy.

    Inner child work, practicing self-forgiveness, or loving-kindness meditations are only a fraction of what we can do to ease into our healing.

    As I was preparing for my return home, I knew there was one more thing I had to put in place to make this process lasting and successful.

    3. I chose my non-negotiables.

    It was time to boundary up and decide what I would tolerate going forward. I remember feeling so scared and uncertain. It wasn’t the boundary itself that scared me as much as the reactions from people who weren’t used to them.

    At first, I felt like a toddler taking their first step. I went back and forth, contemplating whether my boundary was good or bad, right or wrong, and whether I really needed to put it in place. Then I realized something—there is no right or wrong when it comes to our boundaries. We set them, and that’s it. They are our non-negotiables, and they are not up for debate.

    The moment we begin setting boundaries, we act with respect toward ourselves. We are sending a message to our brain saying, “I love and value myself enough to honor what feels right and let go of what isn’t.” We are also ready to build relationships with a strong foundation underneath.

    It’s important to acknowledge the fear that comes from setting boundaries. Do we fear the loss of people? Are we worried that we won’t be validated or that others will get upset with us?

    Although these concerns are valid, and we all battle them, it’s important to remind ourselves of the cost of self-sabotage and self-betrayal. This way of life isn’t sustainable or healthy, and eventually, it will bring us back to facing the same challenges.

    It has been a few months since I made changes within my relationships and how I navigate them. Although some of them radically changed, I was able to work through my anger and let go of lots of negativity in my life.

    I still fall into my victimhood and try to let myself off the hook. However, I am now better at recognizing it while understanding the privilege I hold to be responsible for my life, and how empowering it feels when I act on it.

  • Why Forgiveness Is the Ultimate Act of Self-Love and 3 Lessons That Might Help

    Why Forgiveness Is the Ultimate Act of Self-Love and 3 Lessons That Might Help

    “The practice of forgiveness is our most important contribution to the healing of the world.” ~Marianne Williamson 

    When you hear the word “forgiveness,” what do you feel?

    Forgiveness used to make me feel uncomfortable. I would physically contract when I thought about forgiving someone who hurt me. I felt like forgiving meant letting them off the hook while I was the one paying for their hurtful words and actions.

    I would play a scene in my head about what it would look like for someone to apologize and admit to their wrongs… and only then would I be ready and able to forgive. I put a moment that hadn’t happened on a pedestal. And in doing so, I outsourced my power to another person.

    This kept me in a prolonged state of anxiousness, resentment, and heartache. I thought that I could bypass forgiveness because there was never an apology.

    While apologies are helpful in healing, they aren’t always guaranteed. You can’t control what other people do or don’t do.

    When you wait for an apology or project high expectations on what it should look like, you’re letting another person’s actions have too much control over your healing. And even if an apology is given, it can never fully take back what happened.

    When I grew the courage to walk away from my partner last year, I felt so much anger for how I’d been treated throughout our relationship. He admitted to emotional cheating, he’d talked down to me, and he’d disrespected my time and energy.

    The last text that I received from him was an apology, and yet I still didn’t feel like it was satisfactory. That’s because the ego will never be fully satisfied. True forgiveness has little to do with what the other person does for you; nobody can truly give you closure but yourself.

    My path to forgiveness began when I received his text. In my final text to him, I was loving and wished him the best. It didn’t involve me trying to say one more piece to gain a reaction or salvage the relationship again.

    It was me listening to the wisdom of my highest self that whispered in the depths of my pain: 

    “I am loving and loved.” 

    “It is for you, future you, and the people that love you that you take this experience of heartbreak and alchemize it into love, acceptance, and peace.”

    My old story of forgiveness was that it was naive and unrealistic.

    But my new story? Forgiveness is empowering and healing. And my future health, well-being, and relationships depend on it.

    Here are three lessons about forgiveness that my breakup taught me.

    1. Forgiveness is a process.

    Forgiveness is not like following the exact route on your GPS to spend a Saturday at the beach. It ebbs and flows. We can’t rush or force it, but we can be willing to welcome its healing effects over time.

    It didn’t feel right to jump right from my breakup into a place of forgiveness. I needed to process the sacred anger, rage, sadness, and bitterness that I was feeling. Because I let myself move through these emotions in healthy ways, I was able to release a lot of energy.

    I then decided I was ready to forgive. I made a conscious choice to forgive internally every time I was triggered or reminded of something painful. At first, it felt nearly impossible. But I reminded myself that it was going to feel hard, and I loved myself where I was at.

    I started with small moments of putting my hand on my heart and wishing peace for my ex. Then I began writing about my forgiveness in my journal. One day, I wrote a forgiveness letter to my ex (not to send) and then burnt it.

    Over time, forgiveness feels more natural and reflexive, but it still requires intention. Be gentle with yourself in the process.

    2. Forgiveness is for you.

    Forgiveness is not about condoning, excusing, or minimizing someone’s behavior and actions. And it’s not about forgetting what happened or giving someone more chances.

    Unlike reconciliation, forgiveness does not necessarily mean letting someone back into your life, although some people may choose that path to rebuild something stronger. But that requires conscious commitment from both parties involved.

    When we resist forgiveness and harbor resentment, the only person we hurt is ourselves. In my case, forgiveness was an act of self-love and acceptance.

    First, I had to forgive myself for staying longer than I should have. Then it was easier to energetically extend forgiveness to my ex and let go of uncomfortable emotions, like anxiety and resentment, which were keeping me stuck in a victim mindset.

    I took my power back through forgiveness because it gave me permission to move on and created space for something more aligned with the highest version of myself.

    When I welcomed the feelings of forgiveness, my energy had a ripple effect. Once I forgave my ex, I saw the best in other people and situations instead of projecting resentful, negative energy, which had previously kept me in a lack mentality.

    Since I started to forgive and love myself more, I have attracted more abundance, love, and success.

    Gratitude now radiates from me and has helped me align with connections, business opportunities, and experiences that have been for my highest good.

    3. Forgiveness invites compassion for all.

    The by-product of forgiveness is an equally healing expression: compassion. When you forgive, you welcome full, compassionate presence as you’re releasing the chains of judgment, blame, and shame. You begin to see the situation or person with a more loving lens.

    As I started forgiving my ex-partner in my heart, I could clearly see that his behaviors were a reflection of his own internal struggles and pain. This gave me pause.

    The feelings of anger and resentment slowly melted away as I saw a side of myself—someone who has also struggled, suffered, and made mistakes. And I couldn’t help but feel compassion for him, myself, and everyone who has felt pain because of pain caused by others.

    Compassion is the antidote to the judgment that poisons our world and creates more suffering. It’s the greatest gift we can give and receive.

    —

    Forgiveness isn’t easy, but neither is carrying the pain in the long run. See forgiveness as a non-negotiable act of healing, empowerment, and self-love. It is the ultimate closure you seek, and it will radically change your life and the lives around you.

  • How I Forgave Myself for Cheating and Hurting Someone I Once Loved

    How I Forgave Myself for Cheating and Hurting Someone I Once Loved

    “The best apology is simply admitting your mistake. The worst apology is dressing up your mistake with rationalizations to make it look like you were not really wrong, but just misunderstood.” ~Dodinsky

    It was January 2016 and Baltimore was in the midst of a blizzard. Outside, the city was covered in a three-foot blanket of snow. Inside, we were having a blizzard party. My boyfriend, five friends, and me.

    We’d been coloring, listening to music, dancing, and playing games. Already, I knew it was one of the most cozy and fun nights of my life. Everyone was happy. The energy was easy and joyful.

    As the night went on, my boyfriend turned on his light display in the basement. It was a combination of LED lights and infinity mirrors that he built with our friend E. They both controlled the light show and music from an app on their phones.

    With the exception of one friend who went to bed early, we were all in the basement listening to music, dancing and enjoying the lights.

    Eventually, the basement group started to disperse. I went upstairs, and so did our friend E. A few people were in the kitchen. Someone stepped outside to smoke a cigarette. I noticed my boyfriend was the only one still down in the basement, then heard him coming up the stairs.

    As he entered the doorway, I noticed he was eerily calm, but I also sensed a rage bubbling beneath the surface. He approached our friend E, poked him in the chest, and said, “How long has this been going on?”

    I instantly knew what “this” was. So did E. But everyone else was clueless.

    My boyfriend told everyone to get out of the house (in the middle of the blizzard). Everyone except me, E, and another friend who he asked to stay as a neutral party. Someone woke up my friend who was sleeping upstairs. Everyone left and trudged home in three feet of snow. (Luckily, we were all neighbors, so they didn’t have to journey far).

    I have no idea what they were thinking, but I imagine everyone was confused and concerned.

    My boyfriend began to interrogate E and me because he’d read a message between us on E’s phone.

    It was a message from me that read: “I can’t wait to kiss you again.”

    Oof. I wish I could say I dreaded this moment. But I did not, because I honestly did not think this moment would happen.

    I didn’t think it would happen because earlier that day I had vowed not to mess around with E anymore. I had figured out that I was no longer in love with my boyfriend, and I was going to wait until he was finished with his dissertation in a few months to break up with him. In the meantime, I would not pursue anything that I felt with E.

    I thought I could simply tell my boyfriend that I had fallen out of love with him and was leaving. It was a good plan.

    I was guilty for having made out with E, and for the feelings I had for him, but we had not had sex, or even come close. Plus, I knew that my being unfaithful was a symptom of the fact that I needed to get out of this relationship. I had crossed a line, but I knew why, and I was going to stay on the right side of the line until I talked to my boyfriend.

    It was a good plan. Except for the fact that my boyfriend suspected something was going on. (Of course he did. People know. People always know.)

    So there we were: midnight in the middle of a blizzard in an intense interrogation. Time was moving slowly. It was all very surreal and nightmare-ish.

    The interrogation went something like: When? Where? How often? Why? To our other friend: Did you know? (He had no clue).

    The questioning went on and on until eventually, my boyfriend told E and our friend to leave. Then it was just the two of us.

    The thing I remember most about the rest of that night is lying together on the couch, crying. I was crying because I had hurt this person who, at one time, I loved deeply. He was crying because he was hurt by the one person he thought would never, could never, do such a thing.

    What I remember most about the next week, before I moved out, is lying in bed with him, watching Rick and Morty, and having the most open, raw conversations we’d had in years.

    I remember how sad I felt.

    I also remember how relieved I felt.

    I didn’t have the language for it at the time, but the relief was from the death that was occurring, and the re-birth that was to come.

    I can’t say I regret the outcome because, in truth, I am now happy. And from what I know, my ex is happy too. And this happiness would not have existed for either of us if I had stayed in that relationship. In the words of Liz Gilbert, via Glennon Doyle: “there is no such thing as one-way liberation.”

    But I do regret how it happened. I wish I had been mature, wise, and strong enough to recognize that I no longer wanted this relationship, before it got to the point of cheating.

    I wish I had known myself better.

    I wish I had known that I could have just left without doing this horrible thing and causing so much pain.

    I regret how I made my ex feel.

    I regret how I let down my friends who thought I was someone who would never do something like that.

    I regret how I strung E along for so long and toyed with his emotions, sometimes knowingly, sometimes not.

    I regret how little worth I had in myself, which led me to stay in this relationship far past its expiration date.

    I am still healing from this experience, and I cannot blame anyone for my pain, except myself. It’s a really weird thing to be healing from the pain you caused yourself.

    It’s also weird to be healing while living a happy, nourishing dream life, which is exactly what I am doing.

    The night of that blizzard a death occurred. A death of a version of myself that I did not like. A version of me who did not speak her mind, who was in the background, who did not like having sex, who was too scared to imagine a more expansive, beautiful life.

    This death opened the portal for me to return to myself, which is the journey I have been on for the last seven years. And it’s a beautiful one.

    If you’ve been hurt by someone who was unfaithful, I am sorry. I feel for you. You did not deserve it. Allow yourself to feel what you feel. Learn from it. Forgive the other person, for the sake of your inner peace.

    If you’ve hurt someone by being unfaithful, I am sorry too. I feel for you too. Allow yourself to feel what you feel. Learn from it. Forgive yourself.

    I’ve learned to forgive myself by:

    1. Acknowledging the pain I caused and apologizing for it.

    2. Communing with my inner child to learn about her unmet needs (the need to speak up, to be heard and seen, to stop people-pleasing).

    3. Remembering that I am imperfect and that making mistakes is part of the human experience.

    4. Asking myself what I learned during this experience (for one thing, not to stay in a relationship when my instincts tell me it’s over), and then applying that learning moving forward.

