Finding Peace With the Past

How to stop letting people hurt you

Sometimes in life, there are people who have hurt us an inordinate amount. We feel like they are taking up space in our heads, long after they themselves are no longer in our lives.

How do you learn to let go of people and situations that have hurt you? How do you learn to heal the scars? How do you move on?

It can be easier said than done. People always tell you to forgive people who have hurt you, and personally I feel like this is giving up your power.

Letting go of the past

Learning how to set boundaries with people, how to say no and stick up for yourself, is far more valuable than forgiveness.

But, what do you do when those people and situations are still taking up space in your head, sometimes even years later?

I find that the situations that linger in my mind are the ones where I should have said no sooner. I should have told people that what they were doing wasn’t ok. But I didn’t speak up for myself.

They always tell you that you should be kind and forgiving, and give people second chances. But how many chances is too many? Odds are, if people boundary stomp, they are going to just keep doing it. They may not know any better, or they may not care.

In either case, sometimes you are better off without certain people in your life.

My problem is that I am too nice. I have always been too nice. I have given people way too many second chances when they didn’t deserve it, and they just went on to hurt me worse the next time around.

When you forgive people too much, knowing full well that you shouldn’t, it corrodes your trust in yourself.

Trusting the wrong people too much, or believing that they will change just hurts you again.

I read several places this week about the value of forgiveness, and I was turning this over and over in my mind. I wrote about how it is OK not to forgive narcissists and other toxic people.

Then I read about forgiveness again from a different source.

I thought ok, maybe the universe is trying to tell me something here. The same message keeps coming at me again and again and trying to push my buttons. So maybe I should do something about it.

Have a good journal session

Holding onto anger and resentment just festers under the surface of your life. The voices of people from the past turn into the voice of your own inner critic, telling you that you can’t do anything right.

Sometimes it can help to journal it all out.

So, instead of writing letters to the people who have wronged me and trying to forgive them, I decided to write goodbye letters, so that they will stop taking up space in my head.

I used to have this really good job, where I worked for about 10 years. I got a promotion that came with a transfer to a new office, and I was supervised by someone who had previously been a peer and a friend.

Add to that, I was aggressively recruited for this position.

When I took the job, I had heard some things about a toxic office culture, and I brought it up when I was interviewing. My friend told me that all the issues had been addressed, and that the office was doing well.

Later on down the line when things started to go badly with the job and — you guessed it! — the toxic office culture, she asked me if I thought she had gaslighted me.

Maybe she did. But the thing is, I saw red flags and I ignored them in the name of friendship. Come to find out that my new boss wasn’t really my friend, and she had really poor boundaries.

She also expected me to have poor boundaries. To respond to emails at all hours of the night. To do hours worth of travel. To work with an assistant who was incompetent. To overextend myself, and not to be able to set boundaries regarding my schedule. Add to this, in this office, people legit yelled at people in meetings.

I had a young baby, so it wasn’t going to fly. I started having panic attacks at work. It was horrible.

Years later, all this is still taking up space in my head. I ignored way too many red flags early on in this job. In retrospect, I should have never taken the position. I was happy in the job I had before that, and I could have easily stayed there.

So, to get this all out of my head, I decided to put it all down on paper. I wrote a long letter to my former friend/ boss and put all my feelings onto paper.

I tried to look at the situation objectively, and to realize that the reason my boss expected me to totally lack boundaries is because she totally lacks boundaries. She had no work-life balance. She was too nice and accommodating to everyone and expected me to be the same.

I can forgive her, because it is her own habits that created all the problems. It wasn’t about me. Any normal person would have failed in that job under those conditions.

What I need to do is to forgive myself. I did the best I could. I tried to forgive in a situation where I should have just walked away as soon as things started to go wrong. I should never have taken that job offer in the first place.

Forgive yourself

A lot of times, it isn’t other people that we are needing to forgive. It is ourselves.

We need to learn how to forgive ourselves for acting a way in the past that has led to deep emotional scars. We need to forgive ourselves for holding on too long to situations and relationships that aren’t serving us.

In so many instances, forgiving people too many times has gotten me into trouble. Because when you forgive someone, you trust them again, you allow yourself to get hurt again.

When you have been a victim, you don’t need to forgive the person who hurt you. Again. It is just like beating a dead horse, with the dead horse being your own feelings.

At some point, you have to make peace, cut ties, and move on.

It isn’t about forgiving the person who hurt you, it is about forgiving yourself for allowing yourself to be hurt by that person. It is about realizing you weren’t weak to be hurt. You were strong. That is how you allowed yourself to get hurt so many times in the first place.

Maybe it is a little bit masochistic even. We think that we can handle so much. Think that we have to handle it. Think that we have to keep going back into the same situations again and again, just because we can.

The fact that you can do something doesn’t mean that you should do it.

Letting go of this idea that we have to keep trying to fix situations that aren’t fixable is one of the things that many of us have to learn. Especially those who have been victims of different types of abuse and gaslighting in the past.

My old boss did gaslight me. She told me everything was fine, when it was so far from fine that it wasn’t even in the same universe.

I can forgive her. I can forgive myself. But I’m not going to work for her again, and I’m not going to be her friend.

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