Life is hard. Let’s just get that out of the way. EMHW is a toxic-positivity free zone as for any growth and healing to occur, we must acknowledge the bad parts that we all go through. I do not care how successful, happy, old, far along in your healing journey you are etc., we ALL have those days (or weeks or months or years) where all we want to do is lay on the couch with our pint of ice cream and completely shut everything and everyone out. The reason why we want to lay on the couch (and the flavor of ice cream that we choose) may differ but suffering is unfortunately a natural and unavoidable part of human life.
Have you heard the saying, “April showers bring May flowers”? What happens when those showers are a torrential downpour that has no end in sight and lightning keeps cracking at every turn? Sometimes things and experiences are just as bad, torturous, exhausting, and infuriating as they appear – there is no amount of rose colored glasses that can change that.
Sometimes the showers last for years and end up flooding our lives. While it is often not our fault that we are experiencing difficult moments in our lives, it is always our responsibility to heal from them regardless of the reason for them. Avoiding that fact is only going to prolong your healing journey. You cannot heal from something that you choose not to admit exists.
A boat in the ocean that has holes in its floor will keep flooding whether the crew wants to acknowledge the water or not. Not acknowledging the holes guarantees sinking, but acknowledging them as soon as possible allows for the best chance at survival. What leaking holes are you avoiding? How “flooded” have you become?
That admission is often one of the number one reasons why people stay trapped in cycles of despair – it feels too impossible, too painful to acknowledge some pretty difficult truths – so we don’t. While I cannot guarantee that the experience of acknowledging and processing these things won’t be painful, once started, your path will now be open to doing the necessary healing. Without these acknowledgements, healing is like trying to find a place on a map that doesn’t exist – you’ll never get there.
This acknowledgement is something called “radical acceptance”. I want to reinforce right away that acceptance does not mean approval, condoning something that is wrong, or allowing painful people/environments back into your life. Acceptance simply means an acknowledgement of reality and all that comes with it, no matter how painful. Acknowledgement of the reality that requires the boundaries that you wish were not necessary, acknowledgement of the reality that some individuals will never treat you the way you deserve and that that has nothing to do with your worth as a person, acknowledgement that some people or environments may be off limits for forever, acknowledgment that things have changed in ways you don’t want and are never going back, acknowledgement that there are certain parts of your life that you wish were different but accepting that unfortunately “different” is not an option. Only once we have acknowledged what we need to heal from, can that healing begin.
One of the most important pieces of advice that I have ever received on this topic came from a dear friend of mine, who is also a trained therapist. A major relationship had changed in my life in ways that I did not like nor that I wanted to accept. I kept fighting against the new reality, thinking that time, a different approach, or a million other things would one day turn this person’s heart back to the way that it once was. This is because it was too painful for me to admit that someone I loved deeply and was once close with could change as a person in such drastic and unexpected ways. However, as long as I kept fighting this new reality, I was always going to end up hurt and dis – appointed because I was acting according to a reality that no longer existed.
When I talked to a trusted friend about this, they lovingly called me out (as any good friend should when they see you going down a painful path) and said, “Kilee! You are never going to find happiness with this person if you keep expecting things from them that they can never give you. That is a 100% guaranteed way to always find yourself disappointed – yearning for things that don’t exist and never will. Reaching that goal is impossible. You need to adjust your expectations for them and this situation according to the reality that is not the reality that you want. While the reality that is may not have been the reality you wanted, it is the reality that exists,”.
As painful of a truth that that was to accept, this is a conversation that changed my life forever. Do our expectations in life and with people match what they can give us and what we can realistically get from the situation? If not, we will always be disappointed with them – we are setting both them and ourselves up to fail straight from the gate. When we can adjust our expectations, however, to the current reality, we allow ourselves many more chances to succeed within that relationship as well as to find greater inner peace. We are greatly increasing the frequency that our needs are met within a situation because our needs and expectations are now realistic in where they need to be rooted.
I think it’s important to note that this adjustment of expectations does not mean that you settle for less than you deserve. What it does mean, is that you only allow people the access to you based on the reality of the health and joy that they can provide you. Part of adjusting expectations with harmful others/environments also means adjusting/implementing the boun-daries that are necessary to align with those new and realistic expectations.
