The Other Side of Our Healing

The difficult work of holding what happened to us alongside what happened around us

There is a version of healing that asks us to tell the truth about what happened to us. There is another, perhaps later, version that asks us to tolerate what that truth does not explain away.

For many of us, healing begins by turning inward. We begin to understand the origins of things we once judged harshly in ourselves: the anger, the neediness, the hypervigilance, the shutting down, the controlling, the disappearing, the ways we chased love, withheld it, demanded reassurance, avoided conflict, created conflict, or became so defended that very little could actually reach us.

And often, when we look closely enough, there are reasons. Maybe love was unpredictable. Maybe anger was the only emotion that ever made us feel powerful. Maybe we grew up monitoring the emotional weather of a parent and became exquisitely attuned to the smallest signs of withdrawal. Maybe vulnerability was unsafe. Maybe our needs were too much for the people raising us, or no one seemed to notice that we had needs at all. Maybe we learned that being lovable meant being useful, impressive, pleasing, quiet, exceptional, easy, or endlessly accommodating.

Understanding these things can be life changing. What once looked like pathology begins to look like adaptation. We start to see that much of what we have disliked about ourselves did not come from nowhere. There was a reason. There was a history. There was a younger person underneath all of it doing the best she could with what she had.

This part of healing matters enormously. We need to make sense of ourselves. We need compassion for the person who adapted to circumstances she did not choose. We need to know that what happened to us was real and that it mattered.

But there may come a point, much further into the work, when healing asks something more difficult of us.

What was it like to be on the other side of me?

Not only, What happened to me? but also, What happened around me because of what happened to me?

Those questions are not opposites. Yet it can take a significant amount of psychological maturity to allow them to coexist.

This is not a starting place

I don't think we can always begin here. There are periods of healing when our work is specifically to become more loyal and compassionate toward our own experience. People who have spent years minimizing themselves, doubting themselves, accommodating everyone around them, or taking responsibility for things that were never theirs may first need to develop a stronger sense of self.

For others, the early work can look almost opposite. They may have become practiced externalizers, locating discomfort primarily in what other people are doing wrong. They may blame, project, or remain so focused on the behavior of others that they are surprisingly disconnected from their own felt experience. Their work may first require turning inward and recognizing what is actually happening inside them before converting that experience into an indictment of someone else.

Different as these starting places may look, both require the development of a sturdier self. We may need to learn: I matter. What happened to me matters. My anger contains information. My limits are real. My needs do not make me selfish. I am allowed to say no. I am allowed to leave. I am allowed to believe my own experience. My feelings matter.

That is not narcissism in the pejorative way we usually use the word. It is the development of a healthy ego, a solid enough self to stand on. And that solidity matters because the question What was it like to be on the other side of me? requires something of us.

It requires enough internal sturdiness, enough healthy narcissism in the developmental sense, to encounter painful information about ourselves without disappearing inside it. We need enough investment in our own worth to survive the discovery that we are imperfect.

When that foundation is fragile, hearing that we hurt someone can feel less like information about our behavior and more like an annihilating verdict about who we are. I hurt you quickly devolves into I am horrible. Then I am horrible becomes I cannot bear what I have done, or simply, I am not okay. Soon we are no longer considering the other person's experience. We are consumed by our own shame about having caused it.

There is something almost dizzying about this process. We can cycle through an entire Drama Triangle inside ourselves. We cast ourselves as the persecutor, then become the victim of our own judgment, then rush to rescue ourselves through justification, explanation, premature self-forgiveness, or some quick declaration that everyone makes mistakes. We can move through every role without remaining still long enough to hold the original complexity.

This is why I am increasingly convinced that self-compassion is not the opposite of relational responsibility. It is one of the capacities that makes relational complexity possible. We need enough love for ourselves that discovering something unflattering does not require us to deny it or destroy ourselves over it. We need enough ego strength to recognize, I did something painful, without converting behavior into identity and concluding, There is something fundamentally wrong with me.

Only then do we become spacious enough inside ourselves for another person's reality to exist alongside our own, without either one having to disappear.

The story gets bigger

Most of us experience our lives from the inside out. We know what we meant. We know what we feared. We know the panic underneath the accusation, the abandonment underneath the anger, the fear underneath the control, the loneliness underneath the demand. We know the history that was activated in the moment. We know how desperately we were trying not to feel something we had felt before.

The people around us do not necessarily experience any of that. They experience us.

A woman may know that she was terrified of being abandoned, while her partner remembers being interrogated whenever he spent time away from her. A man may understand that conflict caused him to shut down because the home he grew up in was frightening and chaotic, while his partner remembers years of trying to reach someone who disappeared whenever a conversation became difficult. A mother may understand that her rage came from years of being powerless, while her children remember listening for the tone of her footsteps to determine what kind of evening they were about to have.

