Latest / Thinking Out Loud | Kimberly / Why Do We Keep Going Back To the People Who Hurt Us? | Thinking Out Loud
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- Kimberly: Why do we keep going back to the people who hurt us? I remember what it felt like years ago venting to a friend about how lonely I felt. Because every time I hung out with my family, I felt alone. I would play happy family. Then the anguish of how truly lonely I felt would come rushing in, feeling as if at any moment I could be abandoned. Emotionally, sometimes physically. At any moment I would be made to feel small. I remember my friend telling me, Kimberly, you still have contact with your family. You don't understand what it feels like to not have any family. I remember feeling jealous. A part of me thought But this pain of pretending is so heavy. It's suffocating, isolating even. It sucks to pretend over and over again for crumbs of love, only to go back to starving all over again. I remember thinking, what do you mean? I'm lucky. Because from where I was standing, Having them in my life didn't make me feel like I had family. It made me feel like I was constantly trying to earn the feeling to have one. Then the final fight happened. a fight I couldn't let go and keep pretending we're a happy family. not after the accumulation of years of hurt and never repairing. the little moments that had added up over time. There was a point where I couldn't unknow what I knew anymore. And then I was free. Just like that. At the same time I was grieving because freedom and grief can exist at the same time. The idea was gone, the hope was gone. I couldn't unsee the pattern anymore. the empty apologies. how much of my life was chipped away trying to be accepted. Now, after all that effort, the acceptance never came. What? There was something else I lost that I didn't expect. I lost the illusion. I couldn't even pretend anymore. couldn't play Happy Family anymore. As strange as it sounds, that pretending had been part of how I could cope sometimes, regulate myself even. The fantasy that maybe someday it would be different. The routine, family roles, hope, even the pain was familiar. When all of that disappeared, it left a huge vacancy, a giant hole where something had been. what had been there wasn't actually good for me. That made me understand something. I can understand why people go back. Why people stay. Because sometimes the thing we're going back to isn't the person. It's the hope. Maybe what we wish the relationship could be, to the familiarity. Because being alone can be terrifying. Maybe you're going back because you spent years building your identity around that relationship. Part of you may still believe that this time might be different. sometimes you're going back because leaving hurts too much. I don't think there's shame in that. I was fortunate That by the time everything finally fell apart, I had already started building something outside of those relationships. I had started detaching. I had become more independent. I had found friends I could depend on. I started building a foundation underneath myself before I finally had to let go. And I think that matters. Sometimes we ask, why don't they just leave? I think a better question is What would they have to lose in order to leave? And what would they have to have in place to survive after they do? leaving someone who hurts you doesn't automatically mean you stop loving them. It doesn't mean you stop grieving them. It doesn't mean suddenly you feel relieved every second of every day. Sometimes leaving means grieving the person, grieving who you hoped they would become. grieving the family you thought you had, the family you might have desperately wanted. And at the same time, it means grieving the version of yourself who spent years trying to make it work. That's a lot of grief. Maybe the question isn't simply, why do we keep going back to people who hurt us? Maybe a better question is, what are we actually going back for? Is it the person? Familiarity? Hope? Crumbs, illusion, fear of being alone, or the belief that if we can just do something differently, this time we will finally be loved the way we've always wanted to be loved. And I don't think there's shame in asking those questions. Understanding why we go back isn't the same thing as saying we should. Sometimes understanding is the first step towards realizing what we need. Sometimes what we need isn't another chance with the person who hurt us. Sometimes what we need is somewhere safe to land when we finally decide to stop going back. Welcome back to Thinking Out Loud. Hi, it's me Kimberly. Before we go any further, a quick note. This podcast is for reflection and conversation, not professional advice. Take what resonates and leave the rest. Here we slow down and we explore life's gray areas, especially in relationships and behavior patterns we can observe and reflect on. I am not here to tell you what to think. I am here to offer framework to help you understand your relationships, strengthen your thinking, and hold space for complexity. Let's get to thinking out loud. I think there are people who genuinely don't understand because they can't relate, and that's okay. Not everyone has lived through the same things. Heck, I don't wish this on anyone. Congratulations. you might not have won a free car, but you have dodged a bullet of taxes that you would have had to pay for that free car. Not everyone has experienced a relationship or leaving someone also means grieving them. I also think there are times when people can't afford to