The other night I received a text from a newer friend asking about something we were debating about letting the kids do together.  As the conversation progressed, we got on the topic of another child’s behavior because there were concerns about allowing our children to participate because of this kid.  I’ve been allowing my son to participate how he chooses with his friends and I haven’t intervened with anything because I want my son to trust his own judgement—within reason of course.  Regardless, there were a couple of incidents with this child and my friend’s experience with the parents has been different than my own.  We all raise our kids differently with different expectations and repercussions for certain things but we have all of the kids’ best interests at heart.  But in the course of this conversation, parent politics came up.  She essentially let me know that it was known amongst people outside of my old friend group that something happened with all of us.  Just writing that out felt juvenile, yet, as we talked about the other day, there are a lot of people stuck in juvenile ways.  Someone feels the need to continue this situation by spreading the partial story to others.  Immediately all the old hurt sprang up because this isn’t actually that old of a situation. I had assumed it would stay with the people involved. 

With that old wound open, it got me thinking about how it’s still impacting me.  I want to talk about the cyclical nature of healing along with the impact of outside parties on that healing.  Healing in itself is already a process that ebbs and flows between fine and not fine, even on the best days, and emotional healing can run the entire spectrum in the same minute.  It’s intense and challenging work to dive into various traumas and try to understand why the people closest to us do certain things.  It hurts the most with people close to us because these are the ones we entrust with parts of us that no one else gets to see and that creates a level of vulnerability in that implied trust.  There are different reasons people do things that hurt us whether it’s simply testing the waters, a desire to do their own thing, or even some really nefarious motives and at some point, depending on the nature of the relationship that motive doesn’t even matter: when that trust is broken, part of us breaks too.  But the focus of this topic is the idea that we can be on a certain level of healing and think we have moved on (or are moving on) only to find out the other party is instigating further hurt.  That’s a test even for the most psychologically astute person.  In my mind, logically that says more about the other person than ourselves yet the emotional part of me wants to tear that person apart.  There is never any sense in beating a wounded animal—if we’ve chosen to leave well enough alone, there is no need to beleaguer the point and draw out the pain for someone who isn’t doing anything. 

So why keep pushing and sharing the story knowing full well it could hurt the other people involved? There is a certain level of immaturity there but there’s more.  Is the lack of response making them seek out responses in other ways?  It’s attention seeking but also power seeking because they’re keeping the story on themselves.  They want to control the narrative so they try to get it out their way to as many people as they can.  When they don’t know what’s going on with the other side, they like to fill in the blanks themselves.  The reality is we can’t control what people think or do and we can’t change their perspective either and we need to trust that people can make informed decisions based on the facts.  And even if they don’t, we still know who we are at the end of the day.  The bottom line is people are going to talk no matter what we do—someone always has an opinion to share on the matter and people like to hear themselves speak, they like any spotlight they can get.  Knowing all those reasons doesn’t mean it feels good to find out the discussion is going on all around you about you.  That, too, is something we have no control over so we need to decide to control our own narrative.  I made the decision to not let someone’s version of the story disturb my peace or change how I behave toward others.  I can be their villain if that’s how they see it—I still get to be the hero in mine.  So let them talk.