Forgiveness and Love

Forgiveness and love are complicated things. I would say they are intricately linked in ways I can’t even begin to fathom and find infinitely painful to examine at present. But like a true sadist I find that I can’t distract myself from its topic. I can’t leave this one alone; indeed I haven’t been able to leave this one alone to heal for a long time. Just when it seems that wounds are healing over, renewing themselves and becoming something other than gaping and all encompassing, I start ‘picking’ at it, re-examining it and fussing over it. I want to know why it happened, how it happened. Essentially it comes down to a need to know what I did wrong in order to end up with it in the first place.

Why is it that I find it easier to forgive family members who have hurt me than I do others? Perhaps it has everything to do with my mum’s words “You don’t hurt you sister, you love her” that I seem to unstintingly apply that mantra to most – but not all - things in my life.

Perhaps I forgive family that much quicker (although I can’t say it is ever easier) because I have to love them. You can do nothing but love them. There is, with family, a tie which can’t (not ever really) be severed. They are, at least in theory and are meant to be, the one constant thing in your life. No matter what you do they are meant to love you and to forgive you and vice versa. The reality is that it is never that easy.

The question I find myself wrestling with, and for some time now, is how you let go of hurt and love someone again? How do you get back to that place of trust and love that you were in before with them? What do you do if for so long it has been doubted that you can or will? How do you get back to looking at them with the kind of love that you did before?

The process of self-analysis is often misleading. I’ve found through personal experience that looking closely at things more often than not presents a distorted picture, distorted because my emotions at the time are undeniably so intimately connected and bound up in things that I’m not able to see clearly, I’m not able to be reasonable. I panic. My fears take over and I’m lost. Doubt insidiously works its way in to the chinks of my self-analysis and becomes all pervading. So, I ask, doubt aside, how do you recover from the kind of hurt that has wreaked a kind of devastation that has marked all other aspects of your life? How do you deal with the kind of hurt that has tainted and tarnished what feels like everything with such sadness you feel you might not ever smile (the kind that reaches and touches you inside) again? How do you heal from such a hurt? How do you stop the ashes of its rupture from influencing everything else? How do you look to the future knowing it is going to happen again and accept it willingly in the name of love? Is such a thing possible?

I look down the road of my future and I know, without really knowing how, that its going to happen again. It’s happened before, I’ve been here before. And while it is a comfort to know that I got over it, its a small comfort. Last time it didn’t take this long to work out, nor did it hurt this much and I can’t say that I knew then that it would something I would face again. I do take a measure of comfort in knowing I’ve begun the healing process but it all still hurts monstrously. Some days it is still so unbearable. It is crippling and debilitating in ways that I can’t describe, in a way that renders me speechless beyond tears.

No one ever anticipates just how devastating it can be to need someone, to really need them in ways that you’ve never experienced before, and to be let down. Reaching out to someone when you are at your most vulnerable, when you are crippled by the need for support and understanding, to find yourself totally alone is crushing. It isn’t just about trust, it isn’t just about disappointment, or hurt, or confusion, or fear, or even anger if you can muster your wits enough to experience that one. It’s all of those things, but its being assailed and assaulted by ALL of them at one and the same time. There’s no drawing your breath, there’s no gathering yourself together, there’s no picking yourself up off the floor. There’s nothing, just an aching and raw need to slip over the edge into oblivion. There is only the desire to freefall into its embrace.

I fell and there was no one there to catch me. The people I needed to be there for me wasn’t. I don’t need people very often – experience has taught me it is best not to – but every once in a while my guard comes down and I do. I allow myself to. It hurt. Really hurt. There wasn’t any anger about being let down, not then and not even now really. Just the hurt, isolated and alone like me. The hurt didn’t come from finding out that the person wasn’t the person that I thought they were - I didn’t have my wits about me enough to think that profoundl. It was more basic, more primal than that. It was about feeling vulnerable, feeling like a child and feeling abandoned.