understand, not only financially, maybe emotionally too. It could be if they let themselves understand what you're going through, they might have to look at something in their life that they aren't ready to look at. if they accept that someone can love you and still hurt you, that someone can be family and still be unsafe for you, that staying. Isn't always the same thing as loving someone. They might have to ask themselves some uncomfortable questions. Why am I tolerating this? Why am I still here? What would happen if I stopped making excuses for this person? What would I lose if I walked away? And sometimes people aren't ready to answer those questions. It's easier to say, well, their family, you've known them forever. Every marriage has their problems. They've been my best friend for years. But they love you. You can't just throw away that much history. And I understand where that comes from. I get it now. Leaving hurts too. You build a bond with people, family, friends, partners. Sometimes that bond is built intentionally, and sometimes it's simply. Built because you've spent years in proximity to someone. you can grow through things together. You can make memories. have inside jokes. You learned each other's history and you know what they were like before they became who they are now. Whether the bond was healthy or unhealthy, chosen or simply created by circumstances, time means something to us. When people say things like, I don't want another failed marriage, I've known them for twelve years, but they're my sister. We've been best friends since high school. They're the only person who knows me like that. We've been through too much together. I don't want to throw away everything we've built. I hear grief, attachment, and fear. There's something to lose. I hear someone trying to figure out whether the relationship they have is worth the pain they're experiencing. I understand the emptiness now because before I went no contact, before I chose to be done, I had someone in my life who wouldn't stop. They wouldn't change. They got better at lying, playing victim, isolating, manipulating the situation. They could use their own tragedies to redirect attention away from accountability. I don't know how it happened, but it always worked out for them. Eventually, when I started putting the pieces together, I realized how far it had gone. It wasn't simply conflict between two people anymore. I was watching this person turn people against me systematically. People in the community, people I introduced them to. People who didn't even know the full story. at the same time, I didn't realize they were sabotaging me to prove the narrative and stories that they were telling other people about me. now I know, reaction abuse. Suddenly, I remember something someone had told me years before. They warned me not to trust this person. They told me this person had done things remarkably similar to them when they were in high school. They had lied about them. tried to turn people against them. I remember putting those pieces together and thinking, they're never gonna stop. the complicated part. I was used to it. Used to the chaos, the confusion, wondering what was real, needing someone to calm me down, needing someone to tell me, no, you're not crazy. This is what happened. Needing someone to hold space for me while I tried to figure out what I was feeling. I realized something that was uncomfortable when I've untangled that. why did I remain so close to someone I knew was hurting me? My autonomy had been chipped away little by little. My authenticity was treated like something strange, weird even, as if there was something wrong with me for being me. My boundaries made me The villain. If I pulled away, I was abandoning them. If I said no, I was selfish. If I wanted something different, I was difficult. There was always a reason, an explanation, another piece of information that made the situation confusing enough for me to question myself again. I got used to looking outside of myself for answers that I stopped trusting my own. I thought I needed someone else to tell me what was real. I believed I needed someone else to tell me whether I was allowed to hurt. I was convinced I needed someone else to tell me whether my boundaries were reasonable. I think that's the part why leaving can be so hard. sometimes the person. become intertwined with your ability to feel safe. You don't simply leave the person. You have to relearn how to trust yourself without them. For me, I spent so much of my time believing I needed to be fixed. When in reality there was nothing wrong with me. I was learning, developing. I was becoming Kimberly. This person became a detour, A rabbit trail that I got incredibly comfortable walking down that eventually I forgot I could turn around. That's the strange thing about detours. You can travel down for so long that it starts feeling like the actual road until eventually you realize, wait, this isn't where I was trying to go. This isn't who I was trying to become. By then, turning around can feel terrifying. your safety depends on the road for so long. Even if it was hurting you, confusing you, even if it was taking you farther away from yourself. You knew the road. sometimes the familiar things feel safer than the unknown things. That doesn't mean that familiar things is safe. It can simply mean it's familiar. I think that's something we forget. Understanding why someone stays does not mean we have to make excuses what is happening to them. compassion and accountability can exist at the same time for people. I can understand why