“This Isn’t Healed. It’s Avoidance.”

I watched a video tonight where a woman said something that stopped me.

She said that you have to feel safe to tell the truth.

I understood immediately what she meant. Particularly now that I am studying to become a therapist, I understand why safety matters. People protect themselves when they don’t feel safe. We hide things. We minimize things. We tell partial versions of stories. Sometimes we don’t even know we’re doing it.

But my immediate reaction was:

That isn’t exactly what happened to me.

I didn’t start telling the truth when I finally felt safe.

I started telling the truth when I felt completely fucking unsafe.

When enough of my life had fallen apart that maintaining the version of myself I had been trying to maintain became harder than admitting what was actually happening.

It took feeling unsafe for me to start telling the truth.

It took feeling safe for me to start understanding it.

And those are very different things.

Telling the Truth

There is a strange kind of honesty that can come with crisis.

When your life is functioning—or functioning enough—there are structures you want to protect. A marriage. A career. A family. A reputation. Your parents’ opinion of you. Your child’s opinion of you.

Your own opinion of yourself.

You learn how to compartmentalize.

You tell yourself that you’re okay.

You explain things away.

You avoid certain subjects.

You keep moving.

And I don’t think all of that necessarily feels like lying when you’re doing it.

Sometimes avoidance is simply the version of reality you are capable of tolerating at the time.

That’s something I’m beginning to understand differently.

I’ve spent a lot of time lately thinking and writing about silence and avoidance as things we need to overcome. I still believe that.

But avoidance exists for a reason.

At some point, it probably protected us.

The problem is that yesterday’s protection can become today’s prison.

Eventually, my prison broke open.

And I started talking.

I started writing.

I started telling people things I had kept inside.

But disclosure isn’t the same thing as understanding.

Saying this happened to me isn’t necessarily the same thing as understanding what it did to me.

Saying this person hurt me isn’t the same thing as understanding how that hurt changed the way I treated somebody else.

Saying I fucked up isn’t even necessarily understanding why I fucked up.

Those are different levels of truth.

And I think I’ve spent the years since trying to move from one to the other.

The Message I Couldn’t Forget

There is a message from someone in my past that has stayed lodged in my head.

I’m not going to identify them. Their story is theirs. I’m also not interested in relitigating what happened between us or deciding who was right.

That’s actually the point.

Toward the end of one of our exchanges, I told this person that I was proud of myself, that I hoped they healed, and that I hoped someday they would tell their own story.

They responded:

“Hun, this isn’t healed, it’s avoidance dressed up.”

Then they added something that stayed with me even longer:

“I doubt you’ll look at the patterning for that.”

That pissed me off.

Of course it did.

Nobody particularly enjoys being told that the version of themselves they are presenting as growth might actually be another manifestation of the problem.

And for a long time, I think part of me wanted to prove that person wrong.

But here’s the uncomfortable thing I’ve discovered:

They weren’t entirely wrong.

There were patterns.

There was avoidance.

There were things I wasn’t ready to look at.

There were ways I could describe what other people had done to me much more easily than I could examine what I had done in response.

There were stories I told about myself that contained truth but weren’t yet the whole truth.

That person saw something.

That doesn’t mean they saw everything.

It doesn’t mean their interpretation of me was entirely correct.

It doesn’t mean mine was entirely wrong.

It means something much more uncomfortable.

Several things can be true at once.

The And

I keep finding this word lately.

And.

It’s such an insignificant little word until you realize how much of life it holds together.

I was hurt and I hurt people.

Some of my reactions were completely understandable and some of those reactions caused damage.

People failed me and I failed people.

I was doing the best I knew how to do and sometimes my best wasn’t good enough.

I deserve grace and I have responsibilities.

I can forgive myself and wish desperately that I had done certain things differently.

Someone can misunderstand me and see something about me that I cannot yet see myself.

That’s much harder than deciding who was right.

Right and wrong are wonderfully comfortable places to hide.

The and makes you stay in the room.

And maybe that’s part of what safety eventually gave me.

I became safe enough to tolerate complexity.

They Were Wrong About One Thing

There’s something about that old message that makes me proud of myself now.

Not because I can finally declare that the person who sent it was wrong.

It’s almost the opposite.

They weren’t entirely wrong about who I was. They were wrong about who I would remain.

They said they doubted I would look at the pattern.

I did.

Not immediately.

Not because they told me to.

Not perfectly.

And certainly not once.

I looked.

And then I looked again.

I’m still looking.

I’ve spent years writing about my life. I’ve gone back to things I wrote when I was absolutely certain about what they meant and discovered that I don’t interpret them the same way anymore.

I’ve gone back to conflicts where I once needed another person to be wrong and asked what they might have gotten right.

I’ve examined reactions that once seemed completely justified and asked why I reacted so strongly in the first place.

I’ve started learning more formally about systems, relationships, families, attachment, emotion, trauma, culture, and the endless ways people affect one another.

And I’m discovering how little any of us understand ourselves while we’re standing in the middle of the thing we’re eventually going to explain.

But there’s another part of this I’ve had to accept.

That person may never know any of this.

And they don’t have to.

People who knew earlier versions of us aren’t obligated to come back and inspect the renovations.

There are people who will remember me as someone I don’t believe I am anymore.

Their memories aren’t necessarily wrong.

They experienced that person.

Changing doesn’t erase him.

And genuine change can’t depend upon everybody from your past eventually returning to certify that you’ve gotten better.

Sometimes you have to do the work knowing that someone out there may always believe you didn’t.

Getting to the Roots

This is becoming particularly important to me as I learn how to become a therapist.

I like roots.

Probably too much.

When somebody tells me about a problem, my brain immediately starts digging.

What’s underneath that?

Where did that reaction come from?

What happened before this?

What’s the pattern?

What aren’t we seeing?

That instinct may someday help make me a good therapist.

Unchecked, I think it could also make me a terrible one.

Because my own life has taught me something important:

Seeing someone’s pattern does not mean they’re ready to see it.

Sometimes what looks like resistance is protection.

Sometimes avoidance developed because a person needed it.

Sometimes someone can disclose something enormous because their life has become completely unsafe—and still not be ready to examine what that disclosure means.

You cannot dig someone’s roots up simply because you think you know where they are.

You might even be right about where they are.

And still be wrong to dig.

Maybe part of therapy is creating enough safety that eventually the person sitting across from you can pick up the shovel themselves.

Safe Enough to Stay

So I don’t think the woman in the video was wrong.

I think she gave me a sentence that was true enough to make me recognize something slightly different in myself.

Sometimes we tell the truth because we finally feel safe enough to say it.

Sometimes everything becomes so unsafe that we can no longer maintain the story we’ve been telling ourselves and everyone else.

But I think something different is required to really understand the truth.

We have to become safe enough to remain beside it.

Safe enough to question our own version.

Safe enough to hear criticism without either immediately accepting it as condemnation or rejecting it as an attack.

Safe enough to revisit something that once made us furious and ask whether there was something inside it we weren’t ready to hear.

Safe enough to say:

Maybe you were wrong about me.

And maybe you saw something.

Years ago, someone told me they doubted I would ever look at my patterns.

They weren’t wrong that the patterns were there.

They were wrong about one thing.

I looked.

I’m still looking.