In talking to a psychologist about my Anxiety and my triggers, he asked me why I kept talking about experiences or people that had hurt me and then had followed up with a comment saying how stupid I was for being hurt, how I shouldn’t even feel like this. How wrong I was for talking about it.
He looked into my eyes and repeated the quote above. He said the following;
“Stop telling yourself that you aren’t worth anything. Someone doesn’t get to tell you when they’ve hurt you and when they haven’t. The key for moving on however is learning to forgive them even though you may never get an apology.”
This made such a big difference to my Anxiety and to my recovery.
In my very dark days, I would sit there holding this hurt and feeling guilty and angry at myself for feeling it. I remember going through an experience where I was feeling extremely hurt and trying to share my pain with that person over the fact that they had betrayed me. I spoke of my hurt that they had continued with the behaviour and that it was causing me pain.I was looking for him to comfort me and to provide some kind of explanation as to why this had happened and why it continued to happen. I was looking for him to confirm my hurt.
But I didn’t get any of these things. I got a response out of anger. I was told to get over it and to stop holding onto something which had caused me amazing pain. Most of all I got told that it partly had been my fault and that I needed to stop holding it against him because it made him feel bad.
Never once did I get told that it was ok for me to be hurt, never once did I get comforted and told that I was worth more.
I was told that I shouldn’t be hurt.
My Anxiety Disorder grew from that moment. I made myself sick telling myself to not feel hurt, to not deal with it, to ignore it and pretend it never happened. To let myself believe that I was the problem not his actions. I wasn’t allowed to talk about it with him and I wasn’t allowed to bring it up at all. It made me physically sick.
And then sitting in the room with my psychologist, he said those words and suddenly my body decided it was ok to feel it and suddenly I broke down. I bawled my eyes out asking the psychologist why I wasn’t worth it, why I was so hurt when it was my fault. Why it still continued to impact my life daily.
And he said to me again that I had to stop letting people decide if they had hurt me or not. He said that when I had been hurt by something, the other person doesn’t get to decide that they didn’t. He said I needed to believe that I was worth enough and that when I was hurt, I needed to heal those hurts and not ignore them or push them away just because someone told me too.
And it made a difference to me and my anxiety.
So I just want to encourage you today, if you have been hurt by someone and they don’t admit to doing anything wrong, it doesn’t mean that you aren’t hurt, it doesn’t mean that you can’t feel the emotions but it does mean that you are responsible to start healing that hurt, you can’t just sit there and push it down again and again until it makes you sick.
You are worth it and sometimes we have to forgive those who aren’t sorry.
Living with Anxiety Me 