I know the intent to hurt me was never there. It wasn’t something they consciously decided to do, but that doesn’t lessen the pain or the hurt. It doesn’t stop me pushing them away because right now I can’t love them the way I should no matter how much I want to. I want to be able to feel about them they way that I used to. I want to be able to look at them and to see their flaws without feeling the hurt and sadness that comes along with them. I want for them to be what they always were for me; everything.

How do you get back or move on so you can find that place again?

Oversensitive

Staring at this page it has occurred to me that I’ve been attempting to keep it blank, to stem my thoughts and feelings – like that was ever going to be feasible, got to love hindsight. I’ve been hiding, or at least attempting to at any rate, from all the things that are worrying me in the vain hope that they would (miraculously) resolve themselves without any input from me. But I didn’t come here to talk of hiding, I’m thinking about sensitivity. At what point does being a sensitive person become being an over sensitive one with poor self-esteem? What comes first – the low self esteem or the being over sensitive? And more to the point who decides which one you are and why do they get to be the one to decide?

Taking time to think about it, I’m now pondering the possibility whether all this doesn’t really come down to a battle for who is right and who is wrong? I’m reasonable enough (at the present moment) to see that when I’m being unreasonable there is always a right and a wrong. Hhm food for thought.

I can readily admit that I am a sensitive person, especially when it comes to my loved ones – they always know precisely what to say to hurt me while I try not to show it – not much of a surprise. Let’s see... what to unpack first why loved ones always hurt you more than anyone else or why I feel the need to hide it. Well, neither one is at the heart of my thoughts ... in a true narcissistic fashion I’m thinking just about myself. I’m looking at myself, looking at how I respond to different things and different people and I’ve discovered my world is an internal world because that is where everything happens for me. Insightful but not particularly helpful at this stage in figuring out when I went from a sensitive person to an over sensitive person. What does it say that I feel this migration from one thing to another as a loss? What does it say that I feel that it is a negative thing?

I don’t know when it happened but some time over the last couple of years I made the transition from a sensitive person to an oversensitive one. I went from a person who was able to utilise the anger she felt when I someone said something hurtful to her to get over it, to a person that feels constantly criticised and as though I am being found lacking in some way.

In my lifetime I haven’t often (can’t say never because there have been a few occasions that I have verbally lashed out) responded in kind when I’ve been ... how to should I phrase this... character assassinated (it’ll do for the time being). It was usually my older sister, the middle one, saying the hurtful things to me and mum had always said “You don’t hurt your sister, you’re meant to love her” Arguably it would seem I was either the only one listening to her when she said such things or my sister just didn’t think they applied to her, which would after a fashion make those things one and the same thing – you make up you’re own mind.

Basically I’ve gone from a person who would only take so much from anyone before I’d retaliate to someone who still doesn’t show how hurt she is but feels it keenly, more keenly than I’ve ever done before and never retaliates now. I no longer stand up for myself; I don’t see the point because it feels like a futile exercise.

I don’t like being called oversensitive (ironically it hurts and feels belittling) it makes me angry and defensive. It makes me feel like whoever is calling me it is doing so deliberately; because they know it is going to hurt me and they know it is going to make me defensive. It feels dismissive and reductive; like the person is just dismissing everything said, reducing it down and therefore diminishing the validity of what has been said. It feels like the equivalent of a person shouting louder than you just so their voice will drown out yours. And yes it hurts. It hurts that they aren’t prepared to even go through the motions of listening, it hurts that they aren’t sympathetic. Worse it makes me feel angry that they are, in part, right, I am being oversensitive and they have no idea how I wish this was otherwise. I can admit they are right because surely if it wasn’t then it wouldn’t hurt as much as it did when they said it?

Having recently (more than once) been told I am being oversensitive has made me think about all of this. It has made me wonder when I made the transition and how I get back. I’m not foolish enough to believe that there can be a complete going back, but I do believe a measure of it can be achieved and I want it. I want to go back to being sensitive but balanced, to feeling anger and momentary retaliation before I let it all go. I don’t want to hang on to every hurt and mis-justice the way that I seem to be doing now. I don’t know if that is possible and if it is how I achieve that.

So, once again, I’m stuck in this no man’s land of half realisations, its the proverbial two steps forward one step back.