someone stays. at the same time I can still say this isn't okay. This isn't something we should normalize. I can understand that someone has a bad day. And I can still say what you did was wrong. You can overcome this. You can sit with these big feelings and figure out Why you've attached it to this idea. It's okay to be cruel. It's okay to be hurtful I don't think happy, healthy people think it's okay to just be casually cruel thoughtless and hurtful to other people. I don't want to live in a world where accountability requires us to stop having compassion. I don't want to live in a world where compassion means we stop having standards. I've gotten some really good advice about this. one of my besties have told me was essentially If they haven't done anything to give you a reason to believe it, don't let the fear take over. My husband has given me another version of that advice. Let them make an ass of themselves. Bluntly, there's wisdom in that. Because I can't predict whether I'm going to hurt again. I can't always know when someone is love bombing me. I can't read minds knowing every person's intention. I can't guarantee that someone won't eventually show me a side of themselves I didn't expect. I can pay attention though. I can let people reveal themselves through their behavior. Because eventually people expose themselves through their patterns, better or for worse. I don't have to manufacture evidence of for something that isn't there. I also don't have to ignore evidence I can give people grace for having bad days. Understanding that people are, I know, they're imperfect. They're not perfect. Bringing compassion to someone's story. At the same time, I can acknowledge that was manipulative, controlling, harmful. I can name their prejudice too. That was sexist, ableist, childism, racist. I can have standards for myself for how I expect to be treated and conversations I engage in. I can stand beside my friends and still tell them, no, this isn't right. I disagree. You're better than this. You're not aligned with the person you have been saying you want to be. I can expect the same from the people who love me. I am more than my moments of unfiltered anger. I am more than the moments I collapse in my trauma. I am learning that having standards doesn't make me difficult. Having boundaries doesn't make me cruel. Wanting accountability doesn't make me unforgiving. That trusting myself doesn't make me selfish. I am allowed to have standards. maybe that's the part of what letting go looks like. Not becoming someone who never gets hurt again, becoming someone who trusts themselves enough to recognize when something is hurting them and trusts themselves enough to do something about it. Here's another layer I don't think we share about enough. What happens when the very person who warned you about someone eventually goes back to them? That one is confusing. Wait, what? For me, the same person who warned me for years about how toxic this person was eventually took the spot I vacated when I started detaching. after I left, they stepped right into the relationship I had walked away from. Isn't that freaking confusing? Sometimes it felt so gaslighting. Maybe it is. I'm sitting there thinking you told me you warned me, you saw it too. How the hell are we here now? I want to be careful with this because I do have compassion for them. I understand it. When the good times are good, they're really good. That's part of what makes these relationships complicated. People aren't usually walking around thinking, I love being treated terribly. It's good for my skin, the complexion. I like to just rub it in. Toxicity. There are good moments, memories, sense of connection and fun. There are times when you feel seen, understood, needed, wanted. I could also see how much this person had been scapegoated for a long time and finally it was their turn. Their turn to be the favorite. Their turn to be chosen. It's nice being chosen. when you've spent years being told you're the problem, and then someone comes along and gives you connection validation and belonging, I can understand why you might hold on to that connection desperately. Even if it means hurting someone else. I think that's one of the hardest things for me to accept. Sometimes people are so straved for connection that once they finally get it, they don't care who they hurt to keep it. Even if the person they're hurting is the very person who once stood beside them. that doesn't make the harm okay. Understanding it helps me make sense of it. when I looked back to the entire situation. the person who had been hurting both of us have been telling us stories about each other. I started noticing something. Some of the things I have been told other people who had supposedly said about me It didn't sound like them at all. The way they talked didn't sound like them, and the attitude didn't sound like them either. Then I started remembering conversations. I realized something that absolutely floored me. They weren't only telling stories. They were taking pieces of what people said and rearranging them. Sometimes they were taking what someone else had said and presented it as something they had said, they could play hero. I had your back. I defended you. I told them this. then I heard the supposed conversation and think, wait, that doesn't exactly sound like something the other person would say I realized I wasn't even getting my own lines. I didn't even get to be hated for what I actually said. Someone else was writing my own dialogue for me. Rude. The audacity. There are taking pieces of other