    And know this: if you are in a relationship in which you are unhappy, you do have the strength to get out of it, without hurting the other person through infidelity. (Please know that I am not talking about abusive relationships here; that was not my experience and is not something I am suited to give any kind of advice on.)

    Also know that you do not have to stick in a relationship just because your lives are intertwined and it’s hard to imagine the logistics (moving out, dividing finances, breaking a lease, etc.) of breaking up. If you’re most worried about these logistics, then it’s time to go. You will figure it out. And you both will be better off for it.

    The last thing I’ll leave you with are these words that my friend-turned-mentor shared with me: People do shitty things, but it does not necessarily mean they are shitty people. Let’s have grace with ourselves and each other. Let’s love even when (especially when) it seems another is not worthy of our love. Let’s have compassion for the lonely child that exists inside most of us.

  • How I Found Forgiveness and Compassion When I Felt Hurt and Betrayed

    How I Found Forgiveness and Compassion When I Felt Hurt and Betrayed

    “I can bear any pain as long as it has meaning.” ~Haruki Murakami

    I’ve always felt like someone on the outside. Despite having these feelings I’ve been relatively successful at playing the game of life, and have survived through school, university, and the workplace—although, at times, working so hard to ’survive’ has impacted my emotional well-being.

    I have been lucky enough to have healthy and supportive relationships with a few loved ones who have accepted me as I am (quirks and all). To anyone else I’ve come across, I suspect I’ve been perceived as inexplicably normal and inoffensive.

    Like many of us who have suffered with our mental health, I’ve always been curious to learn more about who I am beyond the surface level experiences of life. Spirituality is a big umbrella, and in my quest for truth I explored various modalities. I eventually found a home within a small yoga community.

    I find many of us seekers feel deeply and have a tendency to overcomplicate things that just are. In my mind this style of yoga worked; quite simply, I followed the practices and life felt a little bit easier, I felt more acceptable as I was, and I believe it made me a better human being to people around me.

    The deeper I went into the practice, the more I began to observe its pitfalls. As is common in many spiritual lineages, it’s quite often not the methods and the teachings that are fallible, but how humans interpret and relate to them.

    In my particular lineage, the leader was found to have physically and sexually assaulted students over a period spanning decades. Those who were brave enough to come forward were silenced, and it took many years before the evidence became so undeniable that the community (by and large) finally acknowledged the truth.

    The revelation and realization that the leader was fallible caused significant pain to many during this time, and is sadly an experience not unique in spiritual sanghas.

    At this time some conversations were had regarding the student-teacher dynamic, and the propensity for abuse in our lineage, but no cohesive and collective safeguards were established or defined. Small fringe communities developed during this time in an apparent greater commitment to change; however, it was by no means the status quo.

    The leader, at this point, had left his body, and it appeared as if many felt it was this man alone who was the problem, and therefore the problem was no more.

    I loved the practice, and I felt my knowledge of the history of the lineage equipped me with an awareness of the propensity for harmful power dynamics to occur. I was fortunate in the early years of my journey to have teachers whose only objective appeared to be to support students by sharing what they knew.

    For the first time ever, I didn’t feel like I was an outsider—I felt acceptable as I was. Sadly, however, due to a teacher relocating, I joined a new community with a new teacher, and this is where my story of pain begins.

    My new teacher must have been suffering. The specifics around my experience are not relevant for this article, but I understand now I was bullied, belittled, and manipulated. Maybe it was a misunderstanding? Maybe I asked too many questions? Maybe I was too direct? Maybe I wasn’t obsequious enough? I went over and over in my head to try to understand, why me?

    I still loved the practice and wanted to be welcomed like everyone else. Throughout my experience I remained respectful to the teacher, but it was a confusing time. Eventually, I can only assume, the teacher got bored with playing with me and played her final card, banning and ostracizing me from the group. I was also labelled to the community as abusive and an aggressor.

    And, oh boy, did that bring up a cycle of emotions. Written down on paper like this they are just words, but I can promise you they felt intense and consuming and relentless. I felt…

    -Humiliation: I have been misrepresented. I can’t show my face ever again. People don’t believe me that I did nothing wrong.
    -Shame: Why am I the person who has been ostracized? There really must be something really wrong with me.
    -Rage: How dare someone cause me this much hurt? How dare they claim to be a spiritual leader?
    -Resentment: No one else in the community has stood up for me; none of them can be good people to let this happen.
    -Grief: I have lost a practice I really loved. My heart is broken.
    -Depression: My path gave me purpose, now what?

    Subsequently, my life unraveled, and I can honestly say the period following was the darkest of my life. Family, friends, and my therapist allowed me space to explore and accept my pain.

    We all experience the world through our own lens, and I appreciate I may have personal defects that clouded my experience of the situation. However, I do see now that I was wronged. No teacher will perfectly match my personal disposition, and that’s okay. However, they should offer a safe and inclusive space for spiritual discovery. I wasn’t given that, and that wasn’t good enough. 

    So many times, well-being supporters would tell me, “You need to move on, forgive, forget, find another yoga space.” I understood but I didn’t know how to go about that.

    At the time, a good friend was going through recovery from alcoholism and working the twelve steps. She told me that she was praying every day for people who had harmed her.

    “How can you do that?” I remember asking her. “I couldn’t wish well for those who have harmed me.” My friend told me that, to begin with, she didn’t believe what she was saying, but that over time she began to feel compassion and forgiveness toward those people.

    So that’s what I did. I made a commitment to myself to start practicing daily forgiveness meditations.

    To begin with, I worked on forgiving the teacher. I learned more about this teacher’s past and learned about a significant life event that I believe may have caused great pain. We all have shadow sides, and I spent time reflecting on the occasions where I may have hurt people to project my own suffering. With time, I was able to see and accept that her actions towards me came from a place of hurt.

    I also spent time reflecting on the positive things the teacher gave me. I acknowledged how she’d held virtual space for our community through covid lockdowns, which undoubtedly helped many of us during those isolating times. I appreciated how she had introduced me to several authors whose words I continue to find great richness in, and whose books I have since recommended to others. The teacher also helped me to advance my physical asana practice, through encouraging me to find possibility in movement which felt impossible.

    It didn’t happen overnight, but I was gradually able to find space in my heart for compassion toward this teacher. However, I wasn’t fully healed.

    I began to understand that there lay deeper hurt and anger directed at other community members, some of whom were aware of this abuse and either denied it or chose to do nothing, believing it had nothing to do with them.

    It was through those interactions that I began to understand the pain of victim denial and gaslighting. I felt angered by the lack of collective action by the community to hold harmful teachers accountable, and to enforce better safeguards to ensure greater student safety. I knew there were others who, like me, had been hurt, and that broke my heart.

    So that’s what my current practice is focused on—healing and forgiving institutional betrayal.

    I am lucky to have joined a new community that feels much kinder. It has taken time, but I am now able to separate my feelings toward yoga from the hurt I felt from individuals in the yoga community.

    I recognize now that many of those who silenced me when I tried to speak up about my teacher were just ignorant; they weren’t cruel. There is still pain, but with time I can see how this experience is a gift; it has taught me how to find forgiveness and reminded me of the importance of compassion toward all beings.

  • Mindful Forgiveness: 4 Steps to Unlock the Healing Power of Your Mind

    Mindful Forgiveness: 4 Steps to Unlock the Healing Power of Your Mind

    “The truth is, unless you let go, unless you forgive yourself, unless you forgive the situation, unless you realize that the situation is over, you cannot move forward.” ~Steve Maraboli

    The key to healing is learning to let go of negative thoughts and feelings. Mindfulness will allow you to be aware of your thoughts and feelings; forgiveness will help in letting them go.

    Simple as it is in theory, putting it into practice may be harder.

    Mindfulness, being aware of your thoughts and feelings in the present moment, is not that difficult. But the trick is to do it amidst the chaos of our modern way of living.

    Forgiveness is even harder. Our mind sees the events of the past as lessons that are beneficial for our survival and wants to hold on to painful and irritating memories.

    But in the modern world, we rarely need this primal safety mechanism, and the grudges we hold hurt us more than they do good.

    What’s worse, the things we have done, or others have done to us, often make us angry. Anger can be a severely damaging mental condition; not only damaging to our minds but also to our bodies.

    However, taking the time to consciously combine mindfulness with forgiveness will open the way to profound emotional and physical healing, and will eventually lead to a joyful and healthy life.

    Being mindful of your thoughts and feelings will allow you to confront them instead of repressing them. Once confronted, the events that cause those thoughts and feelings can be examined and forgiven.

    I learned this the hard way, but now I want to share what I know so that you can skip the painful part.

    Pain is Often a Prompt to Grow

    Just a few years ago, I thought I had life figured out. I had done everything ‘right,’ succeeded in achieving my goals, and therefore, I expected to be happy.

    After years of rigorous studying, I landed a job at a corporate bank. It was everything I had ever dreamed of. I could finally afford a fancy car. I was surrounded by amazing people. I went to parties, traveled, and had fun. Life was (supposed to be) pretty sweet.

    As fun as it was, it was not healthy in any way. My health started to deteriorate quickly. I gained over thirty pounds, started to have pains in my back and legs, and was always tired.

    What’s worse is that no matter what I did, I could not be happy. I was constantly irritated or anxious and had no idea what was causing these feelings.

    Then one day a realization hit me: I was completely miserable.

    Why was I not feeling any joy in life? I could not understand what the matter was. There was no reason for me to feel how I did. I was doing everything that I had learned was supposed to bring me happiness, yet I still wasn’t happy.

    So there I was: a young man in my mid-thirties, gaining weight, feeling miserable, and losing my mental and physical health in the process.

    I had no idea how to deal with any of this. How was I supposed to deal with my anxious and angry mind when I had never learned to deal with my emotions, let alone express them in a healthy way? The only solution for me was to not confront my feelings at all.

    Before long, I developed a heart arrhythmia, which felt really uncomfortable, especially when trying to sleep. My pulse rate went up to 120 bpm and did not come down no matter how I tried to relax. Sometimes it felt like my heart would stop beating for brief periods of time.

    So I went to a hospital, but the doctor who examined me told me that he couldn’t determine the cause. Physically I was fine, and my EKG was perfect. Like taken from the pages of an anatomy textbook.

    This was, of course, very puzzling. How could my heart seem to be healthy when I was clearly suffering from arrhythmias?

    Lying there in the hospital bed, I had time to think deeply about life. And after some pondering, the answer became obvious.

    Illness Is Created First in the Mind

    My condition was psychosomatic. I understood that my inability to deal with my emotions was piling up negative thoughts and beliefs in my mind, which caused my body to react in a negative way. I had refused to be mindful of my thoughts and feelings, thus being unable to let go of them.

    Only when I was forced to stop and listen to how I truly felt could I find this answer. It was a hard and mandatory lesson in mindfulness, one that still sticks with me today.

    So I decided to confront my negative thoughts and emotions. The process was simple: Stop and take a deep breath. Be still and focus on breathing in and out slowly. Then tune in to how I feel. What are these feelings? Why am I feeling them? What are they trying to tell me?

    I noticed that under the surface, my most dominant feeling was anger.

    I was angry with myself. Why was I not able to deal with my emotions? Why hadn’t I listened to how I felt and tried to repress my emotions instead? Why did I let the situation get so bad?

    I was angry with my parents and teachers. Why didn’t they show me how to express emotions in a healthy way? All I was ever told was “crying is weakness,” and “being angry is not okay; go to your room until you calm down.” Sometimes it was not even okay to show love or affection. So I learned to repress my emotions.

    I was also angry with society. I felt that the only thing I had ever heard about how to be happy was wrong. I did not find happiness by achieving goals or getting material wealth, as is so often taught by society (and everyone else around us for that matter). I had the education, the career, the money, the car, and so on. Yet I was miserable.

    But I knew that it was not necessary to be angry with myself or others. I was only doing what I had learned was right. Likewise, what others had taught me about life, feelings, and happiness was what they had learned themselves. They did not know any better, and their intentions were good.

    So I decided to start forgiving. I used mindfulness meditation to connect to my thoughts and feelings.

    And when I was deeply immersed in my mindfulness meditation and focused on a feeling, often a memory popped into my mind. It was something that someone had said or done that had made me feel angry or afraid.

    I then “healed the memory” through an exercise where I forgave the people involved.

    And wouldn’t you know it, when I started to forgive the things that I or others had done in the past, I healed almost instantly.

    I got rid of all the pain in my mind and body, and there was no sign of arrhythmia anymore. I almost couldn’t believe it. With this simple combination of mindfully identifying thoughts and feelings, then forgiving the people that caused them, I healed my body in two days.

