You Understand Why They Did It. It Still Hurt.

Maybe you know exactly why she behaves that way. You know what her childhood was like. You know what he’s been through. You know she gets scared. You know he never learned how to talk about his feelings. You know they probably didn’t mean it the way it sounded.

You understand.

And maybe that understanding has helped you have compassion for people you love. But sometimes understanding can become the reason we stop acknowledging something else that is equally true:

It hurt me.

Both can be true.

Understanding Doesn’t Erase Your Experience

We are complicated human beings. Someone can love you and hurt you. Someone can have a painful history and still be responsible for how they treat you. Someone can be doing the best they know how to do, and their best can still affect you deeply. You can understand why someone behaves the way they do and still wish they had behaved differently.

One truth doesn’t have to cancel the other. That sounds simple when we say it out loud. It can be much harder when the person involved is someone we love.

Sometimes our ability to understand another person becomes a way of carrying more than belongs to us. We explain their behavior to ourselves. We give another chance. We make allowances. We try not to take things personally. We remind ourselves what they’ve been through.

Again, none of those choices is automatically wrong. But there is a question I’ve found helpful:

What belongs to me here?

Maybe an apology belongs to you. Maybe acknowledging your part belongs to you. Maybe having a conversation belongs to you. Maybe changing how you participate belongs to you.

But another person’s healing does not belong to you. Their choices do not belong to you. Their willingness to understand your experience does not belong to you. Their reaction to what you say does not belong to you.

Compassion doesn’t require you to carry all of it.

You Don’t Need a Villain

One of the things that can make this especially difficult is the feeling that someone has to be wrong. If I acknowledge that I was hurt, am I making them the bad person? If I understand why they did it, do I lose the right to be hurt? If I forgive them, does that mean everything goes back to the way it was?

Human relationships are rarely that tidy.

You can understand someone without excusing what happened. You can forgive someone without returning to the relationship you had before. You can care about someone and decide that something needs to change. You can acknowledge your own responsibility without taking responsibility for everything. You can love someone and disagree with them.

You don’t have to turn another person into a villain in order to take your own experience seriously.

Maybe compassion is spacious enough for more than one truth. I understand why this may have happened, and it hurt me. I care about what you’ve been through, and I care about what happened to me, too. I can see your humanity, and I don’t have to disappear in order to honor it.

You may not immediately know what that means for the relationship. You may need a conversation. You may need time. You may decide nothing needs to change. You may decide something does.

Compassion doesn’t make that decision for you. It simply gives you enough room to see more of what is true.

And sometimes that is where we finally begin hearing ourselves again.

Inside The Transforming Force, we’re spending October exploring Cultivating Compassion for Self & Others and what happens when compassion makes room for both another person’s humanity and our own.

If this feels familiar, come join us inside The Transforming Force.