Latest / Thinking Out Loud | Kimberly / What Happens When Someone Changes But Never Repairs? | Thinking Out Loud
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- Thinking Out Loud - Podcast: is change without accountability possible or is it different versions of avoidance? ⁓ One that looks healthier on the we hear all the time. People people mature. and people become better versions of themselves over time. sometimes that's true. ⁓ do learn, people do evolve. What does it actually mean to ⁓ better ⁓ the people who experienced the worst version of you were never acknowledged? ⁓ their reality was never named, if the impact you had on was never fully faced. it's one thing to move forward and build healthier patterns and new relationships. ⁓ It's another thing entirely to turn back and take responsibility for damage that already happened. I think we confuse those two things. ⁓ We see change and we assume repair must have followed. That's not always true. Sometimes change happens in isolation. Sometimes it benefits the person who changed, while the person they've hurt are left trying to make sense of something that was never fully acknowledged. Hi, it's me, Kimberly. Today's question ⁓ happens when someone changes but never repairs? when someone generally seems different, the harm they cause is never addressed. We often hear people grow, people mature, and people become better versions of themselves over time. I do believe that is true sometimes. growth raises a harder question. ⁓ What happens ⁓ when the change includes accountability the people who are hurt? First, I think it's important to understand what that actually looks like. Sometimes a person does acknowledge things. Sometimes they even make real change in their behavior, ⁓ that doesn't automatically mean our nervous heal. especially when there are layers of harm. that haven't been unpacked yet, repair still needs to happen. Often it's someone trying to heal layer by layer and the deeper the history of harm, the longer rebuilding trust can take the nervous system remembers, it remembers tone. It remembers pattern. remembers the last time you felt safe and you were hurt anyways. ⁓ Sometimes trauma lives in the body in ways don't make logical sense in the moment. a sudden sound, a tone of voice, a familiar environment can bring everything rushing back ⁓ and healing responses take time, consistency, safety, ⁓ not just ⁓ here is side to this too. ⁓ Sometimes pain hardens. it turns into bitterness. Sometimes a person stops seeking repair and start seeking validation for staying in the pain. in those cases, it's okay for someone to choose distance. It's okay to say something was broken here and I don't have the capacity to rebuild this. Maybe the pain was too deep. Maybe the line was crossed. Maybe too much damage happened for too long without meaningful change. Sometimes the most honest answer is simply, I can't keep doing this anymore. I understand the thought that can run through someone's mind in those moments. ⁓ They often back and forth between What they were taught to tolerate and what their autonomy is telling them to protect. ⁓ The past doesn't matter anymore, right? they treated terribly. They mocked me. They never owned it. now I'm expected. And everyone else to accept it. The tension is real change and repair are not the same things. ⁓ Someone grow into a less reactive person. They can start fresh and treat new people better. can build healthier relationships moving forward, repair asks for something different. ⁓ Repair requires back towards the people who were harmed and acknowledge what happened fully, not minimizing it. Not reframing it to feel more comfortable. Not skipping over it in the name of it's just who I am now. Repair requires humility. It requires consistency. and requires a willingness to sit with the reality of the impact you had on someone else, even when it's uncomfortable. I want to be clear about something here. ⁓ I am not talking about children being responsible for emotions. I am talking about adult to adult relationships built on equal footing. And I'm also talking about parents taking accountability for harm done to their children. And this includes adult children. Children are not responsible for managing adult emotions. As a society, we need to stop expecting and normalizing children, absorbing the emotional chaos of adults. ⁓ Adults are responsible for regulating themselves. ⁓ Children are the ones who need guidance ⁓ and while they are still learning how to do that. For example, ⁓ I received a harsh comment online by I'm assuming a teenager about my motherhood. The comment said, we don't care. At first I laughed ⁓ wanting think of something petty, then I was like, you know what? Let me see who I'm working with. And then I realized it was coming from a teenager kid. my reaction changed instead of getting angry. My thought was simply, ⁓ who hurts you, honey? So I didn't engage because if I don't have something constructive to offer children, it is my responsibility to step back. She understand what it's like to be pregnant. She