I don’t want to get into too much of the details of this hurt here as I do think I’ll share this publicly and I don’t want to call out this person publicly. This wound hurts deeper than many I’ve had over the years because it attacks something I’ve been passionate about for over 13 years, honouring my twins and their journey through giving back. I recently learned that someone who once meant a lot to me as a friend made a horrible accusation about something we were doing to honour our boys and told a few people that they believed we weren’t being honest and honourable at all. While they were corrected and did, eventually, come to realize our intentions were completely honourable and there was no wrong doing, no dishonest or fraudulent activities on our part, it absolutely guts me that someone could say such things about us. Taking this act of generosity, of goodness, of love and turning it into something dishonest and fraudulent honestly makes me feel sick.
And so now I’m left wondering why anyone could ever think and share such horrible things, why some people can do such horrible things and people just accept them and continue with their friendship (and actually slowly shut us out of their lives) but most of all, I wonder why past wounds of our hearts can be ripped open so easily.
My thoughts and prayers over the last 2 weeks have lead me to some understandings about some people and some friendships. And slightly diverging and wandering within my head and heart to the work I’ve been doing to see how our childhood forms our personality, it has also made me look at my own character, my own personality type and traits and see how some people can turn a trait that I have, and have sometimes used in selfish and self serving ways, into something extremely toxic.
My recent journey into hard internal work has led me to see that I am a caregiver and helper in my heart and that this began in my childhood. It usually begins as a way for a child to understand the world and things that happen around them, For the caregiver, it often begins because they don’t feel they can be loved for who they are and want to be loved so much that they become ‘little helpers’ to feel they are earning that love. As they become adults this can manifest into thinking they know what’s best for others, that it’s their job to help others and to fix situations. It can also manifest itself into a more toxic situation where the ‘helper’ is building a favour bank, building up a stockpile of those they’ve helped so that those people will pay this back later in life. Sort of ‘I’ll scratch your back but someday I'll expect you to scratch mine’ without telling the people they help. They also can get very upset with others who don’t accept their help, often because they see things in a way that ‘they know best and others should see that’. This can cause relationships to break down in their lives, usually because the people they try to help get tired of their ‘I know best’ attitude.
Now I do not completely fit this personality type for a variety of reasons but i definitely have learned that the feeling I’ve always had of not being enough, not measuring up, not meeting people’s expectations and feeling I never can (nor will I ever be great at anything, only good at some things) has lead me to doing many things for others to fill the void I felt. I also have figured out that this same feeling of inadequacy has lead me to make poor choices, especially in my dating years, because I just wanted to fill that void, to be loved and appreciated by someone and yet at the same time feeling that because I wasn’t good enough that I should settle for relationships that weren’t best for me because those were the people who would accept my flaws more or not see them because they had lots themselves. Messed up right!!!!
Anyway, I’ve diverged again. This helping personality type, in it’s unhealthy state, is what made me think of this person who has hurt me so much. While I don’t know if he’s the same type as me, I now see the extreme side of this type. He fits the classic ‘I know best and you should accept my help’ attitude and he, most definitely, gets upset when others don’t accept his help. When he helps, he becomes very controlling and extremely critical of others. Actually the extremely critical part exists most of the time in his life. I am now able to see that this is where our friendship began to fall apart as he was very eager to help us with a major project when I was pregnant with the twins but my husband wasn’t keen to have him help because he knew that this guy would take over the whole project, want everything done his way and make judgements on any decisions we wanted to make about the project.
So that is what started the distancing in the friendship but what could possibly bring someone to the point of saying horrible things about something we did to honour our boys and their journey? How does anyone even bring themselves to the point of thinking something so awful and then sharing it with others?
And why, oh why, am I letting this bug me so much when it happened so long ago and he was, obviously, proven wrong as we went to continue to honour our twins in similar ways for years and years to come (and still do today)???
The answer is because I’m human and because the core of this wound is actually one that I struggle to be healed from. This incident rips open the wound that relates to one of the most significant trauma experiences of my life and the wound of losing one of your children isn’t a wound that ever fully heals, it just gets to be a smoother scar as the years go by.
So while that wound may always be one that can open a little more easily than others, the wound of someone saying hurtful things, even 13 years ago, is one I can bring to God in prayer and ask for guidance for.
My therapist and I talked about it this week and she told me something very valuable. Being a Christian means that I am called to forgive but forgiving is a me thing to do, not an us thing to do. I don’t need to have any conversations with this person and I also can not expect him to have the same perspective on this, nor the same reaction or same way of moving through it because he isn’t a Christian. All I can do is pray through it and pray for him. Pray that God may open his eyes and heart to see Him and that, in time, he may come to see and know how the wounds of his own heart have hurt others.
My dearest friend and sister of the heart has also been chatting with me this week about this situation. She was hurt for me to have heard these things and had wise words she shared that came from her own devotions….
The devotion was in reflecting on how the Hebrew people had been in bondage for 400 years. They were slaves in Egypt and slavery meant they were not free to do God’s will. When Moses came to tell the Israelites how they could experience freedom they were more concerned about the reaction of their taskmasters than they were about pleasing God. Freedom would mean the Egyptians would be mad at them and might attack them. They were afraid and this fear made them feel that freedom from their bondage did not seem worth the hardships they would endure.
‘When God sets out to free us, there will often be a price we will have to pay. Grief can form a terrible form of bondage, yet we become comfortable with it. We can grow so comfortable with fear that we don’t know how to live without it. As destructive as our sinful habits might been, we may prefer living with the familiar, rather than be freed to experience the unknown.’
Living life after loss is hard enough but having people question your actions, your integrity, your moral compass makes you angry. I know that i will continue to have work to do on living through my grief and I thank God often for all that he’s done to help me to find a way through it and to live without fear…fear of accepting this trauma as part of who I am, fear of forgetting my son and the experience that changed me forever, fear of the judgment of others on how I’ve chosen to publicly grief or openly talk about infant loss and how it’s affected me…so many fears. Now I ask him to help me to love people who’ve hurt me through this journey, people who have judged, people who have said things that hurt without realizing it and, now, people who’ve said things they knowingly knew were hurtful and unkind.
My dear friend also shared this that was a reflection on this devotional for herself but applied so much to me, to this situation....
‘Sometimes it is hard to love those who have hurt or wronged me….In those moments I ask that You give me the strength to choose love. And I pray that because of this others will know that I belong to you,’
And so I will continue to ask God to give me the strength to choose love for this person and to move this situation to a place of healing and forgiveness in my heart. And I encourage anyone reading this to pray for me for this but also to consider this in your own life for situations that have wounded you and continue to sit heavy in your heart.
Peace and love my friends.