    Two days. That’s all it took to heal over ten years of neglect.

    I also found my mental well-being improving by leaps and bounds. I felt peaceful and happy. I started to see the joy in everyday moments, which I hadn’t for years. I realized that the opportunity to feel joyful was always there, but I’d been so occupied with the past and the future that I was unable to see it.

    The 4 Levels of Forgiveness

    This is what I did, and you can try this too.

    1. Forgive yourself for what you did to yourself.
    2. Forgive yourself for what you did to someone else.
    3. Forgive others for what they did to you.
    4. Forgive others for everything they have done.

    Start with level one and work your way through the levels. With this exercise, you will start to feel better in a matter of days.

    For levels one and two, forgiving yourself, try this simple exercise:

    Think about something you regret. Stand in front of a mirror, look yourself in the eyes, and say, “I forgive you. You did the best you could at the moment. You didn’t know any better.” Repeat this in your mind, or even better, say it out loud. Do it at least five times. After you are done, close your eyes and take a deep breath. Relax.

    This might be the hardest one of the exercises. For some reason, we tend to hold a grudge against our past selves. But it doesn’t do any good to be unforgiving. For a long time, I was guilty of thinking, “I’ll never forgive myself for what I did!” But as I started to do this exercise just once a day, I quickly started to feel like a weight was being lifted off my shoulders.

    For levels three and four, forgiving others, try this quick meditation:

    Close your eyes and relax. Breathe in and out slowly three times. Think about a memory that’s bothering you. Imagine the situation as vividly as possible and pay close attention to the person that’s the cause of your negative feeling.

    Then, imagine the scene you are in starts to fill with bright, warm light. Like the midday sun on a beautiful summer day. Imagine yourself approaching the person that’s causing the suffering and saying to them, “I forgive you. You did the best you could at the moment. You didn’t know any better.” Then imagine giving them a warm, loving, forgiving hug.

    If you feel like you need help with this, you can imagine anyone you want, even multiple people, there with you to give their support. If you so choose, you may even bring to the scene a higher power to help you.

    Done! Open your eyes and take a deep breath. Relax. You may already feel a little lighter, but don’t worry if this takes several tries. It may not be instantaneous or easy, but it’s definitely worth it.

    Everyone Is Doing Their Best (Including You)

    Forgive yourself for not knowing any better at the time. Forgive others for acting the only way they knew how. You acted the way you had learned, and so did everyone else. Please don’t blame yourself and try to forgive others for their behavior. By holding on to fear, anger, or hate, you will ultimately hurt yourself.

    Forgiveness will give you peace of mind. It will allow you to live mindfully and enjoy the moment, which you now understand as a perfect opportunity to express who you are. You will be able to let go of the past and stop worrying about the future, and your life will start to fill with peace and joy.

  • Why I Had to Stop Judging Myself to Start Healing from Childhood Trauma

    Why I Had to Stop Judging Myself to Start Healing from Childhood Trauma

    “I now see how owning our story and loving ourselves through that process is the bravest thing that we will ever do.” ~Brené Brown

    A few years ago, when I began recovering from childhood trauma, the first thing I learned was that I needed to master the skill of self-awareness.

    However, becoming aware came with some pretty hard truths about who I was, what I did, and how I acted because of what had happened to me.

    Although I eventually found the courage to face some challenging experiences from my past, I wasn’t ready to forgive and accept myself.

    When I acknowledged the impact of my past trauma and abuse on my current life, I immediately started blaming myself. It was difficult to accept that I pleased people to gain validation and stayed in toxic relationships since I didn’t feel worthy or lovable. Therefore, I went straight for what I knew and was accustomed to—judgment, guilt, and shame.

    As Bessel van der Kolk explained in his book The Body Keeps the Score:

    “While we all want to move beyond trauma, the part of our brain that is devoted to ensuring our survival (deep below our rational brain) is not very good at denial. Long after a traumatic experience is over, it may be reactivated at the slightest hint of danger and mobilize disturbed brain circuits and secrete massive amounts of stress hormones. This precipitates unpleasant emotions, intense physical sensations, and impulsive and aggressive actions. These posttraumatic reactions feel incomprehensible and overwhelming. Feeling out of control, survivors of trauma often begin to fear that they are damaged to the core and beyond redemption.”

    Although self-awareness is the first step toward nurturing change in our lives, many of us reach for judgment when faced with uncomfortable truths about ourselves and our past experiences. Ironically, the lack of self-acceptance blocks us from healing and moving past what happened to us.

    Is it possible we sabotage our healing by being overly hard on ourselves?

    For example, victims of sexual assault are often held hostage by the shame they carry around. Since speaking about the assault is terrifying, they remain silent while secretly taking responsibility for the abuse.

    If guilt and shame are predominating emotions we carry inside, how can we move toward successful recovery and accept our wounded inner child?

    We do it by letting go of judgment for what happened to us and, instead of taking responsibility for the harm we experienced, we become responsible for our recovery.

    I remember when I was about seven years old, my father got angry because my brother and I were playing around the house and making noise. He slammed our bedroom door so hard that the glass shattered. As he was moving toward me with his face red and furious, I urinated.

    Any time I looked back at this experience, I felt an overwhelming sense of shame and promised myself that I would never get weak and scared of anyone.

    As I got older, I adopted a survival mechanism of being a toughie. I would put on the mask of a strong woman while suffocating on the inside since I felt fragile, weak, easily offended, and anxious.

    However, I couldn’t stand facing my weaknesses.

    Anytime I felt sad, vulnerable, or emotional, I would judge myself harshly. In a sense, I became my biggest internal abuser.

    After I got divorced, I was haunted by self-judgment and felt worthless because of what I allowed while being married. Disrespect, pain, neglect, and lies. How can a worthy person allow such things? I couldn’t stop judging myself.

    Eventually, I began working on my guilt through writing and daily forgiveness meditations. Although I started to understand the importance of acceptance and forgiveness in my healing and recovery, I was only scratching the surface.

    The real challenge arose when I confronted who I was because of what happened to me. My focus started to shift from blame to self-responsibility. Although it was a healthy step forward, it was a long and intimidating process. Since I was deeply absorbed in my victim mentality and filled with shame and judgment, accepting myself seemed like a dream I would never reach.

    It was difficult to admit that I had stayed in a toxic relationship by choice, manipulated people with my tears, and created chaos and drama in my closest relationships to gain attention and feel loved. However, the discomfort I felt was a sign that I was on the right track. If I was willing to keep my ego at bay, I could achieve progress.

    Here’s how I overcame self-judgment and began healing my childhood wounds.

    1. I began to open up and speak the truth.

    At first, I had to face how disgusted I felt with myself. Once I began talking about what happened to me while finding the space of refuge with my therapist, coach, and close friends, judgment began subsiding and acceptance took over.

    My favorite piece of advice from Brené Brown is to share our story with people who deserve to hear it. Whether you speak to a therapist, a coach, a support group, or a very close friend or a family member, make sure this person has earned the right to hear your deepest and most vulnerable feelings and memories.

    Speaking our truth in the space of acceptance is one of the most beautiful ways to heal and process traumatic memories and experiences. A safe space and deep connections are fundamental when healing ourselves, especially if we get hurt within interpersonal relationships.

    2. I acknowledged what happened to me.

    The breakthrough during my recovery happened after I read a book by Oprah Winfrey and Dr. Bruce Perry titled What Happened to You? Suddenly, so much of my behavior started to make sense.

    I wasn’t the sick, disgusting, heartless human being I considered myself to be. I was a wounded adult who didn’t address her traumatic experiences from her childhood while acting from a place of survival and fear.

    When we begin healing ourselves and find the causes behind our (often) unconscious and self-sabotaging behaviors, we become more understanding of who we are and move away from judgment. There is a power in asking, “What happened to me?” instead of “What is wrong with me?”

    Understanding yourself from an open and compassionate place allows you to reach for the love and acceptance your inner child craves. I don’t believe that we are broken or need to be fixed. We are worthy and whole souls whose purpose is to find our way back to ourselves and reconnect with who we are at our core.

    3. I learned to silence my inner critic.

    Learning to recognize the little mean voice inside my head was challenging. My thoughts of judgment were so subtle that they passed by me without awareness.

    The easiest time to spot critical thoughts was when I was meditating. Even during meditation, I judged myself: “Sit up, make sure you focus on your breath. Oh, come on, Silvia, do it better. You aren’t good at meditating. Your mind just wandered again!”

    Since we have about 60 000 thoughts in a day, I decided to focus on my feelings. By observing my emotional state, I became better at identifying what I was thinking and was able to step in to change it .

    I remember one particular night when I was feeling very depressed and hopeless. I asked myself, “What am I thinking that’s making me feel this way?” The answer I observed was, “No one will ever truly love you.” It was the first time I decided not to believe these thoughts. I sat down and made a list of people who showed me love, care, and compassion.

    If you often judge yourself, you may need some practice  and loving patience. However, if you are working on your healing, understanding and accepting yourself is a way of telling your inner child, “I love you, I am here for you, and there is nothing wrong with you.”

    —

    Once I discovered the positive effects of self-acceptance on my recovery, I realized that being overly hard on myself had nothing to do with healing but everything to do with the trauma I’d experienced.

    Today I understand that the little voice inside my head giving me all the reasons to stay stuck in survival mode is my inner child screaming, “Someone please love me.” And I am ready to do just that.

  • Don’t Wait to Open Your Heart: There Is Only Time For Love

    Don’t Wait to Open Your Heart: There Is Only Time For Love

    “Be soft. Do not let the world make you hard. Do not let the pain make you hate. Do not let the bitterness steal your sweetness.” ~Iain Thomas

    Looking back, my most cherished childhood memories can be traced back to my rosy mother.

    Intricate forts in the backyard with Spice Girls playing in the background. Sleepovers using Limited Too’s finest sparkly lotion, eyeshadow, and lip gloss. Rainy afternoons filled with friendship bracelets and Lisa Frank activity sheets. Children and teachers showing off their wild side at my mothers’ signature talent shows at the local theatre. Arts and crafts in a room surrounded by floral couches and mauve wallpaper. Flea market field trips to select the perfect charm bracelet. And, loads of buttery birthday cakes with the words Be With Your Dreams written all over them.

    Sadly, we grew apart during middle school when she abruptly uprooted our sunlit lives in exchange for a nomadic lifestyle. After traveling with her to two states, I grew tired of the “new kid” title and moved in with my father.

    With each of her subsequent moves, my resentment morphed into a towering boulder that blocked her love to seep through. Our tug-of-war relationship continued for six years into early adulthood.

    I still remember the day that everything changed.

    I was at a work conference when I received an unexpected call from her. I grudgingly called her back in a crowded hallway.

    “What?!” I said in a pompous tone.

    She whispered, “I’m so sorry to hound you but I need to tell you something. I have cancer. ”

    “What do you mean?” I said as my throat sealed.

    “I’ve been diagnosed with ovarian cancer—I am so sorry.”

    A few days later, I visited her home in Key West, Florida. I can still picture her galloping towards me as I exited the puddle-jumper. She had a mop of loose curls, a wide smile, torn army green cargo pants, and a swollen belly that resembled pregnancy.

    For the first time in years, we bonded without the heaviness of the future.

    We became giggly movie critics. We strolled the shoreline in search of magical conch shells. We frequented our favorite Cuban restaurant and oohed and aahed over zesty soup. We bought vintage aqua blue tea sets for future tea parties. We swapped stories that were once forgotten.

    Instead of cowering in embarrassment, I encouraged her roaring laugh in public. I embraced her hippy lifestyle as we basked in the sun, with Key Lime Pie sticks in hand. I co-directed one of her renowned talent shows featuring local YMCA kids. Her trailer became a treasure trove filled with wispy white pillows, the aroma of velvety hazelnut coffee, and new beginnings.

    With each day that passed, the towering boulder of resentment I once had dissipated into raw love.

    She didn’t have standard health insurance, but she saved black pilot whales in her free time. She didn’t have a steady job, but she made others smile as she sold handmade bottlecap jewelry at Mallory Square. You see—if you’re fixated on expectations of who someone should be according to your standards, you can’t love them for who they really are.

    My mother once wrote me:

    “Those stressful days are gone, and I don’t think I’ll ever see them again. I don’t have the meetings and high-powered days like I used to. I drift to work somehow gazing at the blazing sun, aqua blue ocean, hibiscus blossoms, and the marshmallow clouds. I wear island dresses in the endless cool breezes with my hair in a wet bun. Most of the time, I hide my bathing suit underneath it all so I can hit the beach right after.  I’m dreaming of my toes in the sand, laughing, giggling, and snoozing while listening to music and chirping birds. Remember, life is beautiful. You need to find your happy – promise?!

