Narratives…

When I found out I had been betrayed by someone I loved, I craved answers. Closure. My mind went a million miles per hour obsessing over every detail of how this happened. How did this happen to me? To us? What part did I play? I had ruminating thoughts all the time. They were endless and would NOT LET UP.  I know I was not easy to deal with during this time. Not that I needed to be, I was the one who deserved the apology, answers, kindness, etc. but I was difficult to be around. That is just a fact. Whether it was warranted or not, I was not pleasant.  I was especially difficult for myself to be around. Not only was I breaking but I wanted to be handling it a lot better than I was; so to top off the hurt, being disappointed in myself for how I was reacting made things even more difficult for me. 

I want to be clear before I go on and move on to the point of this post. I had every right to be difficult. I had every reason to be mad. I had every reason to be demanding. I had every reason to not trust. I had every right to want answers and the truth. I did not need to be pleasant to make someone who hurt me more comfortable. And if you are in the beginning of betrayal–you have every right to feel it and whatever comes up is okay. Not every action to your emotion is okay but every emotion is. 

I had thought about how I would react should this ever happen to me and it was very different than how I actually dealt with it. That is what made me disappointed in myself, because the version I was was not someone I recognized and was definitely not who I had planned to be in a circumstance like this. I was not disappointed in myself because I handled it wrong, I didn’t handle it wrong, my emotions were warranted and were okay but I was looking at a different version of me that I did not recognize anymore. All the planning in the world for how we think we will react to different shattering circumstances will not actually prepare us for our real reaction. We will often be surprised by how we react. Sometimes something will rise in us that we never knew was there. And that’s okay. That’s data we use for when we heal.

But before I could even begin healing, I had to form a narrative in the absence of truth and answers in order to give myself closure that I was never going to get from someone else. I couldn’t begin to heal until I formed the story and there were many gaps, many variables and many perspectives involved in the real story that I would never know so I made up some things using logic, my understanding of timelines, my experience, what I remembered about conversations and situations, etc. Eventually, I formed a story about what I thought had happened and how it happened. This was part of my process to let go and give myself closure. 

That narrative we form in the absence of information is often very skewed and very wrong. We have to do this all the time, in big and small ways. We form narratives about why our bosses do what they do and make the decisions they make and we do this without having all of the information. Many times, these narratives pin your boss or management against you. We form narratives around why our parents parented us the way they did. Why friendships ended. Why the waitress was rude to us. And we usually form these narratives in ways that are very slanted toward us and very slanted against someone else. 

Take my situation for instance, what I know that happened was bad. Was hurtful. Was wrong. Caused me a lot of pain. Caused a ripple effect that hurt me even more and caused even more problems. So of course, while I am forming a story with a beginning, middle and end in my mind, the details I have to form in the absence of information are going to skew towards the facts I do know. And the facts were bad so the filler I am putting in to make the story whole was bad too. That filler skewed heavily to make me more the victim because I already knew I was the victim. But I do not know that filler to be true at all. The truth is probably not as bad as I have decided it was. It’s easier to write someone off as ‘bad’ and ‘hurtful’ and a ‘liar’ than it is to admit that people are multi-faceted and that because someone did something hurtful does not mean they set out to hurt me. 

I recently discovered myself on the other side of this scenario where the assumptions about me skewed heavily in the other way. I learned the filler that had been put into a situation where I had not previously provided clarity made me an even worse character in this person’s story than I already was. And don’t get me wrong, I did something that goes against the standard I hold myself to and so for that reason, I failed. Of course, I could justify what I did and I have done that over the years but I always knew I did something that goes against the kind of person I want to be and I have apologized to this person before and I knew that their version of events didn’t line up to my version of events but I apologize for my part regardless of the little details here and there that aren’t accurate because how can I expect someone to believe that I didn’t do what they think I did when I broke their trust regardless? But to be on the receiving end of assumptions made about me and those assumptions skewing to the worst possible version of me at every turn is its own kind of pain.

And if I am honest, I am causing that pain when I look at my situation and skew towards the worst possible version of the person who betrayed me at every turn. I am inserting more pain into this story than was already there and that is no good for anyone. I want to learn to provide myself closure without knowing the whole story and without inserting a version of the story that always skews in my direction as the victim and their direction as the ‘bad’ one. That really removes that facets of people and that really does everyone a disservice. It makes them the villain and me the victim or vice versa and I, for one, have no interest in being either.

The truth of being human is that we will all hurt others and be hurt by others. We will all go against our standards we set for ourselves sometimes. We are all the hero and the villain depending on the story and who is telling it. We are all capable of being both. It may be easier to decide that the person who loved you well for many months or years but hurt you in the end was always terrible but then that makes me or you the person who couldn’t tell for months or years that someone was terrible. Then we’re the dumb one. I do not want to be that either!

Or, we can just admit that sometimes people who love us will hurt us and that doesn’t negate the good they did or the love they did give us. For me, that feels like a more peaceful place to live. It’s where I strive to settle because when I allow for people to have different facets, I hope it allows me to have different facets as well.