people's words, rearranging them, and creating versions of me that could be used as a villain. I don't even get to be the villain for what I actually said. Someone else wrote my lines and those lines suck. What I said could have been used better because why? Sometimes when I said things like, They'll take all the oxygen out of the room, Which could be seen as mean, what I actually said was, I don't think they realize they have taken all the oxygen out of the room. That's okay. I struggle with that too. Sometimes we rush in relationships with our spicy We can't give people a ghost pepper if they've never even had a jalapeno. it's not fair to people to rush relationships when they might not have ever had jalapeno, and you gave them a ghost pepper, I think it's fair to say in this case, calm down. Help people be able to handle you or Respect they need cream cheese with their jalapeno level of yourself. You're giving them. Anyways, no, I didn't even get that. It was Kimberly thinks you're full of yourself. Rude boring. You steal my role of the story of trying to be a supporting character. You turn me into a villain. you can't even be creative about my own lines. That is just diabolical. How do you even defend yourself against something you didn't even say? How do you correct a story when people are telling you it had already been written for your character? And the weirdest part is that when you finally try to explain yourself, what I was seeing is I was a mess, angry. And I was hurt. I was trying to make sense of something that had been happening for years. I was called the liar. I remember being so angry that I said, You're no different from the person you're warning me about. the response was, thanks. what do you even do with that? I couldn't make them see it. I'm not gonna beg them into agreeing with me or try to convince them to choose differently. Their choices don't have to become my reality. They can choose that relationship, believe the version of the story that makes sense to them, decide I was the villain, but damn it. Let me at least have my horns, okay? My own lines. Even if you're gonna twist my words. imagine I simply misunderstood and tell them I was too sensitive, and they have to live with their choices one way or another. I don't have to fight them for the right for my own experiences. I do want my horns though. I've already lived it. I know what happened to me. I've processed it. I've looked at my own behavior where I was wrong. I could have communicated differently. I didn't know better at the time. The things I wish I had done differently I've also looked at the things that I might have carried that weren't mine to carry. That's the difference for me now. I'm not trying to convince everyone that I was right. I don't care. Makes me think of lumpy space prince I don't care. I don't want to find ways to cope because I need to escape from my own life. I'm starting to love my life. Let's not get too crazy. I am still a hermit who needs to be taken seriously when I say leave me alone and leave by 6 p.m. I got a nervous system my capacity to protect here. Jeez. I'm focused on understanding what happened so I can stop repeating it. I don't want to spend the rest of my life trying to get people to agree the version of events that wasn't me. I have been trying since I was eight years old, and I am now 33, 25 years, where I could have been getting to know me, not simply surviving my environment. Not going from one controlling person trying to isolate me to another. I've wanted to feel free to be me. I think that's what I mean when I say I've gone from being a victim to being a victor. Dang. Hunger games is no joke. Healing for me has become, it doesn't mean nothing happened to me that I wasn't hurt. Or I magically turned something painful into a positive experience. Ha ha ha ha. It means I don't want what happened to me to make the permanent ownership of me. I'm not going to pretend it didn't happen. I'm not going to write it in a way to make other people comfortable. I'm also not going to build my life around proving it happen. That's the difference for me now. that's where indifference started to become really important to me. Not I don't care because nothing matters. Rather, I cannot control your choices. And that's actually not my job I could give you water, you could slap it out of my hands, and you can turn around and drink whatever poison you believe. is offered to you as much as I want to stop you, I can't force you to drink the water. That's not my job. Your choices belong to you. Mine belong to me. To the person who made that choice to go back, I genuinely hope you have a future where you don't have to make me be the villain in order to make peace with your choices. And I hope you don't have to rewrite me to justify staying. if someday you decide to leave that relationship and realize that you were never the problem you were told you were, I hope you can see that too. You didn't need someone else to make you better. You don't need someone else to rescue you either. You needed yourself, your own confidence to trust your own voice. And maybe that's what I needed too. Not another person to tell me I was right. to tell me who was wrong or to tell me what was real. I needed to learn that I could trust myself and that might be one of the hardest parts of walking away. Because when you spent your entire time questioning yourself, eventually freedom isn't only getting away from the person. It's getting back to yourself. truthfully, I think one of the biggest reasons people stay is the shame attached to leaving. sometimes