doesn't understand what it's like to give birth. ⁓ She might have been carrying pain from her own home. might've been told that motherhood ruins someone's life. She might not have been taught empathy. I don't know her story, I do know this. It is my responsibility to regulate my emotions and not ⁓ dump them children. And that includes teenagers. This is where things get complicated yes, children can cause harm. Did it hurt my feeling for a moment? When I got context, I got over it, back to adult to adult relationships. This is where things get complicated because when someone changes, but never repairs the harm they cause the people they hurt can feel deeply disoriented. one hand, you want to believe that growth is real on the other. The harm you experienced was never acknowledged. It creates a kind of emotional imbalance. This debt that was never fully paid and it keeps collecting interest over time. make small gestures and small payments, somehow the pain has tripled because ⁓ the interest was The pain and harm was done ⁓ ⁓ unfortunately ⁓ can't your ⁓ and repair. harm and abuse. True repair and acknowledgement takes work, active, consistent work. not everyone's up for the challenge sometimes it can take years of accountability before trust even begins to rebuild. Acknowledging harm ⁓ is start, ⁓ without follow through acknowledgement becomes nothing more than a fancy speech and a speech is not the same thing as repair. When repair never happens, the past never truly closes. The story ⁓ in the middle. The people who caused harm may feel they've moved forward. Like it was just a Tuesday for me. ⁓ Why you get over this? the person who was hurt. is often left holding unanswered questions and unresolved pain. They're left to eat it. Sometimes it can even make the relationship feel one-sided, ⁓ one person was performing for approval while the other believed the connection was genuine. ⁓ have learned people who perform in relationships often say things like this. After everything I've done for you, the sacrifices I've made, you should be grateful. You know, you're not that great. And that creates confusion ⁓ the other may have been acting from genuine care. They showed up they wanted to, they gave because it mattered to them. when someone else is operating from obligation, control, or expectation, it calls everything into question. ⁓ this relationship even real? For a long time, I believed I was too difficult, ⁓ that people could only tolerate me if I wore a mask. eventually I realized something important. Sometimes ⁓ it was about me. Some people don't want relationships that require self-reflection. They want relationships that feel easy, even if it means avoiding accountability. And while that may work for them, it's not the kind of relationships I want, not in friendship and not for my family I'm creating with my husband. I also had to accept something hard. ⁓ Just because I wanted to repair doesn't I'm entitled to receive it. It's a hard pill to swallow. I couldn't force someone else to ⁓ how their behavior and their abuse impact me. And at point I had to stop trying to drag people into conversations they didn't care to have. They just wanted a reset button ⁓ Growth without repair can be real. People do change, change without accountability ⁓ does automatically rebuild trust with the people who were harmed. In my own life, I'm grateful I kept trying. ⁓ I believing there were relationships where repair was possible and I found them. ⁓ I found people who are willing to ⁓ own harm. talk through it and rebuild when things broke and every time a little piece of me heals. those relationships taught me ⁓ to repair harm I had caused to. I really care about my friends and my husband and my girls. I learned something important in the process of learning repair and why it's important in the process of making changes. Healing does not require giving harmful people continuous access to your life. Accountability can support healing. It can be beautiful, sometimes healing has to happen without it. And I've learned something else too. Pulling back from relationships isn't always cruel. Sometimes it's the most honest and respectful thing you can do for both people you're choosing to stop performing and you're starting to live honestly. back to the question, what happens when someone changes ⁓ but never happens? The relationship doesn't actually heal. ⁓ The isn't erased. The words alone cannot prove change. behavior over time is what shows that real change has happened. speeches can make someone feel better about themselves, ⁓ repairs about building safety for who were harmed. And that takes humility and consistent effort. because someone finds growth ⁓ does not mean they automatically regain access to the people they hurt. Relationships require care like plants. need maintenance, soil, water, sunlight, and attention. And they need the understanding that not every plant is the same. Without that care, without that thoughtfulness, connections slowly wither and no speech, no matter how powerful, can bring a relationship back on its own. Thanks for