Someone raised by a narcissistic parent may have spent years recovering from being controlled, invalidated, made to second-guess their own experience, or emotionally consumed by that parent, while also having absorbed some of the same relational strategies. They may have learned to dominate a conversation, struggle to tolerate criticism, make other people's feelings about themselves, or experience disagreement as disloyalty. The fact that those behaviors were learned in an environment that wounded them matters deeply. The fact that those adaptations may later wound people who had nothing to do with the original injury matters deeply too.

This is where things become uncomfortable, because often the people who receive our adaptations are not the people who created them. Our partner did not abandon us when we were six. Our child did not humiliate us in adolescence. Our friend did not create the household in which disagreement meant danger. The person standing in front of us today may simply have encountered defenses built for a war they never participated in.

Wounds travel. Not inevitably. Not permanently. But they can.

And one of the harder parts of healing is realizing that sometimes the very things that once helped us survive later became difficult for other people to survive in us.

That realization does not make the original wound less significant. It makes the story bigger.

Two truths do not have to cancel each other

We are often much better at choosing between truths than holding them together.

Either I was the one who was harmed, in which case my behavior must remain understood primarily through the lens of what happened to me, or I caused harm, in which case perhaps I lose my claim to compassion altogether. Either innocent or guilty. Either victim or perpetrator. Either wounded or wounding.

But human beings rarely remain so neatly assigned.

We can have been profoundly hurt and later behave in ways that hurt people. We can have been abandoned and become controlling. We can have been silenced and become domineering. We can have been criticized mercilessly and later become intolerant of criticism. We can have learned to disappear because closeness was dangerous and eventually become someone whose absence wounds the people trying to love us. We can have been manipulated and later discover that we manipulate.

We can be wounded and wounding.

The emotional sophistication is in refusing to use either truth to invalidate the other. I was hurt, and that matters. The ways I learned to survive my hurt affected people I love, and that matters too. Not half of each. Not a compromise between the two. Both, fully.

That is very different from saying everyone is equally responsible for everything that happens inside a relationship. They aren't. Abuse, coercion, exploitation, violence, and profound power imbalances require clarity, not some reflexive insistence that there must always be two equal sides.

But much of human relationship exists in more complicated territory. Sometimes I deserved protection from what happened to me, and years later someone I loved deserved protection from what I did with what happened to me. Sometimes I deserved enormous compassion, and so did they. Sometimes the very behavior I most need compassion in order to understand is also behavior someone else experienced as painful.

There is no contradiction there once we stop treating compassion as a scarce resource. Extending compassion toward someone who was affected by us does not require withdrawing compassion from ourselves.

What was it like to be on the other side of me?

I keep returning to this question because it requires a particular kind of relational imagination.

What was it like to love me when I could not trust love? What was it like to disagree with me when disagreement registered in my body as rejection? What was it like to need something from me when I was drowning in my own needs? What was it like to tell me that I hurt you and watch me immediately explain why I did it? What was it like to bring me your pain and eventually find yourself tending to mine? What was it like to live next to my anger, constantly reassure my fear, or be held responsible for repairing wounds you did not create? What was it like to love me while I was still learning the difference between intimacy and enmeshment, between differentiation and disconnection, between boundaries and punishment, between self-protection and withdrawal?

These are not questions designed to indict us. They become possible when we no longer need to protect ourselves from the existence of another person's reality.

That may be one of the most important developmental shifts in relationship. I become sufficiently rooted in my own subjective experience that yours no longer threatens it. I don't have to convince you that I was hurting in order for my hurt to remain real. I don't have to disprove your experience of me in order to preserve my own.

I can know what was happening inside me and become curious about what was happening inside you at the same time.

If I am not for myself

There is a teaching from Rabbi Hillel that has followed me for years: If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?

The older I get, the more I hear those first two questions as inseparable.

If I am not for myself, who will be for me? There is the development of self. I must become capable of standing with myself. I must take my experience seriously. I must know when I have been hurt. I must not abandon myself simply because someone else is uncomfortable with my truth. I need boundaries, dignity, self-respect, and enough confidence in my own perception to live from the inside out.

Perhaps it is no accident that Hillel begins here. Self first. Not because the self is all that matters, but because there must first be a self sturdy enough to enter relationship without disappearing.

But Hillel does not stop there. Thank goodness.

If I am only for myself, what am I? There is the return to relationship. My experience matters enormously. It is simply not the only experience that matters. There are other centers of consciousness in the room. Other histories. Other nervous systems. Other wounds. Other meanings. Other people whose inner lives are as vivid and consequential to them as mine is to me.

Perhaps emotional maturity requires both movements. First, I become a self. Then I become a self capable of relationship with other selves. I learn not to abandon myself, and eventually I become strong enough that acknowledging you does not feel like abandoning me.

This may be one of the prerequisites for partnership

Two people can love each other deeply and still remain unable to do this.