leaving doesn't only feel like losing a relationship. It feels as if you're admitting you were wrong about it. you invested years into something you didn't become what you thought it would become. You trusted the wrong person, you ignored things, even made excuses Shame that comes up when reflecting on the people who told you to leave or write. Who wants to sit in that? I remember acquaintance of mine who was struggling with multiple relationships in their life. Their mother abandoned them, siblings had mistreated them, ex husband had been abusive, and unfortunately, I came to understand that their current partner was hurting them too. At the time I didn't know that. They were convincing. They presented themselves as a supportive spouse, the person who cared, who had their partner's back. Every once in a while the mask would slip. When it did, you could see the contempt they had for their partner. I remember letting them live with us for a while so they could get back on their feet. my acquaintance was broken from being abandoned by their mother. Also, they were still trying, trying to rebuild their life, make their life work. Meanwhile, their partner seemed to find a reason to complain about everything. The explanations was always something else. Trauma, brain damage, I don't feel safe, and I remember thinking, okay. At some point we have to talk about your choices. Trauma can explain why someone struggles. It can help us understand why someone reacts in certain ways. Brain damage can affect behavior as well as mental health. And none of those things mean a person has no responsibility for what they do. when my acquaintance offered their partner a brownie and they became so upset that they decided they needed to leave the house. because they didn't feel safe over a brownie. And I was confused by it. that's literally what it was, they offered you a brownie. all their partner had did was offer them a brownie and yet it reminded them of their childhood. And still the story didn't make sense. Your behavior and you're doubling down that your partner should have known and read your mind and that's not okay. I remember being firm. This isn't trauma making a decision for you. You made a decision to scream at your partner and then leave and run away. Over a brownie. And there was another time when my acquaintance mentioned that their partner had tried a new flavor of snack without them. And their partner became increasively angry and they shoved the mattress into them. again, at some point we have to be able to say, you made that choice. Instead of sitting with that, the partner needed someone else to become the villain. at first it was my acquaintance, was too emotional. was the problem and I would talk to this acquaintance. I would listen to them and their reactions made sense in the context of what they had been experiencing. they have C PTSD. They had been through a lot. They were struggling. Struggling doesn't make someone inherently bad. They were also trying trying to do better. I had to confront one of my own beliefs that I had believed that if I didn't help them, who would? And eventually I had to answer my own question themselves. I couldn't be the person responsible for keeping two adults afloat. I couldn't fix their marriage. They're a grown adult. I wasn't going to make my acquaintance leave and whatever they decide was their choice to live with, but I wasn't also going to continue to keep their partner at my house who was this is two months in the making of drama. And eventually I had reached the point and said, Your partner is no longer welcome to my home. that was my boundary. It wasn't a punishment It became a consequence of my God, I would like to just watch a show. to exist in my own home. And there was no revenge behind it. It was just, I'm done. I wasn't deciding what they could do or they were allowed to love their partner even though they blamed me. Like, you're trying to break me up and divorce my partner. For me, it was simply. This is what I will and will not allow in my house anymore. eventually I had become exhausted. Every day there was a meltdown, another crisis, another I don't feel safe. at the same time, the person saying they didn't feel safe was recreating an environment where other people started to not feel safe either. Eventually I had to say maybe you needed to stay somewhere else. That's where it started. Things escalated. I made it very clear we cannot keep living like this. This isn't a choice anymore. you either leave or I will ask you one way or another to leave. It got ugly. And first, they begged. I was firm on my no. My husband had enough and I had enough. my acquaintance was lost on what to do anymore. When begging didn't work, they decided to throw my own trauma and insecurities back at me saying, I get why they did that to you regarding to the person I was talking about in this episode who turned a community against me. yeah, after that, they weren't welcome back in my home. they kept going back and forth, messaging about them wanting to harm themselves, talking crap about me, begging to come back, It was all over the place. It was inconsistent. It was exhausting. And I'm going to be clear about something. When someone tells you they're going to hurt themselves, I'm not going to become their crisis counselor. I don't have the capacity for it. I am going to get them help and call the appropriate emergency services Get someone qualified involved. Keep the message. Document what they said. I can care about someone without making myself responsible for whether they choose to