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they are talking about what they learned yesterday and it feels like people are using something that was painful to me to help themselves in their recovery efforts. Maybe I'm being selfish and self-absorbed, but there's something about me hurting and them feeling uplifted that just doesn't make me feel very good about myself.
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Jenna, please understand I can't heal the hurt so yes, I try to learn from it. I need to feel uplifted sometimes, to feel myself coping, to occassionally feel something I did was ok or that at the very least I didn't cause more hurt.
You see if I forbid myself to ever feel uplifted when someone else is in pain I can't live at all. I work with abused kids, my husband is trying and mostly succeeding to stay off booze, meanwhile he's been denied the psychiatric help he needs because of his past drinking. My brother has learning disabilities, lives alone in a terrace and often gets bullied at work. These are people that I love, people who's courage touches my heart, people that I learn from by the gentleness they have and sometimes even from their pain.
So you see, I don't think I have an option not to let myself feel uplifted every now and again and as I can only get that feeling by my heart, words and actions being the same thing it doesn't do harm to others.
Jenna, give the same as you know it's right to get back - I mean inside you, in the way you feel about others, be slow to judge and quick to care. Sometimes that means being slow to judge people as wanting to hurt you.
People can and do do things they know will hurt others - but let that be their problem because I can't imagine a harder way to live life. As they judge the world outside they must partly judge themselves.