    My mother appreciated every moment, even if the highlight of her day was glancing through a window in a sterile hallway. She described the hospital’s cuisine as divine. Although she could barely walk, she somehow dragged her flimsy wheelchair through sand, just to inhale a whiff of the salty ocean air. And at every opportunity, she looked up at the clouds in awe of being alive.

    As her soft body turned into brittle bones, I learned the importance of her famous motto, Be With Your Dreams. She taught me how to live an idyllic life filled with nature, wonderment, and positivity. She proved that having a raw, openhearted approach to life was superior than any cookie-cutter mold I once envisioned for her.

    In my mother’s last days, she shared tenderly, “Britt, I think of how I left you behind sometimes. I know I wasn’t a perfect mother, but I’ve always loved you so much, baby girl.”

    I waited for that moment for fifteen years. And in that moment, I felt nothing. Zilch. Nada.

    Time was the only thing I longed for. As tears streamed down my face, I wondered how many more memories we would’ve had, had I learned to appreciate her for who she was years ago.

    Most of us wait to resolve our conflicts “later.” The unfortunate part is that minutes and days turn into months and years. There’s a good chance we’re missing out on a relationship right now that could change our entire lives. So…

    Open the door to your heart and choose love. Be kind instead of right. Remember the good times. Let go of pain disguised as indifference. Take responsibility for your part. Stop the judgment. Be the bigger person. Forgive the small things.

    For goodness sakes, say or do something! Pick up the phone. Write an apology letter. Drive to their house. Plan a trip. Text a nostalgic memory.

    Don’t you see… there’s only time for love. And, who knows—if you’re lucky enough, they might just show you how to Be With Your Dreams.

  • I Will Remember and Recover, Not Forgive and Forget

    I Will Remember and Recover, Not Forgive and Forget

  • In the Blink of an Eye, Everything Can Change

    In the Blink of an Eye, Everything Can Change

  • Before You Reach Out to That Person from Your Past: 3 Things to Consider

    Before You Reach Out to That Person from Your Past: 3 Things to Consider

    “You don’t have to rebuild a relationship with everyone you’ve forgiven.” ~Unknown

    It’s natural, when you’re hurting and lonely, to want to reach out to people you’ve been close to in the past.

    Especially if there’s unfinished business with someone. And especially given the added isolation that comes with a global pandemic.

    Whether or not you do reach out is entirely your prerogative. For what it’s worth, I don’t necessarily think it’s a bad idea to try—in most cases, a “Whoops” is better than a “What if…?” Whatever the result, you’ll learn something. It might be an unpleasant truth, but it’ll help you, one way or another.

    But, before you draft that text message, or email, or even pick up the phone, I also believe there are three things to consider:

    1. Why are you reaching out? What’s really behind your impulse?

    If you’re only doing so to take the edge off your loneliness, think again.

    If the relationship with the person you’re thinking of contacting has broken down, there’s probably still some hurt there. For them and for you. Contact will re-open that wound.

    Perhaps a long time has now passed, and any pain is vastly less profound than it once was. But let’s not kid ourselves—if things got so bad between the two of you that you haven’t spoken for months, things are pretty bad. There’s going to be something there.

    The benefits of reaching out have got to outweigh the possible hurt that comes from doing so. And the only way that can happen is if you genuinely miss that person. In short, the person, and that relationship, has got to be worth the pain that might initially come from speaking to them.

    So, ask yourself, honestly, do you really want to speak that person? Is it really them you miss, or is it just the connection you once had with them?

    Are you, in fact, just lonely?

    If, upon reflection, you realize it is just solitude prompting you, don’t reach out. It’s really not fair to either one of you. The pain won’t be worth it. It can’t just be about you, or what you’re currently feeling; the other person has to genuinely matter to you.

    Don’t let them be collateral damage in your war against solitude. Because that’s all they’ll be, a casualty.

    Your loneliness will pass. Like desperation or the need to get something off your chest that feeling is, in most cases, a temporary one. It will abate. And, when it does, so will your need for that person.

    I’ve been on the receiving end of this more than once, and it’s not nice.

    A former partner once contacted me out of the blue. It had been a turbulent relationship; during the time we’d spent together, our lives had both been raging dumpster fires, and we’d never been able to quell those flames adequately enough. Eventually, our relationship was consumed by them. But I still felt there was still something there. Despite the final rites having been administered, I knew I had never truly given up hope.

    Initially, I was beyond happy they’d reached out. I didn’t know if anything could be salvaged, but I was willing to try.

    However, after a short time, I knew my hopes were unfounded.

    A few days after we began speaking, this person began to drift away. They even told me directly that they weren’t feeling desperate or lonely anymore, but I had already guessed that; their waning interest was obvious in the way the messages started drying up, in the manner in which they suddenly avoided the big topics, which we’d freely discussed up until that point.

    I had served a purpose, and I had taken an edge off whatever they were feeling.

    And once I had, I was let go again—I was no longer needed.

    Because it had never been about me; it had been about them and what they were temporarily experiencing.

    I was hurt but not indignant; I’d done it myself before, and it’d be hypocritical to damn them.

    But, overall, there wasn’t a good enough reason to have those wounds re-opened. Reconciliation is a long, painful process; it can’t be built on loneliness. It only works if both people genuinely want to reconcile and be back in each other’s lives.

    If you’re in the same boat, try to find a healthier way to feel connected. I know, I know… loneliness is vile, debilitating. And not an easy thing to tackle. As someone who has battled loneliness for a long time, I am in no way denigrating the devastating impact it can have on your mental health.

    But being aware that you are lonely is a good first step in doing something about it. Knowing that you don’t really miss a particular person, that you just miss people per se, is a foundation. It’s something to build upon.

    However, if you’ve seriously thought about this, and it is genuinely them you miss, then there’s something else to consider…

    2. What do you want to achieve by reaching out?

    In the same way you need to be clear about your reasons for reaching out, you’ve also got to have a firm idea about what you want to achieve.

    It’s okay if all you want to do is try and re-establish contact with the future hope of reconciliation; there doesn’t have to any grand, overly complex plan in place beforehand.

    But there does need to be something, some sort of objective. And it’s got to be realistic based on the relationship you had. If it was a fundamentally unhealthy or codependent relationship that took more than it gave, then expecting all of those flaws to be resolved in one message is simply ludicrous.

    Perhaps you simply want to see if there’s a chance that something has shifted, and that there’s a glimmer of repairing the damage. It’s a small something.

    And you need that something.

    If all you’ve got is, “I don’t know; I don’t know what I want to achieve,” then it is probably the loneliness talking, or another random impulse, and stepping back is the right thing to do.

    Don’t jump into this with no idea about what you want. There’s going to be some hurt, some pain—think about what you hope to achieve by (potentially) re-opening this particular wound.

    If you’ve done that, and the answer works, then there’s only one more thing to consider…

    3. You might not get the response you want.

    Although you might view that past relationship and the other person involved through rose-tinted spectacles, they may not view you and the relationship in the same way. Just because you’re feeling conciliatory, it doesn’t mean they do. They might be perfectly happy with how things are, thank you very much.

    Plus, if it’s someone you haven’t spoken to for some time, you won’t have a clear idea about what’s happening in their life. There’s a global pandemic unfolding around us—people have lost livelihoods and loved ones.

    Your message may arrive while they’re in the middle of dealing with something huge. A message out of the blue from you may be the last thing they need.

    There’s also the simple fact that people change. Not many, but some of us do. And that can be confusing.

    Again, I was recently on the receiving end of this.

    And, again, it was that very same former partner.

    Time had passed since our last abortive communication. And, by this stage, I wasn’t so amenable to their approaches. I still had feelings for them, but those feelings had changed, mutated, in line with the work I’d done on myself in our time apart.

    Simply put, I’d moved on.

    As a result, I now saw that person completely differently. Whereas there was once a deep affection, now there was a solid realization that my own mental well-being was better for having removed them. The sad truth was that I just didn’t miss them anymore.

    Sometimes you need someone from your past to re-emerge to show you how much you’ve changed. I was very aware that, six months earlier, I would’ve been much more open to their words. I simply wasn’t any more; I was happy with how things were.

    The affection (or connection) was gone, and I just wanted to keep moving on.

    I couldn’t give them the answer they wanted, and they didn’t take it well. It wasn’t the happiest of experiences, but it did teach me that this was something to be aware of if the roles were ever reversed.

    If you’re not feeling strong enough to face a response that isn’t overflowing with kindness, a flat refusal, or worse, no reply at all, don’t do it. You’ve got to embrace the possibility that this isn’t going to go as planned.

    And you’ve got to be in a place where you can emotionally deal with that rejection.

    If you are, it might be worth the risk. If you’re not, don’t do it.

    —

    These are strange, lonely times. Reaching out may seem like an entirely natural thing to do. Maybe you’ll get the chance to rekindle an old relationship.

    Or maybe you’ll discover that the relationship truly did die a long time ago.

    It’s always worth taking the risk, but make sure you truly want to, and that you’re prepared for any response, good or bad.

    Reaching out—it can be a chance to reset a relationship, or to deliver the final rites. Both of which can be useful, and you might learn something invaluable.

    Most of all, paradoxically, it might give you both a chance to finally let go.

    And that’s something always worth doing.

  • If You Want Closure After a Breakup: 6 Things You Need to Know

    If You Want Closure After a Breakup: 6 Things You Need to Know

    “We eventually learn that emotional closure is our own action.” ~David Deida

    When my last relationship ended, I didn’t really understand why. After eight years together and still feeling love for each other, my partner walked away saying he didn’t feel able to commit.

    He didn’t want to work on the relationship because he felt that nothing would change for him. So, I had no choice but to let it end and do everything I could to pick myself up from deep grief, intensified by great confusion.

    Now, over a year later, I still cannot give you a definitive reason as to why we broke up. I do still think about the breakup and occasionally it can bring up emotion, even now.

    But these days, instead of that burning need to understand and make sense of it, I have a more distanced curiosity when I think about the reasons we ended. I think this might be that elusive state we call “closure.”

    This reflection led me to explore what closure means: why we strive for it and why it feels so hopeless when we think we can’t reach it. Do we ever truly have it and where does it come from?

    What is Closure?

    When we say we want “closure” at the end of a relationship, what do we actually want?

    I have discovered that when people talk to me about needing closure, what they generally tend to mean is that they want answers and understanding about why things ended the way they did.

    Heartbroken people often believe that they will get the closure they so desperately desire, if only they could make sense of why. They expect that this knowledge will help them stop the overthinking and relieve them of their painful emotions.

    I used to believe this too, but experience from my previous crushing divorce taught me it doesn’t work like that. Closure must come from within because if you look to your ex or anywhere else to find it, you will be left frustrated and helpless and you will prolong your healing process.

    So, let’s look at some truths about closure that explain why it has to be an inside job:

    1. Your ex’s responses will lead to more questions.

    At the point of my breakup, my ex and I had a couple of conversations that involved me doing a lot of asking why, but not getting many answers. He couldn’t really explain; he told me “It’s not you, it’s me,” and when someone gives you that as their reason, there is nowhere you can go with it.

    For the person leaving it probably feels like the best way to end it. But for the person left, it’s deeply unsatisfying, and our natural tendency is to desperately ask more questions: “What’s wrong?” “Can I help you with whatever you’re going through?” “Can we fix it somehow?” “Can we at least work on it?”

    It’s important to know that when we are still in love with someone, nothing they can say will us give closure. The answers will never feel enough, they will only lead to more questions and more longing.

    2. “One last meeting” extends the pain.

    If there is still communication after a breakup it’s tempting to ask for one last face-to-face, to help you understand and gain the closure you seek. But for all of the reasons above, this will not help.

    A meet-up is often an excuse to get in touch because the ending feels too painfully final. Sometimes there’s a veiled hope that by seeing them for “one last talk” they may rethink or have doubts about leaving.

    Nobody is ever wrong for seeking closure this way, but before deciding to meet, check whether you are really hoping for reconciliation. Consider how your pain might be prolonged if you don’t get it.

    3. Your closure can’t come from their truth.

    You cannot rely on the words of the person who broke your heart for your own closure. Not because they are being deliberately dishonest (except for specific cases when they are), but because there is never just one truth at the time of the breakup.