live. that's not cruelty. That's recognizing the limits of what one person can safely carry. eventually my acquaintance chose to go back. This is the part that really stays with me because I think the part of them thinking was, I don't want another failed marriage. Because they did say that. I remember another thing they said. The sex was amazing. Those things tell me something. People don't make decisions based on one variable. they aren't sitting there with a spreadsheet going, okay. Emotional safety? Terrible. Physical intimacy? Excellent. Therefore I stay. we're more complicated than that. There can be abuse and affection, fear and attachment, pain and good memories, and someone can make you miserable and still make you laugh. Someone can hurt you and still be the person you call when you're lonely. Someone can be terrible for you and still be someone you love. And that's part that makes leaving so damn hard. Then there's the emptiness. What happens when you leave and there's nobody there to catch you? I think that's huge. I did try to support them. I told them you are welcome here. They are not. That was my boundary. To them, they heard I have to choose, and they chose their partner. Eventually, that choice burned the bridge between us, and I can understand why. I can see how much influence their partner had over them. I can see how isolated my acquaintance had been. how controlling the dynamic had become. And understanding it doesn't mean I have to pretend it didn't hurt me, the outcome. Again, not being chosen. It doesn't mean I have to reopen my door though. Compassion does not require access. I can care about you from over here. Hope you're okay. Hope you eventually build the confidence to make choices because you want to make them. Not because someone manipulated you into making them. Not because you're terrified of being alone. Not because you're ashamed of another failed relationship and not because you need someone to tell you who you are. I hope someday you can stand in your own choices, whether they're good or bad choices, whether they work out or not. I hope you can say I chose this. And if you realize you make a mistake, I hope you can say I made a mistake without needing someone else to become the villain so you can live with yourself. maybe that's the part of what shame does. It doesn't make us rewrite the story so we don't have to admit I stayed, I went back, I ignored it. I wanted this relationship to work so badly that I accepted things I wouldn't tell my best friend to accept. There is so much compassion needed here. We do what we can to survive. Surviving something doesn't mean we have to stay there forever. That experience taught me something too. I don't let people live with me anymore. Nope. I've learned that my home needs to be my safe place. After spending years in survival mode, I'm realizing how important it is to build safety wherever we actually have control over it. One of the places I have control over is my home, my boundaries, my friendships, my access, my time, my energy. I used to think boundaries were primarily about protecting other people from me becoming overwhelmed, and now I'm learning that boundaries are also about protecting me. If you're constantly living in a crisis, eventually the crisis starts to feel normal. You might start thinking, well, this is what relationships are, right? Isn't this what helping people looks like? It's what love requires. Isn't this what family does? This is what being a good person means. No, maybe being a good person doesn't mean letting everyone else's crisis consume your life. compassion doesn't mean becoming someone else's life raft endlessly. It's to help them let go. It's to help them get safety. You can't stop them from jumping back into the water. Loving someone doesn't mean drowning with them. Loving someone means recognizing I can't save you. Loving yourself means recognizing you can't take me down with you either. And that's not abandonment, that's a boundary. I've learned after I walked away what happens when surviving someone becomes a coping mechanism. I remember when I first cut ties with the person who had been hurting me for years and I thought, okay, I'm free, I'm safe, I'm done. My brain apparently didn't get the memo. All the energy had to go somewhere. I became curious. Why can't I have a good time? Why can't I just enjoy being out with my friends? Why am I waiting for my vacation to be ruined? Why am I waiting for the holidays to go wrong? why am I looking for the problem? Why? I realized something. My memory had been attached to survival. I had spent so much time learning to anticipate what would go wrong that when nothing was wrong, I had to find something. If I didn't find something first, I was afraid someone else would. If I didn't overthink the situation, maybe I would miss something. If I didn't figure out what I was done wrong, maybe someone would abandon me. if I didn't fix it quick enough, maybe I'd get in trouble. it was as if my entire life had become hold your breath, wait, watch, listen, figure it out, fix it before someone else does, before the mood changes, before the memory gets rewritten. Before the good things become evidence against you. I had learned to be suspicious of good moments. What if somebody took that good memory and twisted it like it had been twisted almost every time, used against me? You know that one memory you hold dear? Actually, Kimberly. And what if that person who supported me for months suddenly used that support as evidence that I was asking for too much? Well. It had happened. There was