when i confused understanding with excusing

There was someone in my life that I cared about a lot. They were someone that I wanted to stay forever so I spent a lot of time trying to understand them. But I spent so much time trying to understand them and why they hurt me that I forgot to ask myself why I was allowing them to hurt me.

I think a lot of people think of empathy as a gift. You're able to understand people, notice when something is wrong with someone, and feel things that other people may overlook. You become the person that people know will understand. People feel comfortable talking to you about their problems because they know you will always work hard to understand.

But the problem with this is that when you're listening to everyone else, your own voice becomes a lot smaller.

I fell into this trap. When someone's energy is off, I immediately notice it. When someone is quieter than usual, I notice it.

And in midst of all of this, your own feelings get tossed aside.

It wasn't that I was ignoring the pain they were causing me. I saw what was happening, I felt it. I knew what he was doing was hurting me.

But my mind immediately moved to understanding.

Maybe they're acting this way because this is the way they were taught. Maybe they're acting this way because of what they've been through. Maybe he's acting this way because he's scared. Maybe he's acting this way because he's hurting too. Maybe he's acting this way because he doesn't know how else to act. Maybe if I just understand enough, I can be patient. And maybe if I'm patient, things will change.

And eventually, his explanation to his behavior became more important than my hurt and experiences.

i became obsessed with the "why"

Being someone who has gone through a lot, I've always spent time trying to understand why. As someone who understands that my past has caused me to hurt others, I try to understand when other people hurt me. I spent a lot of time living like that and I never really saw any reason not to.

So with him I tried so hard to understand because I knew he was in pain. I knew he had gone through a lot too. And I know he kept it bottled up.

Instead of just thinking, "what he did hurt me," I started to think, "why did he do this?"

I would think of his past and find reasonings behind his behavior. And eventually, it became easy to forgive him for everything. It wasn't that what they did to me stopped hurting, it's that I got to such a deep point of understanding their past that I was making excuses for how it made me feel.

When you learn so much about someone's past, it can make their behavior feel less intentional and more instinctual. And even though the pain you feel is still there, it's hard to hate someone when you believe that they just didn't know any better.

his pain became bigger than mine

I understood him so much. I could separate the anger he felt towards me from the anger he felt towards his past. I could tell when it was me he was upset with versus people in his past he was upset at. I understood what his fears were. I saw the way he defended himself. I saw how much he was protecting his heart.

I kept looking at the little boy he used to be instead of the person standing in front of me.

My pain no longer mattered because his pain felt so understandable.

every hurt came with an explanation

Any situation we went through started to follow a pattern.

He hurt me → I tried to understand why → I found a reason → I forgave him → It happened again → I repeated the cycle.

The problem wasn't understanding. It's okay to understand someone and realize that their pain may have caused them to act a certain way. The problem was that understanding became the end of the conversation instead of the beginning of accountability.

Every time something hurt me, I became his defense attorney instead of my own.

i wasn't perfect either

I want to make it clear that I also caused a lot of pain. I'm not going into this believing that I was the victim and they were the villian. I played my own part in hurting them.

I hurt them. I said things I didn't mean. I ignored how my behaviors hurt them. I put my own wants above their needs. I became defensive when they came to me about their pains.

I acknowledge that there are many things I could have done differently too.

I apologized. I tried to explain myself. I tried to understand what it was that hurt him. I tried to acknowledge that even though my actions came from a place of hurt that it still didn't erase the pain I caused them.

Maybe that's part of why it became to muddled for me. I knew I wasn't perfect. I knew that I had done stuff too that hurt them. And within all of that, it became incredibly easy to convince myself that I was the reason for all of the issues between the two of us. Every time I remembered something I did wrong, I used it as evidence that maybe I didn't have the right to be upset or be hurt by them. And slowly over time, I became silent to my pain when it came to them. And they used that as evidence that they didn't do anything wrong to hurt me.

Everything started to seem as if it was all my fault and because I understood them, I started to blame myself too.

And I think the biggest problem was I didn't demand the same accountability from them because I kept my pain hidden.

When they hurt me, my first reaction wasn't to ask him to explain or apologize, but instead my first reaction was to understand why he did it by looking into his past.

I wish I had voocalized my pain too. I think what I wanted in the end was to feel like my pain deserved the same curiosity and compassion that his meant to me.

Maybe this is the danger of being empathetic. I became so good at explaining his behaviors that I stopped requiring accountability of it. So not only was I holding onto my pain, I was also holding onto his.

Looking back, I don't regret understanding him.

My mistake wasn't understanding, it was believing that because I understood the why that it didn't matter than I had been hurt.

But truly, I think I deserved to be understood too.

what empathy taught me the hard way

I think the lesson to be learned from this is that sometimes we confuse understanding as forgiveness.

You can understand and have compassion for someone's behavior. But you can also require them to take responsibility for it. You don't need to use their past to invalidate your present.

Understanding someone isn't the same as accepting their behaviors. Compassion isn't the same as forgiveness. Someone's trauma doesn't excuse how they hurt you. It can explain why they did it without intent, but it can't be the excuse.

ending

I really wish I had given myself more empathy while this was all happening. Sometimes I wonder, if I had just told them how much pain they were causing me, would things have turned out differently? Instead of forgiving them constantly, would be telling them how I felt have changed how they behaved?

Truthfully, I'll never know and truthfully, I don't think that me knowing all of this would have changed everything. I was too scared to lose them. Even if I did tell them my pain, it didn't feel like they were trying to understand me. I could be in the same situation with all this knowledge but it wouldn't change a thing because they're still the same person.

I really wish they had understood me at least a little. I think things really could have been so different if I had just received a percentage of the same understanding.