Welcome And Why Forgiveness Hurts

Hey friends, I'm so glad you're here. I'm Caitlin and welcome to How to Be a Grown Up. And this is the show for women who are struggling with forgiveness right now. We've been on this arc of, you know, what happens when you got hurt or when you hurt someone and when they won't take accountability. I think forgiveness is a natural next step in this whole arc. So I want to tell you a story that is still to this day one of the most bizarre and painful friendship betrayals of my life. This is my senior year of college. I was living with my best friend. She wasn't a student at the school, but she wanted to live away from home and we were roommates. And at first, everything seemed normal-ish, but then I started noticing a few strange things. First, there was this fat envelope of cash in our freezer. It wasn't in a wallet or a drawer or you know, somewhere hidden anywhere else. It was just in the freezer. And I saw it and I had this little like, huh? Okay, people actually do this. People put money in the freezer. And then uh I guess I was just practicing denial already as a survival/slash life skill. I just put it back and I didn't ask about it right away. And then my best friend slash roommate's co-worker came into the bank where I worked, and somehow best friend slash roommate came up in our conversation. And this co-worker told me that best friend slash roommate was out of work for a little while because her father had died, which I knew to be completely untrue. And I remember just thinking, like, wait, what? Like, that didn't no, that didn't happen. Like, that's not real. And then there were like purchases, like expensive purses showing up in my house. And I just wondered, like, where, you know, this is cute. Where is this coming from? And then one day I came home from class early. It was, I was actually in between classes, and I never came home in between my first and second class on that day because they were kind of tight together. And I came home anyway because I remember it being cold. Like I was cold in my outfit and I wanted to change. And I found our dog, my roommate's dog, Sadie, outside on the street. She was freaked out, shaking. I'm trying to get her to come home. She's a strong girl. And when I get back to my apartment, there's a detective outside with a cop, and my place had been ransacked. My room was untouched, but my place had been ransacked. My roommate is crying. She tells me an unhoused man broken, assaulted her, and demanded money. So to get him to go away, she gave him the envelope full of cash. So I did what any emotionally underdeveloped college student with absolutely no wisdom and a heart full of naivety and a very active, very real sense of loyalty would do. I, you know, I ditched the rest of my classes, I called my parents, told them what happened, got into a police car with my best friend slash roommate, and we drove around looking for this man. At one point, we even stopped the cop car, and the cops accosted a man who sort of met the description. I'll never forget that. And then, you know, life continued, and a couple of weeks later, I found out from a newspaper headline that the entire thing was a lie. She had staged it. And I found out in the newspaper in front of other people who I knew and was friends with. Not from a conversation or an apology or from a confession from the newspaper. That the anger and the pain are just not going to live in your body forever. So I want to dive into that a little bit more deeply. Um, I think people confuse what forgiveness is and isn't. Let's start with what it's not. It's not saying that your hurt didn't matter or that you weren't devastated, or that it wasn't a big deal what happened. It's definitely not the same thing as going right back to how things were before it happened. Because sometimes the thing that happened really was that bad. You really shouldn't lighten up about it. You are allowed to say, no, actually, that was a very real betrayal. That was a very real egregious injury that you caused me. And that's what this was for me. It wasn't just disappointing and embarrassing. It was a very real betrayal that 21-year-old me uh really felt. So forgiveness, at least the way that I've come to understand it, is something that you do for yourself. It was for me. It was me saying, you know what, I refuse to let this thing, this nightmare, own my emotional life forever. I didn't excuse the behavior, I didn't all of a sudden trust her again. And I didn't continue living my life as though it didn't ever happen to me. It just meant I wasn't dragging it around like this carry-on bag full of well, literal bag itch bricks, I don't know. I had to get to a point where I could say, yes, this happened. It sucked, it hurt, it changed me forever, but I still don't want it to run my life. And that's really hard. We want the math, the emotional math to do the mathing, right? We want that person to understand what they did. We want the apology, we want the clean ending. We think we're gonna feel better when we get the apology and the clean ending. We want the universe to make sure the math is mathing. And when it doesn't happen, especially like in my case, when you find out something awful in the newspaper instead of from that person's mouth, forgiveness can feel impossible, like it's never gonna happen. Especially when you're that angry. It's I will never forgive you for this, right? Y'all, I agrieved for a long time. I lost the friendship. The the best friendship, the person who at the time I truly felt to be my sole person, my soulmate. I also lost most of our longtime social circle who believed her over me, and some of those people even attacked me on her behalf. And because I'm the person that I am, I'm a talk-to-process person, I'm a rejection-sensitive person, as we've discussed in the past. I'm an overall fairly trusting person. I ruminated on this ish. I could not let it go. I talked about it constantly. You know, looking back on it, I probably should have pushed hard for a therapist, but I didn't. I pushed through it by myself, like the stubborn, um, independent woman that my mother raised me to be. And I should mention, side note, my mom fully believes in therapy and better living through pharmacology. Thank you, mom. But anyway, it wasn't a quick recovery for me. I