evidence for it. What if something I had said with good intentions became proof that I was selfish? People had done that to me. what if something I was proud of became evidence that I thought I was better than everybody else? What if something I did because I cared was turned into an accusation? And I have lived through enough of that that I started expecting it. that's a hard way to live. Eventually you're not only responding to what people are doing, you're responding what you think they might do. Trying to prevent the next betrayal before it happens, solving the problems that haven't happened yet. You're trying to read minds. Might get to the point you don't even know if you're enjoying the moment anymore. waiting for the other shoe to drop. I think that was one of the hardest things for me to recognize. Peace. felt unfamiliar. Not bad, unfamiliar. Which felt uncomfortable for me. I had spent much of my time in survival mode that my brain had become really good at surviving. It was good at scanning, analyzing, noticing changes in someone else's tone, remembering conversations, and asking, what did I do? figuring out that somebody might be upset before They even told me. Those skills helped me survive certain environments. I started to ask, do I still need to live like this anymore? I don't want to spend the rest of my life treating every relationship like a crime scene. Hold on, let's collect evidence. What did she mean by that? What did he say? Why did he say it like that? Was the pause weird? Did I do something? Should I apologize? Was that facial expression about? For me, it got to a point. Go enjoy your freaking vacation, Kimberly. You paid for that vacation. That's where I started realizing that healing wasn't only about leaving the person who hurt me. It was about learning how to stop organizing my entire life around the possibility that someone might hurt me. I can't predict every person's intention. that nobody will ever misunderstand me. that nobody will ever leave. I can't control whether someone decides to take something I said and turn it into something else. My gosh. People do it all the time on the internet. Word twisting experts. What I can do is pay attention to what people are actually doing. I can communicate, ask questions, clarify, apologize when I've genuinely done something wrong. I can listen when someone tells me I've hurt them and I can say, that's not what I said, that's not what I meant, that doesn't work for me. I'm not participating in this conversation. I'm leaving. I'm specifically meaning for people who have had power over you. Or continue to have power over you. I don't feel the need anymore to apologize for things that I had to survive. I don't have to solve every misunderstanding that they had created about me. I don't have to figure out who is creating an opportunity to misunderstand me. I don't have to pretend. I don't have to prevent abandonment. By becoming perfect, and I don't have to earn the right to have boundaries by first proving that I'm a good person, and that's something I still am learning. I was conditioned to think dysfunction was normal. I learned that love could mean constant monitoring someone else's emotion, that connection could mean walking on eggshells, conflict meant someone was going to leave or be given the silent treatment. Being a good person meant fixing things. Even if you weren't the one who broke it. If I could simply explain myself well enough, maybe I could prevent someone from deciding I was bad. I'm an adult now. I get to make choices. I don't want to be robbed anymore of the right to make my own choices. I'm not a helpless child anymore and I don't have to participate in the relationships that hurt me and continue to hurt me if given the chance. And I don't have to stay somewhere simply because I understand why someone behaves the way they do. I don't have to keep giving people access to me because I feel sorry for them. And I don't have to sacrifice my safety to prove that I have compassion. I don't have to assume every relationship is dangerous because some relationships were. That's probably the part that takes time. I feel learned helplessness doesn't disappear simply because you intellectualize understanding that you have choices now. Sometimes your brain knows you're free before your body believes it. I am learning what it means to have a good day without waiting for someone to ruin it. I can make a memory without immediately wondering how it could be used against me later. I can love people without constantly preparing myself for them to leave. trust someone without giving them unlimited access to me. set a boundary without writing a twenty page dissertation defending it. walk away when a relationship becomes harmful. I don't know exactly what the future holds. or if I'll never get hurt again. I finally understand something I didn't understand when I was younger. I have choices now. I don't have to keep surviving a life. I already survived. I get to build one, a new one. With a different foundation, and maybe that's what freedom looks like for me, slowly learning that I don't have to spend every peaceful moment preparing for the next disaster. sometimes the good memories get to be good memories. The vacations get to be the vacations, and somebody gets to misunderstand me, and I get to keep living my life. I am no longer the helpless child trying to figure out how to survive someone else's choices. I am an adult I get to choose who has access to me, what I participate in, what I walk away from, and maybe most importantly, I get to learn what life