I came across this song the other day, “A Letter To Everyone Who’s Hurt Me,” and it really struck a chord. I mean really. How do you learn what love and respect are supposed to feel like when you grow up being shown one thing but being told or experiencing something completely different?
Uncomfortable truth: you don’t.
When you grow up in a place that where love and respect are lectured or claimed but not modeled, it feels normal to be in a relationship where someone claims to love and respect you but whose actions do not prove it. When you grow up being emotionally physically neglected, neglect feels like love. When you experience physical, emotional, or sexual abuse, abuse feels like a normal part of a normal relationship. When you grow up with emotional incest or parentification, codependency and becoming your partner’s “parent” is normal. When you grow up with parents who threaten to abandon you for being imperfect or emotional, then when a partner threatens to abandon you, it feels like love and it is perfectly natural to do everything you can to stop them from abandoning you. When you grow up in a place where two people fight constantly and are hostile and abusive, then fighting and hostility and abuse look and feel like love. When you grow up in a place where two people who don’t like each other, don’t fulfill each other, and don’t respect each other stay together, it is perfectly natural to be in a relationship with someone you don’t like, who doesn’t fulfill you, and doesn’t respect you. When you grow up watching one parent dominate and control and make demands while the other parent placates and has their needs, their wants, their feelings, their everything dismissed because “it’s what you do for someone you love, it is comfortable and natural to dominated, controlled, and every need dismissed because someone says they love you.
There is another truth here, which is that people are broken and act out their their brokenness and their unresolved issues in their relationships, often unwittingly. I get it. I see it. I understand and I can look at myself and see that I have also acted out the unresolved issues I had… However as far as this writer is concerned, ignorantia neminem excusat.
Ignorance excuses no one.
I can look at a person’s actions, past or present, and simultaneously understand why someone behaved in such a way as to injure me while also knowing they should be accountable not only for the impact of their actions, regardless of the intent, but also accountable for both healing those injuries in themselves and changing whatever must be changed in their lives, which also means changing relationships if and when a partner does not change and grow with you in that or if and when that partner remains in that toxic place themselves.
Recently, someone asked me if I would tell my ex or any of my previous abusers all the things I have done since them and despite them. There were plenty of times throughout my childhood and all my adult relationships when I tried to tell them that and I have found that often, in response to me, they’ve always said that I was made who I am because of them.
But I think the truth is I am who I am despite them.
“A Letter To Everyone Who’s Hurt Me”
Songwriter: Brennan Loney, Chandler Leighton, Jaymes Young, Mike Robinson
Chandler Leighton, 2023
I thought it was normal to watch your parents fight
It taught me dysfunction was just part of life
That love’s just a word that we use to excuse our mistakes
Now I can’t tell if I’m afraid or just jaded
I guess I’m just scared to end up the way they did
How do I unlearn the ways I deal with pain when that was all they taught me?
To everyone I’ve loved who’s let me down
Let this letter hold what I can’t say out loud
What do I owe you for who I became?
Should I say thank you or curse your name?
Do I give you credit or all of the blame?
‘Cause growth and pain always feel thе same
Feel the same, feel thе same
I try to avoid it when I meet somebody new
I fall for the same shit that I did with yo
‘Cause there’s comfort in chaos and that’s why I kept you around
It’s insane to me that this could be the medicine and the disease
A cigarette that’s killin’ me, yet I still wanna breathe in
I keep tryin’ to wash off the smell, but it’s stuck on my skin
What do I owe you for who I became?
Should I say thank you or curse your name?
Do I give you credit or all of the blame?
‘Cause growth and pain always feel the same
I wanted to fix this, I thought we could change
But when will I learn that’s a damn mistake?
And I’ll keep on givin’ ’til my body breaks
‘Cause growth and pain always feel the same
Feel the same, feel the same, feel the same, oh
I know it’s not your fault
But I don’t know who to blame, oh-oh (Oh-oh)
(Growth and pain, growth and pain, growth and pain)
(They feel the same, feel the same, feel the same)
Still don’t know the difference, I hope that can change
‘Cause love and hate, they still feel the same, feel the same
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
To everyone who grew up in a toxic or dysfunctional home and who has struggled to learn how to find and accept the kind of love that doesn’t feel normal compared to what that childhood was, I see you.
To everyone looking for what you need to get out of a toxic or dysfunctional home or relationship, I believe in you. Do not give up.
the kintsukuroi life 