    The answers you receive from your ex may bring you a little bit of understanding or peace at first. But if you depend on them for your closure, and then the reality shifts, it can set you back and bring even more pain.

    I allowed myself to feel deeply reassured by my ex’s assertion that he left because he needed to be by himself. So, when he told me two months later that he was dating again, it left me utterly devastated because I had allowed my peace of mind to come from his words and not my own healing. I had believed “It’s not you, it’s me,” then felt the gut punch that it actually was me.

    However, as I started to move through the healing process, my growth allowed me to shift my perspective on the meaning I gave to this revelation. I learned to reframe the deep feelings of rejection to create my own, more empowering, understanding of why we ended.

    You cannot cling to reassurance from someone else’s truth or explanations, because they will not hold lasting meaning for you. Your closure will only have a strong foundation if it comes from your own truth.

    4. Moving on should not be conditional.

    You disempower yourself when you believe that you can only get closure via your ex-partner. In doing so, you are effectively allowing them to say whether it is okay to move on.

    If you require an apology, changed behavior, an explanation, empathy, forgiveness, or anything else from them before you can move forward, what happens if those things never come? Are you okay with potentially spending years waiting for someone else to fix your pain?

    Whatever your ex-partner tells or withholds from you, however they acted back then, whatever their current situation or future behavior, is far less relevant than your response to any of these things.

    Your ability to gain closure is unconditionally within your control, and it becomes far easier when you stop focusing on your ex.

    5. Closure is not passive—what you do counts.

    We have a common understanding that “time heals a broken heart.”

    While it’s true that the intensity of grief emotions can lesson over time, what really makes a difference to your speed of moving on, is how willing you are to do the inner work to change and grow.

    As you gain closure, you’ll notice you are no longer so emotionally triggered by the same external situations. However, this doesn’t happen because anything out there is different; it’s because you are different.

    When you learn to heal an internal wound, shift your perspective, and change your responses to events, you gain peace from the inside. This is not dictated by time; it’s up to you how soon you want to make these changes.

    6. Closure is not a one-time event.

    There is a misconception that closure is something we finally “get.” The word itself implies that it’s a conclusion to everything related to the breakup. Because of this belief, we find ourselves constantly wondering when we will “have it.”

    Instead, if we see it as a process rather than a one-time event, it takes the pressure and expectation away from reaching this end goal. Creating closure is a continual journey of self-awareness, learning, and checking-in on our progress. We don’t just wake up one morning with a clean slate for a new life.

    Reframing closure this way also relieves us of judgment about how we should feel. It’s common to regard new emotional triggers, after a period of good progress, as unwelcome. They are negatively seen as a sign of a setback, but they are just highlighting where we still need a little more healing.

    Allow Yourself Achievable Closure

    The way we view closure matters. Compare the statement “I’m gaining closure every day” with “I don’t have closure yet.” You know straight away which feels kinder, more healing, less self-judging.

    I recently asked people what closure looked like to them, and I found that most believed that it is something you reach when you no longer think about or have emotions around your breakup.

    I wonder how realistic this thinking is. Perhaps it’s healthier and more attainable to claim we have closure, not when our thoughts and feelings have completely gone, but when they no longer have power over us.

    In my experience, becoming at peace with your breakup ultimately comes from healing through growth, and choosing to focus on what is within your control. This is the kind of closure that doesn’t come from an ex-partner, a rebound relationship, or any other external source. When you gain closure this way, it cannot be taken away from you.

  • How I’m Healing from the Pain of Growing up in a Dysfunctional Family

    How I’m Healing from the Pain of Growing up in a Dysfunctional Family

    “Don’t try to understand everything, because sometimes it’s not meant to be understood, but accepted.” ~Unknown

    As a child, I never had the opportunity to develop a sense of self. I had a father who was a drug addict. A mother who was abused by my father. And later, we had my mom’s possessive and controlling boyfriend. It was tough finding a consistent role model in the mix.

    I was one of four kids and we grew up in a trailer, sharing one bunk bed among us all. As children, we often would brutally fight with each other. We all wanted our own space and sense of self, but there wasn’t enough to go around.

    With our mom working so much, her boyfriend would watch us. He seemed to enjoy punishing us. I remember feeling so afraid. I didn’t want to do anything wrong. I wanted to have his love because it felt like the only way to be safe. I never felt good enough, not to my mom, dad, or the boyfriend.

    Starting in my teen years, codependency started really kicking in, and I wanted my mom for everything. I unknowingly was part of her triangulation between me and my sister. We both craved her love and wanted to have her favoritism.

    As a wild child, my sister was stuck with my mom’s negative self-projections, I received the positive. As the years progressed, these roles flipped, and I suffered a sense of rejection and confusion as to what I had done wrong.

    Life was hard and I couldn’t live with the fear and shame, so I learned to unplug from my feelings. At the same time, these unprocessed feelings would cause outbursts of anger. I started feeling entitled to anger. It felt like life had kicked me so hard as a child, why wasn’t it getting easier? Why was it getting worse?

    My learned dysfunction kept me yearning for connection but fearing it and pushing people away at the same time. I wasn’t capable of trusting others in a healthy way. With each loss, I took on more shame and perceived failure.

    As I struggled through life, I was oblivious to the amounts of shame my family dynamic had me carrying. My mother’s triangulation and manipulation created an environment where she was justified in lashing out with no accountability. Everyone else was to blame for her poor reactions to situations.

    As my mom and sister became a team, I became the problem who needed to learn how to accept and love them unconditionally. There was nothing wrong with them treating other people poorly. It was okay for them to deceitfully hide family secrets (e.g.: Mom drove home drunk from the bar and doesn’t remember getting home), because I wouldn’t agree, so they were justified.

    I felt like I was on an island, broken and unable to figure out what was wrong and how to fix myself because the “rules” of justification changed so swiftly, and always in their favor.

    Having no sense of self and being completely enmeshed with my mom and sister, I felt beyond broken each time I was accused of not being able to love unconditionally. I was worthless and a disgusting human being who was incapable of even a basic emotion that everyone else had.

    It took a lot for me to see that love for my mom was making me feel close only when she was going through tough times, making me part of her someday club (our motto: “someday” will never happen for us).

    My sister learned to use her money to express her love. She would take me to dinner and give me her quality hand-me-down clothes. While I was grateful, it also became justification for her to do crummy things toward me, usually when she had been drinking.

    While sober, if she had a problem, she’d choose to “forgive.” The only problem is that she hadn’t really forgiven me because one night while everyone was having fun, I might get tired or I didn’t think a joke was funny or I looked at her the wrong way, and it would all come flooding out—every stored feeling she had been holding back for days or weeks.

    If either my mom or sister hurt me, the expectation was that I should just get over it. There was no need for them to take accountability because “we are human” and “I am happy with who I am.”

    I wanted to be loved and accepted but couldn’t ever really find my place within my family because the dynamics were so volatile. I was suffocating in the conflicting feelings. I felt angry but ashamed. I was unhappy and felt worthless.

    When I hit bottom and I couldn’t see one thing in my life that gave me worth, I knew that I needed to make changes. I reached out and got help from a therapist and joined a local support group.

    As I am separating from the dysfunctional patterns, the things that have helped me are:

    1. Ask for help.

    Dysfunctional family dynamics often create shame around the idea of talking to others. It’s seen as exposing family secrets and going against the unit. Nobody should suffer due to things out of their control. Reaching out helps you find the compassionate outlet you deserve and need.

    I have been in therapy for about two years now. It has been the only time of my life where I have been able to experience consistent, reliable, and healthy direction. It has supported me in learning how to have self-compassion and make healthy, but tough choices.

    I didn’t want to accept the reality that my mom and sister will likely never truly see me for me. My role as a scapegoat is brutally necessary for the emotional “economics” that occur within my family.

    Therapy helped support me in my choice to find myself outside of my family of origin. There was much pain in going from seeing my family every weekend to now living a life outside of them. It required radical acceptance and the knowledge that I am unable to change anyone but myself.

    I was lucky to have a kind, compassionate, reliable therapist to guide me as I dealt with each of the emotions that came up during this time.

    2. Accept others as they are.

    As a scapegoat in a dysfunctional family unit, I have learned to accept my situation for what it is. I have to set my expectations for what others are capable of giving.

    We have no control over others or their view of the world. All we can do is accept a situation for what it is and assess if it is healthy for us. Once I accepted that my mom and sister do not really see the family dynamic as dysfunctional, I was able to free myself of the anger and need for control. They are blind to the ways they protect themselves emotionally and unwilling to have an open mind about it.

    There is sadness, but I see that the relationship dynamic causes so much pain for me, and I cannot fix this on my own. While I am compassionate toward the pain they must be carrying, I see that I cannot continue a relationship that is built on dysfunctional habits.

    3. Know your worth.

    As an enmeshed individual, my worth was defined by external sources. I wanted my mom, sister, brothers, friends, coworkers, and acquaintances to validate me as a good, worthy person. I desperately needed to feel like others liked me enough to feel I had worth.

    I now know that we all have worth, and it’s our individual responsibility to maintain this worth from within.

    I have a tough inner critic, so having a consistent mindfulness practice has helped me establish my worth. It is hard to find worth when you are caught up in your own head, believing the negative thoughts going through it. Mindfulness helps me turn away from these thoughts and label them as just that, thoughts.

    The more we tune out our negative self-talk, the more we can acknowledge our mistakes and learn from them without sinking into a low and getting down on ourselves. With this brings the awareness that our mistakes do not diminish our worth. Our worth is inherent. A mistake is just a mistake.

    4. Learn what healthy love looks like.

    Our family of origin doesn’t always teach us what healthy love looks and feels like.

    In dysfunctional families, each person loves based on their limited capacity to process their own emotions. When someone has to keep reminding you that you are unconditionally loved, ask yourself, how do I feel right now? For me, I felt hated and restricted to being what was easy for my mom and sister.

    Love should connect you with your inner joy. We all feel down at times and cannot rely on others to make us feel good about ourselves at all times. But I do feel that when someone loves you unconditionally, you shouldn’t feel lost. The joy of this love should be consistently present and help carry you through the tough times (e.g.: disagreements, hurt feelings, etc.).

    When it comes to my mom and sister unconditionally loving me, I have had to accept that they love me the best and only way they know how while hiding from their shame. If they lash out, they are not able to carry the shame and embarrassment of their own actions. They cannot validate my feelings or experience in any way. They need me to carry this responsibility for them. This is not unconditional love.

    —

    As you move through the necessary steps to separate from learned family dysfunction, please remember that you didn’t learn these things by yourself and you will not unlearn them by yourself, nor should you.

    Oftentimes things like depression or anxiety are a hurdle. Building a community is scary but necessary. This can be reaching out to a therapist or searching for support groups in your local community.

    For years I struggled thinking that I could fix what was wrong with me on my own. It wasn’t until I reached out and got help that my mind was able to open up, process traumas, and make lasting changes.

  • Why Forgiving Is the Last Step in The Process and What Comes First

    Why Forgiving Is the Last Step in The Process and What Comes First

    “True forgiveness comes when you realize there is something totally radiant inside you, that nobody could ever touch” ~Eckhart Tolle

    I grew up in an emotionally abusive household.

    My father was a man who diligently provided for us, but he left me with scars and shattered self-esteem.

    My mother cooked me my favorite foods and let me sleep in her bed when I was scared, but she attacked my insecurities when I frustrated her. My friends played nasty pranks, but she wiped my tears as we both tried to survive my religious, cult-like school together.

    As a kid, I didn’t have the tools and mental maturity to deal with these complicated emotions. Everything was black and white. I couldn’t understand that people were a big, beautiful, and sometimes toxic mess of gray. After a year-long depression, I discovered the Internet, and I wanted to start healing.

    All the articles suggested forgiving, and I’m glad I ignored that specific piece of advice, because it’s much more complicated than that.

    I decided to focus on healing instead, and a crazy spiral started. There were a lot of extremes, a lot of tears, and a lot of perfectionism. But there were also love and joy, friends, and moments of incredible peace.

    Six years and one day later, I woke up and realized I didn’t obsess about my parents anymore. I could see them as people and forgive them for their cruel actions. I could set boundaries without getting subsumed by a tunnel of rage, and after a nasty fight, I could calm down and let go of any hard feelings.

    How on earth did I manage this?

    Accept the pain.

    Trauma runs deep. There are lasting effects, and we’d be fools to not acknowledge them. Even mental health professionals admit that the goal of recovery isn’t to remove the side effects, but to live in the present without being completely overwhelmed by the past and future.

    And for quite a lot of us, it hurts.

