when someone becomes the face of your pain

I hate you.

But do I really? Do I hate you or do I hate what you represent in my head?

Sometimes you can hate someone and still know that they aren't responsible for everything that happened. You can hate the person and still know it's not actually them you hate, just what their presence represents. You can hate someone while knowing it was a whole other person's decisions that played a role in creating the situation. You can look at someone and feel an overwhelming amount of resentment while also knowing that the story is so much bigger than just them.

That's what makes this kind of anger so confusing.

The person you hate isn't always the person who hurt you. Sometimes, they are simply the person who became attached to the hurt.

And that distinction is incredibly difficult to make when you're living inside the emotions of it.

when someone's existence becomes connected to your pain

There was once a point where I started to associate someone with everything that was going wrong. It wasn't because they had personally come into my life and intentionally destroyed it. They didn't say anything cruel to me.

But their existence still hurt me because it became tied to a series of situations that hurt me deeply and still continue to.

Their presence became connected to secrets. Their presence became connected to things being hidden from me. Their presence became connected to conversations I didn't know were happening and decisions I didn't understand.

And eventually through all the fear and the uncertainty, I stopped seeing them person as just a person.

I started seeing them as the symbol of all the pain I was going through. Everything became their fault.

but they weren't actually the problem

This part that took me a really long time to understand and to come to terms with. And truth be told I still struggle with my undeserved hate towards this person.

Someone can be your entire source of anger without actually being the person you're truly angry at. Someone can be the source of all your pain without actually being the person responsible for causing you that pain.

This person didn't do anything to me, but they unintentionally created situations where someone else could hurt me. And instead of seeing it as only the second person's fault, it was easier to just blame the presence of the first person. Sometimes the anger and pain blind you to where the true source of pain leads to.

You don't think about who really made the choices. You don't think about who it was that lied to you. You don't think about who it was that chose not to communicate honestly and openly.

You just see the person who became associated with it. You see this person as the problem because the problem did not exist until they joined the picture.

And then you think that one sentence that begins all the hatred, "if they weren't here, none of this would have ever happened."

And maybe that's true in a very complicated sense. Maybe without their presence the person who hurt you would never be in the position to be able to hurt you.

But, it does not make this person's presence responsible for every choice that follows their existence, especially choices that they didn't make.

anger looks for somewhere to go

One of the most difficult emotions to deal with when hurt is the anger. The boiling white rage that causes you to see nothing but accusations.

Anger needs somewhere to go.

When you get hurt it makes it easier to have someone to blame. You want to find a clear villian because it makes the pain and anger easier to process. You can look at the person and say, that's the reason this happened.

But it's not fair to this person is it. You throw all your anger to this person's presence and not a single person can explain why, not even yourself. You just know that you're hurting and you know that you're angry.

i started seeing danger where there was only association

This is what's scary about misplaced anger. Your brain doesn't tend to remember every single detail of what actually happened. Sometimes the only thing it can remember is how you felt.

And what I felt was unsafe, betrayed, scared, confused, tossed aside, and excluded. When you feel like this, your brain then translates that pain into danger. And that danger could only stem from that one person.

They become a warning sign. Their name became a trigger. Their presence was something you wanted to run away from. Just thinking of them caused fear and pain.

Through all the pain you stop asking yourself what this person actually did and start to look at what happened whenever this person was around. You start to look for evidence to support your anger and hate and it continues to fuel more anger.

You stopped questioning the person's actions and started listening to your feelings. But feelings aren't fact.

your feelings are still real

I'm not saying that I wasn't valid to be hurt or angry. I was hurt. I was angry. Those feelings were real and how I felt about the situation.

But feelings being real doesn't automatically mean every conclusion I came up with was true.

I had to learn that I could genuinely feel like someone was dangerous to me while recognizing that they didn't intend to cause any harm. I had to learn to admit when my anger was misplaced and admit that it wasn't them, it was what they represented.

I had to learn that two things could both be true at once.

I was hurt.

and

The person I associated with that hurt may not be the person who caused it.

when my anger hurt someone who didn't deserve it

I'm not here to tell you I learned all of this before making any mistakes. I learned all of this from making the mistakes.

I let my misplace anger affect the way I treated them. I was so focused on everything their existence respresented to me that I stopped separating the person from the situation. I saw them as a threat to what I so deeply cared about.

And it wasn't fair. It never was. My anger was not for them to experience.

Don't get me wrong. There are certain actions that did play a part into the situation. But this person did not go into it to intentionally hurt me. Instead what they did caused the other person to make choices that hurt me. What I had to learn was that even though A lead to B which lead to C, it didn't mean to A was the reason for C.

I let my hurt bleed onto someone else. And that's where I need to take responsibility.

Sometimes accountability is realizing that you can be someone who is hurting and still be capable of hurting someone else. It's realizing that while your pain was real, the pain you caused someone else was also real and undeserving.

I spent so much time reacting to something that genuinely broke me but that didn't give me the right to direct that pain to someone who simply represented the situation without causing it.

And this is one of the hardest things I've had to learn recently.

Someone can represent your pain without being responsible for it.

ending

I honestly still really struggle with the separation. When you've spent so much time blaming someone things get muddled. It's hard to take a step back and see the pain for what it really is.

I still have some people I need to apologize to for the undeserved anger I set on them. And this isn't me taking responsibility for the whole situation. I'm simply taking accountability by the choices I made.

I am sorry. And I'm trying to learn to separate it.