didn't just wake up one morning and go, well, that was enlightening. I learned a lesson from that. I'm gonna move on now. No. I grieved, I ached, I was furious, I was embarrassed, I was hurt, and I was all of those things at once over and over and over again. I felt foolish, I felt betrayed, I felt like a complete idiot, and a whole bunch of other things that were not cute. And it really messed up my friendships, at least the way I approach them. So here's what I have to remember and tell myself over and over and over again. Forgiveness is not the same thing as forgetting. We've heard that phrase before, right? Forgive, but don't forget. It's it's for a reason. It's because forgetting is never the goal. Memory brings wisdom. Memory helps you see patterns and red flags that I should have noticed, right? Memory reminds you after it happened of what kinds of behavior you're never going to accept or ever normalize ever again. So when we say forgive but don't forget, we don't mean replay the whole thing over and over again like your brain is stuck in some sort of masochistic loop. It just means remember enough to be wise and protect yourself, but don't open the wound over and over again just to prove that it still hurts you. Of course it still hurts you. This episode is painful for me to talk about. But I've learned enough to know what to look for, and that part I'm thankful for. And I'll be honest, I don't actually know when I decided to let this whole thing go. I remember being a full-time grad student, working full-time. I had actually given the friendship another shot. And then there was another lie, multiple lies, another betrayal. And I think at that point, I just sort of grew up, matured. I knew that with all that I was juggling, I just couldn't do it anymore. I couldn't do the drama. I couldn't do the what the actual F moments, I couldn't do the anger. And that was it. You know, that was the turning point that that let me go from feeling pain and feeling angry to just releasing every bit of it, accepting what happened and releasing the emotions behind it. So I had to learn, you know, realistically, forgiveness isn't reconciliation necessarily. We've never reconciled. It's not pretending that nothing happened. We both know this thing happened and it has shaped me. I'm never going to be able to pretend it didn't happen. It isn't handing someone full access to you again. Again, we've never reconciled. She does not have access to me outside of probably finding me on social if she wants to. Facebook only, I don't not the other places. For me, she's not. And she won't be. And that's how I know that I can forgive somebody and still say, no, not now. You're not like that. Not with my kids in my life. You don't get access to me and my life the way you did before. So forgiveness, in that sense, it means you know, you you tell the truth about what happened. Maybe people will leave you, maybe they don't. You are able to grieve what you lost, I hope. And then at one point you notice that you're just tired of being ruled by the hurt, and you decided that you're ready to put it down. And that's how it was for me. It wasn't just some like big dramatic moment. It was that whole, I can't do this. It was this realization that I was completely exhausted by this. By her, by her behavior, by myself and my own behavior. And I just couldn't let this incident or incidents as they were be the things that defined be anymore. And I think that was the real shift. It wasn't the everything's fine now, because it definitely wasn't. It was just me realizing that if I stayed in that hurt space, in that angry space, in that rage forever, then she gets to keep living in my head, in my heart, in my body rent-free. She'd already taken enough from me. Why would I let her do that? And by the way, if you're into stories about the chaotic and funny and sometimes deeply painful ways that we learn to be adults, please make sure you're following this show. I normally do that at the top of the episode, but you can tell this is me just spilling my guts to you. Anyway, I think that's what people mean when they say forgive, but don't forget. They don't mean pretending it didn't hurt you or keeping people out of your life because you had some sort of shower epiphany. All my best epiphanies happen in there. They just mean that you're deciding that the pain that you're going through, the hurt, the anger, it doesn't get to be all-consuming. It means that you're letting that pain go for your own well-being, for yourself. And then you're just using the memory of that pain to guide your future decisions. That friendship completely changed me. I grieved it for a very long time. And at some point, I realized that letting go of my negative emotions wasn't the same thing as saying it was okay. It was just the only way that I knew I could keep going. So if you're in that in-between place, the the place where you're still hurt, you still remember, you're still trying to figure out what forgiveness means. Someone says the name and you fly into a rage. I I just want to say that it's okay to take your time. Remember, you're not trying to erase what happened, you're just trying to make sure that what happened and the negative emotions that come with what happened don't own you forever. So that you can keep on going too. If you want more information about any of these topics, again, I'm not a therapist. This was a personal story that I felt like I needed to tell. I have all of this in a blog post for the episode. Um there's a lot of resources there that you can go to to read to just kind of get some tips and psychological support for this. You're just not alone in it. So feel free to read those. Again, they're listed in the blog post for the episode. Just so you know what's next, I'm gonna start planning my summer series. I don't really know. I have a few directions in mind, but I don't really know where I'm gonna go. So um I've got some ideas. And I just want to remind you that I'll start going, um, releasing episodes every other week starting after Memorial Day, so that I can have a little bit of a summer and kind of um put some things together while, you know, on those off weeks. Take a little time for myself. If there is something you'd like me to cover, please do share it with me. But in the meantime, love you mean it. Bye.