    It hurts for the teenage girl who spent her high school years struggling with depression and eating disorders because her family criticized her weight.

    It hurts for the boy who battled anxiety all his life, and his existing condition was only exacerbated by terrifying bullies and an unstable home environment.

    It hurts for me, a girl who lost years of her childhood to anxiety and fear, and never felt safe around her father.

    For a long time, I kept searching for a path where I could back-pedal. Hold up, let’s forget about the trauma and depression, can I just be a normal kid? Visit friends and insult their slime collection, and laugh about memes, and cry and fall in love? Can my diary be filled with boy-crushes and silly things, instead of obsessive questions begging me, why are you so lazy? Why are you so sad, and depressed, and ugly—

    And that brings me to my next point.

    Don’t get trapped in your abuser’s patterns, and don’t give your power to them.

    At first, I tried to fix myself. I filled pages with goals among goals. Get slimmer thighs. Talk less. Stop forgetting stuff. Stop fidgeting. Stop being lazy. Stop being yourself. Stop. Stop. Stop.

    I was a kid. Your entire world, your survival, depends on two very flawed human beings feeding and clothing and raising you. I thought that maybe if I were better, they’d treat me better.

    But eventually, I stumbled upon an article about abuse. There was this checklist activity, and I checked off twenty bullet points. “Congrats! You’re a survivor…”

    I’m not the problem, I thought, staring at the screen. They’re the problem.

    So, I went down a new road. Instead of trying to fix me, I tried to fix them , and when I inevitably failed, I was angry about the awful way they treated me

    My parents used this rage as another bullet in their gun.

    “Have you ever seen such a rude child?” “F*cking insane” “I’m just trying to speak nicely, stop yelling!”

    And they kept shooting at my heart, every time I said stop.

    “Stop commenting about my ugly skin and my weight. Stop saying I’m a failure, that I’ll never succeed in life. Stop rolling your eyes at me every time I make a mistake, or I forget something.”

    Stop, stop, stop.

    But they wouldn’t stop. Trying to fix them was worse than trying to fix me. Why? Because you can’t find closure from other people. You can’t control their actions.

    After the hundredth argument, I was sitting next to my bed. And then it hit me. They would never look me in the eyes and say, “I’m sorry, I’ll try to change.” Every time I tried to talk about my vulnerabilities, they would rip the wounds open and rub salt and lime into the blood. I would never get the closure I needed from them.

    I sat there for a long time. The tears dried on my face. And then I opened my journal, and wrote, “Dear Diary, I’m so tired…”

    Love yourself during the journey.

    I kept postponing my happiness. I kept waiting for two flawed people, who mentally, emotionally, and sometimes physically abused me, to change so I could finally move on. As a result, I never really tried to heal by myself.

    When I opened that journal, I still operated from the belief “I wasn’t good enough” and I needed to be “better.”

    I tried to have the perfect body. I was terrified to eat carbs and treat myself to a nice meal. I tried to be the perfect artist. At one point I loathed all the writing I’d ever made and threw away entire notebooks.

    It took me a long time to realize, there is no “better.” Are there milestones and visible signs of growth? Absolutely. For as long as I’m a human, I’ll struggle. So, I better start loving the imperfect soul I was given or die in the pursuit of “better.”

    This is why I encourage you to start taking care of yourself. Take the pressure of perfection off your shoulders.

    As an abuse victim, I tried to smash myself into a shape without insecurities so I’d never feel sadness, never cry while sitting on the ceramic toilet ever again.

    The journey is long. I’m still walking it. But every day, there are small opportunities to practice self-love and give yourself rest.

    These days, when I make a mistake, I still berate myself, but there’s a new voice, saying, “Don’t call yourself an idiot.”

    It tells me to go outside and get some fresh air when my brain’s being overloaded by my parents’ screaming voices and the TV fuzz. It tells me, “Things are going to be okay” when I’m recovering from a panic attack. It gives me strength when I want to do nothing more than give up.

    There are loads of ways to build a compassionate inner voice. Journaling, saying kind words to yourself in the mirror, complimenting your work before you attack it for its flaws. It’ll take time. It did for me. But slowly, the critical editor quieted, and I felt better about myself.

    Find an identity outside of your pain.

    This is intricately linked to healing. When I forgave my parents, I hadn’t made the conscious choice to forgive. I had made the conscious choice to heal.

    I wrote short stories, painted my first portrait and just delighted in mixing the colors, and I read blogs and books and laughed. Every day, I woke up and just tried. Sometimes I failed and fell into my spiteful patterns. And other times, I succeeded, and caught the cruel thought in my head, and dismissed it.

    I fed stray cats in my neighborhood. I watched Good Omens and read more Terry Prachett books. I took walks and I improved myself, not from a place of inadequacy, but from a place of kindness and self-love.

    I journaled these experiences, and as I read my previous entries, I realized three things.

    1. I’m not just a survivor.

    2. I’m an artist, a sister, a writer. I’m the girl who plucks dandelions from the grass near the lake and throws shells into the water. I’m the person who keeps my cat from eating plastic wrappers, and who helps my brother with his homework and comforts him when he’s crying. I’m the person who doodles millions of feathers, and faces, and earrings in the margins of her history homework.

    3. The abuse has affected me. It is a part of my life. It bleeds into my work and the themes I communicate.

    My talents and intelligence, they weren’t diminished by the mental abuse. I’m still a radiant person worthy of love and appreciation. These should be obvious concepts, but recognizing these things lifted a load off my shoulders—a load of resentment. And it comforted the deep fear I was never going to be healed. That I was always going to be a little broken, a little empty.

    But when I wrote down all of these experiences, I realized there were vast expanses of my soul my parents could never taint. There’s still pain. I think there’s always going to be pain; it’s a simple fact of life. But now I can comfort myself. I can feel those emotions and move on, without attaching the label “broken.”

    Forgive because you need the space.

    There are still scars. There are always going to be scars. There are always going to be hard emotions and terrible situations, because life is a series of peaks and valleys.

    I forgave them because I didn’t want to keep lugging them around, like a suitcase of rotting garbage. But it was the last step of a long, long process, where I repeatedly had to revisit my trauma, accept hard lessons, and integrate them into my sense of self.

    If I had tried to forgive right from the beginning, it would’ve been a stupid move. I would have constantly justified their sh*ity behavior, since “everyone has flaws, you should forgive and forget so you can maintain a relationship.” And I would’ve never discovered the power of my grief and my rage.

    If I had tried to forgive them during the middle, it would’ve been a false emotion. I would’ve clogged my headspace with my abusers, trying to forgive them for the horrendous things they’d done to me, when I should’ve been devoting that energy to healing.

    Right now, after I did the hard work of healing and gaining distance from my pain, I can forgive them. And when I say I forgive them, I mean I no longer obsess over them. I do get angry. But it’s me setting boundaries and protecting myself instead of my wounded soul lashing out. I may cry during a particularly bad attack of self-doubt, but I no longer waste energy trying to blame them.

    Sometimes, I want to hate them uncontrollably again. My father robbed me of my self-confidence, when he should’ve been building me up. I have this subtle, resigned voice that’s convinced I’ll never amount to anything, and it’s a permanent part of my psyche.

    But forgiveness has opened so much space. Space to process anxiety and tears. Space to fill with love and memories of friends. Space to just exist. And going back to my old ways, where I tried to get them to change, get them to realize how much they hurt me, it feels like putting a noose back on my neck.

    So that’s how I forgave. By healing. By loving myself. By learning how to handle my hard emotions and finding an identity outside my pain.

    Don’t rush yourself to forgive. Society says it’s the right thing to do, be the bigger person. But let me tell you that’s bullsh*t. If you’re just out of an abusive relationship, your version of forgiveness might be constantly excusing their toxic behavior and sacrificing your needs. Heal first. Make art, take baby steps to build healthy relationships, and above all, give yourself time.

    And when it’s the right time, forgiveness will come.

  • You Can Forgive Someone and Still Want Nothing to Do with Them

    You Can Forgive Someone and Still Want Nothing to Do with Them

  • When You Lose a Loved One to Suicide: Healing from the Guilt and Trauma

    When You Lose a Loved One to Suicide: Healing from the Guilt and Trauma

    “You will survive, and you will find purpose in the chaos. Moving on doesn’t mean letting go.” ~Mary VanHaute

    I was ten years old when I discovered the truth. He didn’t fall. He wasn’t pushed. It wasn’t an accident.

    He jumped.

    Suicide isn’t a concept easily explained to a six-year-old, much less her younger siblings, so I grew up believing that my father’s drowning was an unfortunate freak accident. It was “just one of those things,” the cruel way of the world, and there was nothing anyone could have done about it.

    This explanation more than satisfied me and, other than a fear of open water and a slight pang of sadness whenever he was mentioned, I suffered no grievous trauma for the rest of my early childhood.

    But at ten years old I learnt the truth—that it wasn’t some divine entity or ill-fated catastrophe that took him from me. He had, in fact, ripped himself from the earth and left everyone he loved behind. Left me behind.

    Was it something I did?

    That’s the first question I asked.

    “Of course not,” my mother said. “He was just sad.”

    The idea that suicide was a simple cure for sadness became the first of many dangerous cognitive distortions I adopted. It would take no more than a dropped ice-cream cone or trivial friendship fall-out for me to declare my sadness overwhelming, to the point where, at the age of eleven, I drank a whole bottle of cough medicine in the belief that it would kill me.

    I was sad, I said, just like him. And if he could do it, why couldn’t I?

    As I grew into my teenage years, the possibility that I was the driving force behind my father’s suicide began to plague me, albeit subconsciously. I reasoned that the bullies at school hated me so, naturally, my father must have hated me too.

    Maybe I wasn’t smart enough or polite enough. Maybe I was unlovable. Maybe everyone I loved would leave me eventually.

    This pattern of thinking would slowly poison my mind, laying the foundations for what would later become borderline personality disorder. I suffered from intense fears of abandonment, codependency, emotional instability, and suicidal ideation, believing that I was an innately horrible person who drove people away.

    I refused to talk about my problems and allowed them to fester, harboring so much anger, guilt, shame, and sadness that eventually it would erupt out of me. It was only in my mid-twenties that I realized just how deeply my father’s suicide had affected me and the course of my whole life.

    I sought help and, slowly, I began to heal.

    Coping with The Stigma

    “Mental illness is nothing to be ashamed of, but stigma and bias shame us all.” ~Bill Clinton.

    Selfishness, cowardice, and damnation are toxic convictions that permeate the topic of suicide, adding to the anger, guilt, shame, and isolation that survivors feel. Growing up, I hid the truth of how my father died under fear of judgment or ridicule, scared that the knowledge would not only tarnish his humanity, but paint me with the same black brush.

    I still remember the words of a girl in high school, “Well, you shouldn’t feel sorry for people who do it, it was their choice after all.”

    Understanding the intricacies of mental illness and just how destructively they can distort the mind allowed me to come to terms with my father’s death. I was able to accept that his suicide was born not out of selfish weakness, but from lengthy suffering and pain, carried out by a mind that was consumed by darkness and void of the ability to think rationally.

    Letting Go of The Need for Answers

    “Why?”

    It is a question that only the person who took their life can answer—but they often leave us without any sense of understanding. In the absence of a detailed note or some definitive explanation we find ourselves trapped in an endless spiral of rumination, speculating, criticizing, and self-blaming, to no avail.

    It becomes a grievance, a desperate yearning for closure that weighs heavily on our hearts. After all, not only did they leave us, but they left us in the dark.

    It is completely natural to want an answer to the question of “why.” We feel as though an answer will provide closure, which in turn will ease our confusion, pain, and guilt. However, because there is usually no singular reason for a suicide attempt, we will always be left with questions that will go unanswered.

    Fully accepting that I was never going to get the answers I craved freed me from the constant rumination of “why.”

    Releasing the Guilt

    To quote Jeffery Jackson, “Human nature subconsciously resists so strongly the idea that we cannot control all the events of our lives that we would rather fault ourselves for a tragic occurrence than accept our inability to prevent it.”

    As survivors, we tend to magnify our contributing role to the suicide, tormenting ourselves with “what if’s,” as though the antidote to their pain lay in our pockets.

    We feel guilty for not seeing the signs, even when there were no signs to see. We feel guilty for not being grateful enough or attentive enough, for not picking up the phone or pushing harder when they said, “I’m fine.” Even as a child I felt an overwhelming guilt, wondering whether I could have prevented my father’s suicide simply by saying please-and-thank-you more often than I had.

