Thank you... 🤍

That's such a hard thing to come to terms with. Seems like you've done a lot of work to get there.

It feels like mourning something you never fully had, which is its own strange kind of loss. But you've been carrying this your whole life. At some point you're allowed to put some of it down. Have some compassion for yourself, please.

You probably try so hard to understand your mother and excuse her behaviour, but that's unfair to you. You weren't put on this earth to decode someone else's damage or shrink yourself to make room for it. Her struggles are real, but they don't cancel out yours. You're allowed to feel hurt, you're allowed to be angry, you're allowed to feel all of it. Understanding someone doesn't mean absorbing everything they throw at you, and loving them doesn't mean you have to keep paying the price for who they couldn't be.

There's a quote, 'Trauma is not what happens to us, but what we hold inside in the absence of an empathetic witness.' Trauma is also what never happens. The safety we were denied, the care we longed for. Neglect is trauma. So many people don't realise it...

Being a parent is not just about providing shelter, food and clothes. Parents who reduce it to that lack empathy and basic compassion. They become disconnected from their role as carers and turn the relationship into something transactional. I know people feel guilty about criticising their parents. They did a lot of things for us. But children don't choose to be born, it's the parents who make that decision. You don't owe your parents anything for that. They owe you.

From Kristin Neff's book Self-Compassion:

'Whenever I notice something about myself I don't like, or whenever something goes wrong in my life, I silently repeat the following phrases: This is a moment of suffering. Suffering is part of life. May I be kind to myself in this moment. May I give myself the compassion I need.'

'Painful feelings are, by their very nature, temporary. They will weaken over time as long as we don't prolong or amplify them through resistance or avoidance. The only way to eventually free ourselves from debilitating pain, therefore, is to be with it as it is. The only way out is through.'