On Being Thankful For Those Who Hurt Us

This article is inspired by episode #6 of the In Your Feelings Podcast, a collaboration from Thought Catalog and Bianca Sparacino.
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[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Emq5poXEcxM&w=560&h=315%5D

Firstly, this is a testament to the connection you had.

At the end of the day, the people who affect us the most are those who we truly let see us. Those we felt a deep connection to. At one point in time you let someone affect you to the point where they were deeply ingrained in your heart. Being hurt by them is difficult because you cared so much. Let this be a reminder that you tried for something. That you genuinely cared for someone in a way most people will never experience. In a world that favors being disconnected, and guarded, over being open — you opened yourself up to someone, and while it didn’t end the way you envisioned, you still experience something that injected beauty into your life for a moment in time. There is hope in that.

Yes, it hurts. But it is growing you.

No one ever wants to be hurt by the person who they thought they would be with forever. No one wants to deal with those emotions. No one wants to live in all of that pain. It is gritty and messy and in a moment, it can feel extremely dark. If you are in a moment like this right now, you have to understand that this feeling is temporary. In return, by making it through the tunnel of this hurt, you will come out stronger and more compassionate and you will learn things about yourself that you never would have if you hadn’t met this person. Nothing is for nothing. It’s all growth.

Sometimes, we mistake a teacher for a soulmate. But the most difficult feelings we experience with them, change us for the better.

One of the biggest lessons I have learned is that people come into our lives sometimes, and while we often hope that they stay, sometimes they aren’t meant to. Sometimes people come into our lives to teach us certain things about ourselves. How to speak up for ourselves. How to advocate for ourselves. What we like, and what we dislike. How to see our own value, our own worth. How to stand up for our hearts, and the way we love in the world. Not everyone is meant to be a forever. But the lessons always remain. The lessons always stay.

You cannot control what happened, but you can control how you heal, and grow from it.

Let this be a lesson in control. Sometimes we lose people we never thought we would. Sometimes the people we trust the most hurt us. Sometimes really unfortunate, really messy things happen, and we cannot control it. Because we cannot control other human beings. We cannot control how they show up for us, or how they treat us. We can only control the way we react. The way we grow from the experience.

And when you come to peace with that, you actually grow into a kinder human being.

When you acknowledge how you feel, let it pass through you, and choose to experience it and grow from it and learn what it has to teach you, instead of letting it harden you to the world, it makes you more conscious. It makes you self aware because you don’t want others to feel that way. You feel more responsible for the hearts of other human beings, you gain a form of compassion.

Some of the kindest human beings I know have been hurt the most. Some of the kindest human beings have had to pull themselves out of the dark, and they recognize that they don’t want to create it. They soften instead of hardening. They know who they want to be and how they want to make people feel.

You now know what you deserve.

When we heal from the hurt, we realize that we deserve more than that depth of damage. We start to see our worth. And sometimes it can be an extremely gritty process — to take note of all the times we slaughtered our instincts or didn’t stand up for what we wanted. It can be difficult to admit we settled in so many ways, that we didn’t trust our intuition, that we didn’t fight for what we needed. But it is within that knowledge that we can dedicate ourselves to choosing more for ourselves. It is within that growth that we learn to define love as being so much more than feeling let down, or saying yes when we want to say no, or feeling lonely in the presence of someone who is meant to care for us. It is within those lessons, that we learn how to be kinder to ourselves, how to stand up for our hearts and what they need.

At the end of the day, moving on is about forgiveness.

Understand that this experience, this human being, served a beautiful purpose in your life. Come to terms with that, sit with it, and find peace within it. That is the only way to truly move on, because when we forgive due to seeing how this person or this situation made us better, we stop ruminating over what we lost, we stop ruminating over negative emotions, and we start to focus on what we gained and how we built out new foundations within ourselves.

We don’t have to hate the people who broke us. That only hurts us in the long run more. If we try to change or grip at that negativity, we are always going to allow for those past experiences to negatively impact our future. Instead, choose to focus on the good — because there is always good, there is always a lesson, and let go. That is true forgiveness.

This article is inspired by episode #6 of the In Your Feelings Podcast, a collaboration from Thought Catalog and Bianca Sparacino.
Subscribe here: Spotify | iTunes