    It wasn’t my fault. And it isn’t yours either.

    The truth is that we cannot control the actions of others, nor can we foresee them. Sometimes there are warning signs, sometimes there are not, but it is an act that often defies prediction. It is likely that we did as much as we could with the limited knowledge we had at the time.

    Healing takes acceptance, patience, self-exploration, and a lot of forgiveness as you navigate your way through a whirlwind of emotions. However, there is a light at the end of the tunnel of grief. Although we may never fully move on from the suicide of a loved one, in time we will realize that they were so much more than the way in which they died.

    To quote Darcie Sims, “May love be what you remember most.”

  • The Day I Found Out from the Internet my Estranged Father Had Died

    The Day I Found Out from the Internet my Estranged Father Had Died

    “The scars you can’t see are the hardest to heal.” ~Astrid Alauda

    On a lazy Sunday morning as I lounged in bed, I picked up my phone, scrolled through my news feed on Facebook, and decided to Google my parents’ names.

    I am estranged from my parents, and I have not had much of a relationship with them in over fifteen years; however, there’s a part of me that will always care about them.

    I Googled my mother’s name first and found the usual articles about her dance classes, and her name on church and community bulletin boards. From what I was able to find, it appeared she was doing well.

    Then I went on to Google my father’s name. The first item I came across was an obituary posted on the website of a business that provides cremation and burial services. However, there was no actual obituary, only a few pictures of a much younger man and a profile of a much older man.

    Was this my dad’s obituary? It couldn’t be, could it? In shock, I convinced myself that it wasn’t his obituary, but I could not shake the nagging feeling that it was.

    For the last month I had a feeling that something was off, that something terrible had happened or was going to happen. At the time I attributed these feelings to work stress and the global pandemic.

    When I learned of the death of one of my mentors, who had been like a father to me, I attributed these feelings to this experience. Could I have been wrong?

    Later that morning I decided to search for my dad’s name in the obituary section of the online local paper. His name came up instantly, and much to my horror, this was how I learned about his death.

    Shock washed over me as I read the obituary. He had been dead for a month when I began having those intense, unsettling feelings of foreboding, as if something terrible had happened. It all made sense.

    My full name, which I had legally changed several years ago, was mentioned in the obituary under his surviving relatives, which quickly turned my feelings of shock into rage. Did my family think that I didn’t care about him? Did they think that I didn’t have a right to know about his death?

    I reached out to members of my estranged support group only to learn that many others had found out about a parent’s passing in the same manner.

    Years earlier I had feared that I might find out about one of my parents passing through Google; however, I had dismissed the fear and forced myself to believe that someone in my family would tell me if one of my parents had passed.

    In the days and weeks that followed I continued to Google my dad’s name. As I read tributes written by friends and other family members, I was hit with the realization that I did not know the person they were describing.

    He was described as a “simple religious man who was a welcoming neighbor, a devoted friend, family man, and an excellent father.” To me, however, he was none of those things, and as I continued to read the tributes, sadness and anger washed over me, and I was forced to reflect on the painful relationship that I’d had with him.

    In kindergarten I remember him telling me over and over, “You are as dumb as a post.” Later, after a visit to see his father, he repeated his father’s hurtful words, “You’re a wild hair, and you’re going to come to a sad end.”

    He continued to repeat these words on a regular basis throughout our relationship. Every mistake I made was met with harsh judgements, such as “You will never be good at that, you were just wasting your time, you were never going to amount to anything.”

    When I failed, he rubbed my failures in my face, and to this day failure is one of my greatest fears despite becoming a somewhat successful professional and academic.

    Time and time again, he told me:

    “It would be much easier to care about you if you did well with your studies.”

    “You’re illiterate, you’re a delinquent, you’re a dunce, and you are an embarrassment.”

    “You are never going to amount anything; you are going to end up working a minimum-wage job with angry, stupid people.”

    “You are fat, you are lazy, you are unfocused, and you are wasting your time with that stupid piano; you will never amount anything with that hammering.”

    After I broke up with my first serious boyfriend, my father told me, “What do you expect? A person like you is naturally going to have problems with their relationships, I fully expect you to have serious problems in your marriage as well.”

    When I was preparing to move away to go to university, he told me, “When you flunk out, don’t expect to come back here, just find a minimum-wage job and support yourself.”

    It’s taken me years to realize that comments like these are verbal abuse!

    Verbal abuse can be disguised in the form of a parent insulting a child to do better, to push themselves to be more, to lose weight, or enter a particular field. It can be disguised as caring or wanting to push someone to be a better version of themselves. Regardless of the parent’s motive, insults and put-downs are, in fact, verbal abuse, and no number of justifications can change this.

    Verbal abuse can have devastating effects on a child’s life, and these effects can be felt well into adulthood.

    Throughout my childhood and into my teens, my parents’ abusive comments caused me to believe that no one would want me and that I was not good enough for anyone. This limiting belief inhibited my ability to form friendships. As a result, I spent much of my childhood and my teens alone, playing the piano or spending time with my pets.

    The friendships that I did form were often one-sided because I made it very easy for people to take advantage of me, because I believed that I had to give and give in order to be worthy of the friendship.

    I also feared failure more than anything else and became very anxious in any environment where I might fail. This inhibited me from trying new things, and I only engaged in activities I knew I was good at.

    It was not until my mid-teens that I met a mentor who not only saw my work but loved me and nurtured me as if I was his own daughter. For the very first time in my life, I had an adult to support me apart from my grandmother and my grandfather, who believed in me and reminded me every day of my value and my abilities.

    “You are good, you are smart and highly intelligent, you’re capable of doing anything you set your sights on,” he would tell me. At first, I did not believe him, but in time I slowly began to see myself through his eyes.

    He talked to me the way a loving parent would have. When I failed, he didn’t make fun of me; instead, he encouraged me to reflect on what I’d learned from the experience and how I could do better in the future.

    He instilled in me the foundation of shaky self-confidence that enabled me to have the courage to apply to university. Without this relationship, I would likely not be where I am today because I would not have had the courage to break free from the verbally abusive narrative my parents had taught me to believe, or to challenge this narrative.

    As I was reading attributes about my father in tributes from people who knew him, I was filled with a sense of longing. Had my dad been the man who was described in those tributes we could have had a healthy relationship, and I would not have had to make the painful decision to cut him out of my life.

    At the same time, these tributes forced me to accept that we are many things to different people. To some people we are a wonderful friend, a kind neighbor, and a loving parent, but to others we are a rude jerk, a self-centered person, and verbally abusive or neglectful parent. Each one of us has the right to remember the dead as they experienced them and honor their memory as we see fit.

    Years after cutting my parents out of my life I silently forgave them for the hurt they had caused me, and I worked to let go of the pain from the past. However, at times, I found myself fantasizing about what a healthy adult relationship could look like with my father.

    I imagined mutually respectful philosophical discussions, long walks, trips to far off places, and most importantly, being seen not as an unlovable failure, but as a successful adult worthy of love and acceptance.

    My last conversation with my father before my grandmother had passed away was positive, which only fueled these fantasies. Yet in these fits of fantasy, I was forced to accept my father for who he was and acknowledge the painful fact that some people are just not capable being who we need them to be.

    We can choose to plead for a relationship that will never be, or for the person to be something they are not, or we can choose to accept them as they are and accept ourselves in spite of their abuse. But this means we must let go and accept that the future holds time we can never have together.

  • The Magic of Rewriting Our Most Painful Stories

    The Magic of Rewriting Our Most Painful Stories

    “When you bring peace to your past, you can move forward to your future.” ~Unknown

    It amazes me how things that happen in our childhood can greatly impact our adult lives. I learned the hard way that I was living my life with a deep wound in my heart.

    My father was a very strict man with a temper when I was little, starting when I was around seven years old.

    He had a way of making me feel like all my efforts were not enough. If I scored an 8 in a math exam, he would say, “Why 8 and not 10?” and then punish me. It was a time when some parents thought that beating their children was a way to “put them in place” and teach them a lesson. All this taught me, though, was that I was a disappointment.

    His favorite phrase was “You will never be better than me.”

    As I got older, his temper cooled down a bit, but one thing didn’t change: his painful remarks. “At your age, I was already married, had a house, a car, two daughters, and a piece of land… what have YOU accomplished? See? You will never surpass me.”

    It was his way of “inspiring me” to do better with my life, but it had the opposite effect on me. It was slowly killing my self-esteem.

    When my father passed away, I was seven-year-old Cerise all over again. At the funeral, I asked him, “Daddy, did I finally make you proud? Did I do good with my life?”

    This was the trigger that made me rethink what I was doing with my life. I had to stop for a moment to look at the past. This can be very difficult to do, but sometimes we need to face those painful events in order to understand the nature of our poor decisions and behavior.

    It helped me realize that, unconsciously, I was looking for my father’s approval in the guys I dated. And you know what? It got me nothing but disappointment and heartache, because I was looking for something that they couldn’t give me.

    Inside, I was still that little girl looking for her father’s love.

    When you are a child, you are considered a victim, but when you are a grown up, it is your duty to heal from what was done to you. You just can’t go through life feeling sorry for yourself and complaining about the hand you were dealt. This just keeps you stuck in a sad, joyless life and jeopardizes your relationships.

    In my case, I had to give that little girl the love she so needed in order to stop feeling lonely and stop making the same mistakes.

    The only approval that I needed was my own! When I realized that, I started learning to love myself—regardless of my accomplishments—and I also developed compassion toward my father because I recognized that he was raised the same way he raised me.

    He probably also felt he needed to be the best at everything he did in order to win his parents’ approval. And maybe he thought if I wasn’t the best at everything I did I would never be valued or loved by anyone else.

    Understanding this enabled me to forgive him, break the cycle, and finally let him go.

    So, what makes us slaves to anger, resentment, and abandonment issues? I think it’s the way we keep telling the story in our heads, and this is something that we can transform.

    Don’t get me wrong, I am not suggesting we sweep things under the rug and pretend like nothing happened. We cannot change the past, and certainly we cannot turn a blind eye to it, but we can modify the way we retell the story to ourselves, and this can be a step toward inner healing.

    I decided to give the difficult parts of my childhood experience another meaning. I edited the way I tell myself the story, and this is how it sounds now:

    “My father was a strict man because he wanted me to succeed in life. He taught me to give my best in every task assigned to me; he didn’t make things easier for me because he wanted me to become strong in character and to find a solution in every situation. Daddy constantly challenged me because he wanted me to develop my potential to the fullest so I could face life and its difficulties.

    I’m certain that when my father departed from this world, he did it in peace knowing that he left behind a strong and brave daughter.”

    This is now the story of my childhood, and you know what? I think I like this version better! It’s helped me close the wound I had in my heart. My childhood left a scar, but it’s not hurting anymore.

    My gift to you today is this: Close your eyes and picture a pencil. Do you know why a pencil has an eraser? To remove the things we don’t like, giving us the freedom to rewrite them into something that we feel more comfortable with.

    You can’t change the facts from your past, but you can change how you interpret them, so feel rewrite as much as you need.

    Your wounds will hurt a lot less when you broaden your perspective, try to understand the people who hurt you, and change the meaning of what you’ve been through.

  • If You’re in a Painful Relationship and Considering Estrangement…

    If You’re in a Painful Relationship and Considering Estrangement…

    “I understand the life around me better, not from love, which everyone acknowledges to be a great teacher, but from estrangement, to which nobody has attributed the power of reinforcing insight.” ~Nirad C. Chaudhuri

    I was brought up to understand that family is family.  So I have naturally given great weight to the importance of family bonds. However, what happens when a familial bond breaks? Do you commit yourself to holding on despite the cost, or do you acknowledge the damage and take the necessary steps to sever the tie?

    Personally, I sit somewhere in the middle. Any important relationship deserves an extended amount of effort, patience, understanding, and forgiveness in rebuilding. However, you can only do so much, and there comes a point when it could be in everyone’s best interests to walk away.

    I speak from personal experience. I’ve been estranged twice in my lifetime. Once from my father, which was my choice, and the other time from my sibling, who ultimately made the decision to walk away; I guess I just dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s on it.

    Let me be clear, neither estrangement was a wonderful experience. The process of severing ties is heartbreaking, regardless of the situation that led to the estrangement. It hurts when you feel you’ve been rejected, and it hurts when you know you’re rejecting someone.

    But when it’s the right decision for you, and once the hurt abates somewhat, there is a sense of relief. Although you may never feel happy about it, you’ll feel happier overall for the steps you took in protecting yourself and your well-being.