feels like when I'm not constantly surviving it. Back to the question. why do we keep going back to people who hurt us? I don't think there's one answer. And sometimes we're gonna go back because the familiar feels safer than the unknown. Sometimes we're going back because we're afraid of being alone. Sometimes we're going back because we're grieving the person we hoped they would become. Sometimes we're going back because we're ashamed to admit that something we invested years into isn't working. And occasionally we're going back because There were good memories. We still love them. They're still making us laugh. The connection was real, even if the relationship is hurting us. from time to time we aren't trying to leave. We're waiting, and hoping they'll finally understand. Finally apologize, acknowledge what they did, for them to take accountability, maybe even to finally repair. I think that's an important distinction When we're trying to tell someone you need to leave. what they're hearing is give up the possibility that the relationship could become what you wanted it to be. they might be ready to do that. They might not want to leave. sometimes people want the person they love to change maybe they want the relationship they remember They might want someone to finally say, I hurt you, I understand why, and I'm sorry. I shouldn't have done that. What can I do differently? I think it's okay to hope for that. it's okay to want repair. We also have to be honest about what we're waiting for. There is a difference between giving someone time to change and putting your life on hold indefinitely, waiting for a change that may never come. you can hope for the apology, leave the door open for repair, love someone, you can believe people are capable of growth, and at the same time, you can ask yourself, what if nothing changes? Not if, what if they finally become the person I need them to be? Rather, what if this is who they are right now? What if there is no apology? What if they never understand your side? What if they never admit they hurt you? What if the relationship never becomes what you hoped it would become? maybe the hard question might be. Am I okay staying if nothing gets better? That's a question I can't answer for someone else. Only you can. I'm saying it because sometimes we spend so much time asking, how do I get them to change? How do I make them understand? How do I get them to apologize? How do I fix it? And we forget to ask. What do I choose if they don't? That's where my journey eventually led me. I can't control someone else's choices. I can't make someone understand me. I couldn't force someone to take accountability. I can't make someone choose me. And I couldn't keep sacrificing myself while waiting for someone else to become capable of giving me what I needed. I had to learn that compassion doesn't require access, that understanding doesn't require excusing. Forgiveness doesn't require reconciliation. Love doesn't require me to abandon myself. that boundaries aren't punishment. they're choices about what I'll participate in. I had to learn that leaving isn't always the hardest part. Sometimes the hardest part comes afterwards, when your brain is still looking for danger, when peace feels familiar, realizing that you spent years organizing your life around surviving someone else's behavior. When you learn how to enjoy a vacation without waiting for it to be ruined, how to make a good memory without wondering how it will be used against you later, how to trust people without pretending you can read minds, how to trust yourself enough to know that if someone does hurt you, you don't have to abandon yourself to keep them. I'm learning that I don't have to pretend every possible hurt. I don't have to become perfect enough that nobody will ever leave. I no longer have to solve every misunderstanding. I don't have to convince everyone that I'm a good person. I get to have choices. And maybe that's the part I want to leave you with. Sometimes we go back because we're still hoping for repair. we stay because we're not ready to grieve what leaving would mean. We return because we're afraid there won't be anyone there to catch us. We go back. Because surviving the relationship had become so familiar that we don't know what to do with it. Other times, we simply haven't learned yet that we can choose ourselves without being cruel. If you're waiting for someone to change, I hope you give yourself permission to ask a honest question. If nothing changes, is this still a life I want to live? Not because they're a good person. They love me, they could change, they deserve another chance. Simply, if nothing changes, am I okay with this? You can wait, you can hope, you can want repair. You also get to make a choice based on what is actually happening, not only what you hope will happen. maybe that's what I finally learned through all this. I don't have to spend the rest of my life waiting for someone else to give me permission to move forward. I have grieved what happened. Love people from a distance, wish someone well and still close the door. Hope they change without making my life dependent on it. Built a life that doesn't require me to survive someone else in order to feel safe. So, whether you leave a comment, send me a message, or simply sit with this question, I hope this conversation stays with you. Thanks for slowing down and thinking out loud with me. And until next time, take care of yourself. And remember, you can hope for repair without putting your life on hold waiting for it. I'll see you in the next episode.