What are you learning?

What do you need?

What evidence do you have?

What would you advise someone you love?

Those questions bring you home.

Final Thoughts

If you have spent years making excuses for people who repeatedly hurt you, please understand that the part of you doing the explaining was probably trying to protect something valuable.

Your hope.

Your attachment.

Your family.

Your relationship.

Your idea of the future.

Your belief in the person’s goodness.

Perhaps even your belief that if you could only understand enough, love enough, communicate well enough, become patient enough, heal enough, or wait long enough, the relationship would eventually become what you always knew it could be.

There is tenderness in that.

There is loyalty in that.

There may even be something beautiful in your willingness to see beyond somebody’s worst moments.

But your ability to understand somebody deeply does not mean you owe them unlimited access to you.

Their childhood can explain them.

Their trauma can explain them.

Their fear can explain them.

Their birth chart can illuminate them.

Their current circumstances can contextualize them.

None of those things erase you.

Your experience still counts.

Your needs still count.

Your peace still counts.

Your limits still count.

And sometimes the most loving, emotionally intelligent, spiritually mature thing you can possibly say is not another beautifully researched explanation for why somebody keeps hurting you.

Sometimes it is simply:

I understand why.

And I am still not willing to live with it anymore.