I remember my friend Diana — who also happens to be a professional therapist — once saying "show me someone who claims they have no baggage and I'll show you a liar!"
She didn't necessarily mean that people actively lie about about their past histories with an intent to deceive, but people often deceive themselves about their pasts, and the extent to which they have effectively processed their traumatic or difficult experiences.
Often that self-deception is about denying that truly horrible events were actually any more than "just a little bit unpleasant." It's how monstrously awful and abusive exes benefit from the rose-colored glasses of passing time and miraculously become "not that bad," after a decade or two have gone by.
Naturally, the human ego likes to pop up and make itself known by assuring and telling us that "we've done the work" when we've actually done little more than just admitted awareness that maybe we were rather unpleasant assholes or tend to stick our heads in the sand whenever difficult situations arise. Sometimes we have to face up to the fact that we're actually accepting being the victim and milking that for all it's worth, even though we keep insisting that we're not.
"Being the victim" often turns out to be little more than a cover story for the deeper issue of having poor personal boundaries, to the point where we are actually agreeing to let someone treat us badly for a variety of reasons, like giving an abuser a free pass on the pretext that "they can't help it!"
Compassion does not mean agreeing to be a safe landing space for other people's toxic behavior.
As I have aged, it has become more and more obvious that people learn survival strategies when they are kids, and those are perfectly valid approaches. But we also reach a point where they are no longer needed and are even inappropriate to our current situation.
It might be tempting to just blame our parents... but what for?
I know that my tendency towards perfectionism was born out of having hypercritical parents, but it's not exactly their fault. They simply showed me a particular "model" but whether or not I'm stuck with it remains up to me.
I think we all have something that makes us a little bit crazy and scary.
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2026.10.20 02:24 PDT
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