We can bring tremendous loyalty, affection, attraction, intelligence, commitment, shared history, and good intentions into a partnership while lacking the ability to tolerate our partner's experience of us. Eventually, that limitation becomes the limit of the relationship.

At some point a long-term partner will see something about us we would rather not see. They will experience our defenses from the outside. They will know what our withdrawal feels like from across the room. They will know what happens to the atmosphere when we are ashamed, frightened, disappointed, overwhelmed, or angry. They will encounter not only the person we understand ourselves to be, but the person we actually become in relationship.

When they try to tell us about that person, what happens next matters tremendously. If their experience immediately becomes an accusation, we defend. If their hurt becomes a verdict on our character, we collapse. If their perception threatens our version of ourselves, we cross-examine them about the details. That's not what happened. That's not what I meant. You're leaving out what you did. You know why I reacted that way.

Sometimes all of those things may contain relevant information. Context matters. Intent matters. Our side of the story matters. But if we cannot let another person's experience exist for even a moment before requiring our own experience to correct it, intimacy eventually reaches a ceiling.

Healthy partnership does not require agreeing with everything our partner thinks about us. It does not require absorbing accusations that are false, accepting responsibility for someone else's behavior, or surrendering our boundaries in the name of empathy. It requires something subtler: the ability to remain connected to our own reality while becoming genuinely curious about theirs.

Emotional intimacy requires more than the ability to tolerate the tension of opposites. It asks us to recognize that this tension is, in some sense, intimacy itself: two subjective realities held in relationship without requiring either one to disappear.

Can I hear that something I did hurt you before deciding whether I was justified? Can I know that my intention was loving and remain interested in why the impact was painful? Can I encounter information about myself that is difficult to hear without collapsing into shame or mobilizing for war? Can I allow what I learn inside relationship to change me? Can relationship itself become alchemical, transforming something in me that I could not have transformed alone?

Perhaps this is part of what we enter intimate relationship for, even if we don't know it when we begin.

This is where partnership becomes much more than compatibility. Eventually, intimacy asks whether two people can keep revealing themselves to one another without requiring each revelation to confirm the identity they already had.

A partner becomes, among many other things, a witness to the parts of us we cannot see from inside ourselves. Not a perfect witness. Not an objective one. Not the sole authority on who we are. But an important witness. To receive that witness without surrendering ourselves to it, and without immediately discrediting it, requires exactly the kind of psychological sturdiness this essay is trying to name.

The people who knew us before we knew ourselves

One of the stranger experiences of growing older is realizing that some people knew versions of us that no longer feel entirely familiar.

There are people who experienced us before we knew how to remain present during conflict, before we understood our triggers, before we learned how to apologize without explaining, before we could distinguish boundaries from withdrawal, honesty from cruelty, caretaking from control, or intensity from intimacy. They knew us while we were still becoming.

Sometimes we want those people to meet us again. We want them to know how much we have changed. We want them to revise the story they carry. We want the new version of ourselves to somehow travel backward and soften their experience of the old one.

Sometimes that happens. Often it doesn't.

Part of integration may be accepting that not everyone receives the version of us who finally understands. Someone can remember us accurately and still not know us now. Someone can remember a version of us we regret and still be entitled to that memory. We can change without requiring the past to change with us.

And perhaps this is another place where two truths have to coexist: I am no longer that person, and, you really did experience that person.

Neither statement has to invalidate the other.

A larger story

I used to think healing meant arriving at the correct interpretation of the past. Now I wonder whether healing is less about discovering the one true story and more about becoming spacious enough to hold a larger one, one that does not discard what came before but includes it and sees beyond it.

A story in which I can remain tender toward the person I had to become and honest about what it was like to encounter her. A story in which what happened to me remains significant without becoming the explanation that swallows everyone else's experience. A story in which I do not have to choose between self-compassion and relational awareness. A story in which I can be innocent in one chapter and responsible in another. A story in which I can have been deeply wounded without making woundedness my permanent identity.

Maybe this is why the question What was it like to be on the other side of me? feels so powerful. It is not a question of confession. It is not an invitation to self-punishment. It is not even, primarily, a question about accountability.

It is evidence that the self has become strong enough to tolerate complexity.

Strong enough to know that compassion for another person does not diminish compassion for me. Wise enough, perhaps, to discover that compassion is less like a ration we distribute and more like a wellspring. Its movement toward another does not require its disappearance from us. Strong enough to understand that another person's pain does not necessarily mean I am bad. Strong enough to discover that I may have been both harmed and harmful, loved and difficult to love, doing my best and still leaving consequences behind me.

There is a kind of freedom in no longer needing our life story to contain only one injured person.

I can stand beside the person I once was and say, I understand why you became this way. I will not abandon you. And then I can turn toward the people who encountered me and say, I understand that you were there too.

Maybe that is one of the places healing eventually takes us.

Not away from our own story, but into a bigger one.