Dear Mary:

You asked: “What do you do, how do you arrange your thoughts when (somebody) has hurt you?”

My answer: if somebody was clearly aggressive toward me (loudly, with words, or silently via the silent treatment), then I have no contact with that person.

The most powerful person in my life who was aggressive toward me was my mother. I was very hurt, very much alone, separated, inside a bubble of deep despair, day after day, year after year. I was angry at her, hated her. I was also angry at myself, guilty, for feeling angry at her.

I tried to love her, just like you wrote: “instead of putting my focus on how much I ‘dislike’ a certain person who has hurt me, I need to try to ‘love’ them… we should try to love those who hurt us”- I wasted all of my teenage years, all of my twenties in that belief, in those efforts, then all of my thirties, and I proceeded to waste all of my forties as well, living a miserable, dysfunctional life, very much in that bubble of despair.

This is how long it has been for me (“for God knows how long”, you wrote).

Finally, following my first good experience in psychotherapy, at fifty, I decided (it was not a decision that was supported by my therapist, but my own), to end all contact with my mother. I decided to take my side, no longer her side, to take the side of the innocent one (me as a child), not the side of the guilty one (she as my mother).

It was only then, when I settled this issue of my mother-myself, that I was able to start healing, to gradually get out of that bubble of despair, to see me as I am, to see other people as they are, to actually experience life outside that bubble.

anita