Quote from: Dances With Trees on January 29, 2026, 11:06:30 AMSometimes, people I love cause me more pain than the ones I know despise me.
Precisely
because you love them. That's why. Love is like... it's like the soul being deeply drunk. For lack of a better term. All the usual things you have in place to read people, and gauge a situation go completely out of the window when you talk in terms of love. You're at your most vulnerable. That can be the most wonderful, but also the most heart-wrenching state. When you give someone a piece of your soul, you have to trust them to be gentle with it. You surrender control of your innermost self to another... and that can be hard.
But you touched on something, Annika. You expect certain behaviour from some people. Not from others. Depending how you feel about them, and what you know about them. This is something it's taken me a long,
long time to come to terms with... the behaviour itself doesn't change. What changes is how you process and deal with it. Hurt doesn't come from someone else. It comes from our
own reactions to a situation. For a lot of years I've blamed a lot of people for a lot of things. For being hurt, for feeling angry, or sad, or alone. I've had a lot of patient people try and help me understand a lot of the rage I felt about a lot of things. Rage buried so deep it burned me up like a coal mine fire in my core. It's
their fault. If they didn't do whatever it was, I wouldn't feel that way.
This is probably true. I mean certainly it is. But it's missing the most important consideration. I
allowed myself to feel the way I did. I
allowed myself to feel hurt, or angry, or sad, or alone based on a word, or an action, or a combination of actions. People can only affect you if you let them. If you give them permission. And where love is concerned... you basically hand over your PIN number, password, mother's maiden name, pet's name, and favourite colour to someone else.
Anyway, the upshot is, as a result of a lot of soul-searching, I am arguably colder now than I used to be. More distant. Personally speaking. Maybe that's a bad thing. But I am also wary of situations where I allow myself to feel hurt. That distance allows me to look at
why people act the way they do. To try and understand. When it comes to the situation you describe, Anni... it seems to me your sister did it to deliberately try and make you feel the way you did. To feel hurt. Probably because
she feels hurt about something. And the only way sometimes that people know how to make someone understand that they feel a certain way is to make someone else feel that same way.
Maybe because they don't know how to verbalise something. I feel there's a lot unsaid between you. That you don't know how to, or don't want to for fear of what it might lead to. And raw emotion is a way to speak without words? Sorry, sweetie, I'm not trying to analyse you or anything. The point I guess I'm trying to make is that the cause of pain isn't the person trying to inflict it. It's the person allowing themselves to suffer it. Emotional pain, anyway. However you feel, try to understand
why someone might behave the way they do. Because doing that might (probably will) change the way you feel yourself.
*big hugs*