For example, let’s say that you have a friend who frequently acts selfishly. You are the one consistently reaching out to make plans, you are the one putting in 75%+ of the effort in the relationship, you make yourself available to them when they need you but they are not there for you in your times of need, etc. You start by spinning a million different reasons in your head as to why it’s not actually as bad as it seems – “They’re just going through a hard time right now”. “They were there for me that one time so they can’t be all bad”. “We just have different perspectives, I am sure they don’t mean harm”.
Whether someone intends to hurt you is not what’s in question here – impact over intent. We all have moments of needing grace from others but does this “moment” of them going through a hard time persist into a continuous pattern of them treating you poorly/not supporting you? No one is fully “bad” and everyone has good in them – the moments of good are not a get out of jail free card, however, for the moments of hurt. I am sorry to say, but operating based on these excuses through continuous patterns and times of mistreatment from others is you gaslighting yourself. You deserve better.
Once you have made this acknowledgement with this friend that it’s not just a rough time, but who they are, that they do have positive traits but that their negative actions are far more frequent, and recognize that even though they have been there for you at times, that the amount that they are will never match what you need – you can start to set the appropriate boundaries.
You have made the hard acknowledgements, now what do the hard acknowledgements tell you about your needs within that relationship? “They are not there for me as much as I need them to be and I exasperate myself trying to be there for them”. You set boundaries with their access to you and start saying “no” more often to requests that feel outside of your capacities. “They are going through a hard time but they can’t use that as an excuse to treat me poorly every time that happens”. You find the limits in supporting them during these hard times in the ways that feel healthy to you.
These changes will often be noticed by the other and they may ask you about them. They may even ask you about them in a way that tries to put the blame on you. This is called gaslighting and do NOT believe it.
Gaslighting is a harmful form of manipulation in which the individual tries to make you feel guilty for holding them accountable for their own harmful actions. You have every right to set limits and boundaries with those that hurt you. If the other individual prefers to focus on the consequence of their action instead of their harmful and inappropriate actions that required the boundaries/justified consequences in the first place, what does that say about them and where their priorities lie? That is deep internal work that that individual needs to perform and is not for you to carry.
The acknowledgement and boundary setting/adjustments will not always be comfortable but the right decision is not always the easiest one. You can do hard things, and sometimes reaching our mental health and wellness goals requires us to do hard and uncomfortable things temporarily so that we can experience an everlasting peace. Moments of healthy discomfort is often where we experience our greatest growth and should not be shied from.
What happens though, when the difficult reality that we must accept is with someone that we can never communicate with/hold accountable (someone that harmed us that has passed, someone that we are no longer in contact with, an event that is completely out of our control)?
You find the peace anyways. You take back the definition of healing and transform it into one that you control, not one that they control. I once had a client who was dead set that the only way that they could heal from a traumatic relationship with their parent was if the parent in question apologized to them. By that definition, my client’s healing was completely in the hands of another individual. What would happen if the parent died before they apologized? What would happen if the client lost contact with the parent completely? What would happen if the parent simply never wanted to apologize/never thought they were wrong? By my client’s definition of healing, all of these scenarios would mean that my client could never heal.
In situations like these you of course deserve the apology but the apology cannot be the only way you define your healing because the unfortunate reality is that a lot of us will never receive the apologies that we deserve. In cases like these, and other situations where the painful reality is something out of our control, it is up to us to change our definition of healing into something that we can control. Don’t give other people, especially people that have hurt you, so much power over your life and happiness. They don’t deserve it.
So what are other definitions of healing that give you the power? That is up for you to decide. However, whenever you decide what those definitions are, I encourage you to write them down into activation statements. I choose [insert definition of healing] to be able to live a good life. With the example that I shared about a loved one whose changed relationship I had to come to terms with, my definition of healing and activation statement was, “I choose to set the necessary boundaries with this individual and always stand up for what is right in how I am treated by others”. Activation statements remind us that we always have choice in our lives and the directions that we are going. You are never powerless.
In these moments where it feels like the downpour of life won’t stop and that we are figuratively drowning in our grief, stress, and pain, it is important to remember that nothing can last forever. Whatever you are experiencing may be incredibly painful to get through, but you will get to the other side. Time will keep moving and the good thing is, you don’t have to be all put together while it does. You just have to make it through. You can be kicking and crying and screaming with your clothes torn and crawling to the finish line, but you will still get there. Let me repeat that you do NOT have to get through everything in one piece. You just have to get through it.
XOXO,
KC
Empowered Mental Health and Wellness 