Thank you for this piece, it feels very insightful and relevant to my own experiences and healing journey.
In my experience, abuse and mistreatment young in life has a direct result on how you experience emotions and people in adulthood. I've worked hard to heal and choose grace and understanding over emotional reactivity to what I would perceive as others moving through the world in abusive or toxic ways.
It took a lot of learning to understand that the way other people move through life is not about me. As children, we are fundamentally myopic, and experiencing abuse while your brain is so tender and malleable sets us up to experience everyone as against us and trying to cause harm. In some cases, that may be true, but the fact is that even if someone's intent with cruelty is to cause harm, it still as nothing to do with me and everything to do with the relative party and what they are not not facing and processing from their own past.
In expressing this view of mine, I have been told that I am gaslighting myself, even being emotionally avoidant of the mistreatment I sometimes face as an adult -- but I believe that my conceptualization of such people as hurting children who became dysregulated adults is merely a reflection of the fact that I allow other peoples actions and behaviors to be about them, not me.
It has been uniquely freeing to separate my emotions from the actions of others. This doesn't mean that I don't have emotions when I experience harm, just that I see a broader picture for where my emotions come from, where toxic behaviors in others (and sometimes myself) originate, and what I can do to not take the pain of others personally when they act out in ways that intentionally or unintentionally inflict emotional harm to others.
Forgiving others for being human is not about dismissing the impact of their actions, but rather forgiving myself for having emotions so I can move through whatever emotional reaction I have so it doesn't govern the way I experience life, joy, grief, pain, and emotional presence.