    As with all life events there is opportunity to learn and reflect…

    In hindsight, there are certain actions I should have taken before the relationships ended, especially when it came to my sibling. Perhaps taking these actions could have prevented the outcome? Who knows? Regardless, these behaviors would certainly have helped me heal quicker even if the end was inevitable.

    If you find yourself struggling in a relationship with a family member—or any type of relationship for that matter—these five suggested actions can help.

    1. Be yourself.

    This is what I kick myself the most about when I think about my estrangement from my sibling. I was never myself. I was always trying to impress them and seek their approval.

    You see, my sibling was a lot older than me; by the time I was two they had already left home. Visits were few and far between, and when my sibling married, there were tensions between my family and their spouse.

    Everything had to be done to keep them happy. We had to tread on eggshells around them to maintain the relationship, and that stuck with me well into adulthood. I believed If I stepped out of line then the relationship would end. So I said what I thought they wanted to hear and acted in the way I felt I needed to act.

    This led to a lot of resentment on my part. No matter how hard I tried, I never felt fully accepted.

    As I saw this would soon impact my own children, I knew things had to change.

    I stopped kowtowing, and within a year they had broken away, communication basically stopped. The hardest thing was knowing that all those years I had presented an unauthentic version of me. I felt I had let myself down. What might have happened if I had just been myself?

    It can be challenging to be yourself when it’s a family member you want to please, but you can’t let the labels they place on you define you. Be who you really are. Yes, you might be rejected, but being someone you’re not is exhausting and likely to lead to more unhappiness. You’re the one who has to live with yourself after all—it’s better to love the person you are!

    If I had my time again, I would just be me, and I encourage everyone to adopt this approach too.

    2. Communicate.

    Relationships all too easily break down when there is a lack of communication. Good communication builds your connection, helps you deal with potential issues early, and allows both parties to have their needs met.

    Too often, we end up shouting, judging, criticizing, or not communicating at all. This isn’t a recipe for a healthy relationship.

    In his book Non-violent Communication, Marshall Rosenberg sets out a framework he created which allows people to express their needs and make requests without any negative behaviors. Using this method can make it easier to ask for what you want, and it also gives you a better chance of actually getting it. It’s a technique I wish I had known a lot earlier, but one that I use now to great effect.

    It’s a four-step process:

    Convert judgements to observations.

    So rather than saying, “You never listen to me” (quite an emotionally charged statement), you would say, “I see you checking your phone when I try to talk to you,” which is more factual and less likely to trigger a defensive response.

    Say how you feel.

    Express how you’re feeling without blame or judgment. Instead of saying, “I really needed you and you weren’t there,” express your feelings like this: “I was feeling really alone.” This is a powerful way of expressing ourselves and taking ownership of our feelings.

    State your needs as they relate to you and your values.

    So rather than saying, “You need to change how you treat me,” you would say, “I have a need to be respected as a human being.”

    Ask for what you want.

    Start with “Would you be willing/like to…?” For example, “Would you be willing to put your phone down when we have a conversation?” Framing your request in this way gives the other person the freedom to say no, meaning they don’t feel forced or pressured and in turn more likely to say yes.

    Here’s an example of the four-step process all put together:

    “I see you checking your phone when I try to talk to you. I feel frustrated. I value being listened to. Would you be willing to put down your phone when we have a conversation?”

    3. Stand strong (even when you’re scared).

    As a recovering people-pleaser, I used to shy away from standing up for myself. I would choose to agree rather than confront. Life was more peaceful when I just smiled and nodded. But this is not a healthy strategy.

    With my father, I needed him to acknowledge and take responsibility for his actions. With each attempt to broach the subject of his behavior toward my mother and me, there would be denial, false accusations, and even aggression. Fear would make me back down.

    But you have to stand strong, even when you’re scared. If an issue is important to you, don’t allow for it to be brushed under the carpet to fester. Facing issues head on allows you the opportunity to resolve them. It provides you (and them) with clear boundaries and makes repeat behaviors less likely.

    4. Accept your part.

    Nobody is perfect. Relationships are two-person territory. It would be so easy for me to look back and put everything on my sibling or on my father, but that would be inaccurate. I have to accept my share of accountability too. We all do.

    I should have spoken up. I should have acted differently in certain circumstances. I should have been honest about how I was feeling. People aren’t mind readers after all. This isn’t about accepting all of the blame; it’s just about acknowledging your part. It helps you grow as a person.

    5. Forgive and let go.

    Firstly, you need to forgive yourself. You’re a human being after all, we all make mistakes. Show yourself the same compassion you readily show to others.

    Secondly, when you’ve had time (which may include therapy) and feel capable, start to forgive the person, even if you’re now estranged. This doesn’t mean you have to forget what happened but more allow the anger, resentment, or any other emotions that don’t serve you to be lifted from your heart.

    I find writing a gratitude letter (listing what you found good about them and your time together, plus anything you’re grateful to them for) really helpful in the process of forgiving and letting go. It helps to refocus on the good side of the person (and your relationship) rather than the negative.

    Remember, we feel hurt because we loved and cared deeply, two important components of a happy life. Letting go allows us to move forward to what is right for us. Use what happened to personally grow and build a better life.

    Every life event, good or bad, has something to teach us…

    I’ve grown so much from my own experiences and use those learnings to positively affect all the other relationships in my life. There is always hope for reconciliation, but for now, I’m at peace with where I’m at, and I hope you will be too.

  • How I Forgave When Life Felt Painful and Unfair

    How I Forgave When Life Felt Painful and Unfair

    “Forgiving someone doesn’t mean that their behavior was ‘OK.’ What it does mean is that we’re ready to move on. To release the heavy weight. To shape our own life, on our terms, without any unnecessary burdens. Forgiveness is pure freedom—and forgiveness is a choice.” ~Dr. Suzanne Gelb

    It happened, again.

    I was sitting opposite one of my closest family members. The irritation coming from me could almost be felt and touched in the room. One comment from him and boom, it was like pouring gasoline on a fire. I couldn’t help myself, I used to get so upset in these situations that I could barely manage them.

    How could this happen? I was a grownup now. Also, I had worked on forgiving this person and moving past this. But then, why was I always falling back into old patterns?

    Have you ever had one (or even several) of these moments? An infected relationship with a close family member that just can’t seem to heal? And you beat yourself up for not being able to resist getting into a fight?

    Let me share my story. One of the closest people in my life when I was growing up was an alcoholic. That has been extremely painful. My childhood was amazing in many ways, but the fact that this person drank too much made the shiny surface fade.

    Due to this, I’ve felt like a victim my whole life. Why did this happen to me? What did I do to deserve growing up with an alcoholic? Why did I have to battle embarrassment and shame because of something he did? 

    It all seemed so unfair.

    During my childhood it was the same routine every evening: looking at the wine bottle that slowly but surely got more and more empty. Going to bed, carefully listening to sounds; was there an argument starting or not? Will there be yelling and screaming? Will I be able to sleep the whole night through?

    I had so much resentment towards him. How could he do this to me and the rest of my family? His drinking and behavior triggered me in so many ways, and most of the time I felt disconnected, irritated and separated from him.

    I wanted to be able to forgive and forget, and to move on, but how?

    I tried to forgive him, believe me, I really tried. But at the end of the day, nothing changed. The anger, resentment, and sense of separation was still there.

    But then one day something unexpected happened. I suddenly shifted my approach to forgiveness, and it was unlike anything I had done before. Finally, I set myself free. (I’ll explain soon how I did that).

    What I realized was this: a shift within me, not him, had to take place. This shift was the key to my forgiveness, and in the below steps I’ll take you through how I did it.

    1. I stopped thinking and started feeling.

    I used to battle with the situation from my head. I tried to “trick” my mind to forgive and forget. But this strategy only kept me further from the root cause, and thus further away from liberation.

    Eventually, I realized that I had to go deeper, to feel the hidden emotions underneath it all. I had spent so many years believing that I was angry, frustrated, and upset. My go-to state with him was attack, hatred, and resentment.

    But underneath those emotions were the true feelings that I had not been able nor willing to feel. What I really felt was disappointment, hurt, and rejection.

    Turns out it was easier to feel hatred and irritation than rejection and unworthiness. What I know today is that I couldn’t heal the situation from a place of anger and blame. I could only heal it by connecting to those deep and painful emotions that were hiding underneath.

    At the time, I promised myself never to be vulnerable again. Unknowingly, at that point in time, I signed a lifelong contract of suffering. I built a thick wall around myself in order to protect myself. A wall between me and my family member (and eventually between me and other men).

    But to forgive, I had to open up to vulnerability again. That was the door opener to true forgiveness. It is scary to go there, I know. But this is where the liberation lies. Go there, go to where it hurts the most and let these feelings come to greet you.

    2. I connected with my younger and wounded self.

    In the process of forgiving, one clear memory came back to me. It was the first time that I met him drunk and upset. I was fourteen years old and up until that point I had felt unconditionally loved. That night he said something that turned everything around. This was the painful night that changed how I viewed myself and our relationship.

    Previously, I had been aware of this memory, but not willing to connect to my younger self. I had not been willing to hear her out. I imagined my fourteen-year-old self in my mind. I imagined her talking to me, telling her side of the story.

    She put into words what I had truly felt that evening. All the suffering, feelings of rejection and unworthiness. Tears started pouring down my cheeks. I cried so hard. So much suffocated longing to feel love and connection revealed itself.

    By listening to her and welcoming the painful emotions something powerful happened – I reclaimed my vulnerability.

    Often, we fight so hard to keep ourselves from feeling the most painful emotions. But the fact is that they are the doorway to our liberation. We have to feel them to release them. In my experience, ignoring and pushing away painful feelings only leads to them controlling you even more. Only when you allow yourself to feel them are you able to set yourself free.

    3. I realized everyone acts to the best of their ability.

    I used to think this person did this because he was ignorant, insensitive, and selfish. But I couldn’t have been further from the truth. What I realized was that he acted to the best of his ability. I also realize that he, in turn, has his own trauma, tragic memories, and difficulties in life.

    It hit me that I would have acted in the exact same way if I had his upbringing (his parents, experiences, and trauma etc). And that shift made it so much easier to forgive him. No one is perfect and neither am I. He did the best he could.

    This is when I replaced anger with compassion. A wave a love washed over me, literally entering every cell of my body. In a moment I realized that this person had always loved me, and still does to this day.

    This was when my triggers vanished. Left was love, empathy, and compassion.

    This person isn’t perfect, and neither am I. I love my children more than anything in the world, but I also mess up. I’m also human. And not only does that insight make it easier for me to connect to my family member, but also to myself. I’m less harsh and judging of myself today than before thanks to that realization.

    4. Forgiveness doesn’t mean acceptance of bad behavior.

    To me, the word forgiveness used to feel foreign. As something that was given to the perpetrator in order to create peace of mind for that person. I resented the word and the meaning of it.

    But forgiveness is not about accepting or approving bad behavior. I can still forgive and objectively oppose certain behaviors. To me, forgiveness didn’t include approval of my family member’s destructive drinking behavior. Instead, forgiveness was an act of service to myself.

    I learned that forgiveness is, in a positive way, an act of egoism. You forgive to set yourself free from chains of suffering and from the past. Years later I told him because I wanted to give him the gift of my forgiveness. But it was never a necessity. It’s now been four years and our relationship is better than ever before.

    Make sure that you forgive, not to help someone else, but to help yourself. Give yourself the gift of letting go so that you can move into the future you desire.

    Set Yourself Up for True Liberation

    Living a life where you hold on to resentment, anger, and frustration toward someone is painful. Anger, bitterness, and resentment doesn’t change the past; it keeps you stuck in it.

    You deserve better. You deserve to free yourself from grudges and painful feelings. Use this article as your guide to move into forgiveness. Start with one of the points above and follow the steps outlined. Don’t force or beat yourself up for not being able to forgive or heal straight away. Just by reading this article, you have taken a step in the right direction and have faith that your timing will be perfect for you.

    Remember to feel, not to think, your way to forgiveness. Gather courage to go deeper, to feel the hidden emotions underneath it all. And most of all: remind yourself that this is something you’re doing for yourself, not for anyone else.

    Our traumas and difficulties in life can leave us feeling hopeless, resentful, and like a victim. They can be our excuse to stay stuck and not create the life we desire. Or the painful experiences in life can be your greatest gift. By learning to forgive someone once and for all, you tap into the blessings in disguise that come with any problem.

    Perhaps, thanks to your experience, you learned to tune up your emotional intelligence, empathy, and compassion. In short, make sure that your greatest problem becomes your greatest gift.