self-forgiveness and the space in-between.

The underground is a dangerous but potentially life-giving place to which depression takes us; a place where we come to understand that the self is not set apart or special or superior but is a common mix of good and evil, darkness and light; a place where we can finally embrace the humanity we share with others. || Parker Palmer

I think, for most of my life, I have not understood the concept of forgiveness. Or rather, I understood it in my mind but not in my heart—the felt experience was lost on me.

I have spent many, many years afraid to look at myself for fear of what I would find. As someone who constantly struggled with internal chaos, it was simply too hard to sit in my badness and experience anything other than shame. I felt that I deserved punishment for my reckless behavior and unfiltered emotions. I couldn’t separate who I was from what I had done, and so I lived in a perpetual state of fear that there was something very, very wrong with me. My feelings were strong and at times volatile, shifting at a rate that felt terrifyingly out of my control. Growing up I didn’t have the resources I needed to learn how to regulate, so in the absence of this education I instead learned how to hate myself.

Hating myself, I decided, would be my own self-inflicted punishment.

The idea that someone could love me despite my seemingly fatal flaws was beyond me. I knew that I had positive qualities—that people liked me, that there was some part of me people enjoyed. I was funny, and bright, and used these aspects of myself to connect to others as best I could. But when people got close, close in a way in which I couldn’t hide, I almost always felt defeated.

Relationships, of any sort, were exceedingly messy and it seemed to me that I was the one who always brought the mess. I just couldn’t get it right, and I think, for a long time, I wore my moodiness like a shield, not to protect myself from other people—but to protect other people from me. I wanted intimacy but believed with every single part of me that I would eventually drive people away with my badness.

And because I didn’t understand forgiveness, once I thought I had fucked things up that was it—there was no coming back for me. I couldn’t tolerate the in-between space, the part where I could have done something bad instead of believing I was bad, in totality. I couldn’t accept that someone could possibly love me, or even like me, after I had behaved poorly.

I couldn’t wrap my mind around forgiveness because it would mean accepting that somehow, I was still worth loving even in the face of doing something bad.

I think as a culture there is a lot of curated vulnerability around perfection—we admit we make mistakes, mess up, and collectively have a huge sigh of relief. This is definitely progress in the right direction. There is a certain level of acceptance around failure.

But what about when our perfectionism centers around our emotions? Around the times in which we overreacted, spoke in anger, impulsively did something that hurt someone else? What about the times in which we REALLY fuck up, the times that leave us running farrrrrrr away from humanity because we are sure that we aren’t worth loving now, after all?

What does it mean to accept ourselves in the face of some of the worst things we have ever done?

This past year for me brought me to this question, over and over again. I think, in large part, because I finally had enough of myself to hold myself with compassion. For so long I was all tied up in hate, avoiding anything that would trigger my inner shame, avoiding intimacy. At the age of 30, I have only ever had one true romantic relationship, largely because I did not know how to sit with myself. It turns out it’s very, very hard to sit with someone else in a place of vulnerability when you don’t know how to sit with yourself.

But, you can’t outrun yourself forever and last year my feet all but collapsed underneath me. I found myself face to face with some of my deepest insecurities, some of the ugliest and most shameful aspects of my being. I found myself grieving the pain I had been in, along with the pain I had caused. And with the help of some good friends, a therapist, medication, and neurofeedback (healing, apparently, is a lot of work), I started to carefully tread into my suffering.

I created space, lots of space, to sit in the dark. I softened into my hurting places, instead of anxiously jumping into fight or flight mode. I let myself feel all the scary feelings I thought had made me a terrible person, I examined them carefully, without judgment and a gentle compassion that I was just learning to find.

What I discovered is that I had done bad things, yes. I had hurt people, both intentionally and unintentionally, with my behaviors, selfishness, and ever fluctuating emotions.

But what I also discovered, much to my dismay, was that this was a part of being human whether I liked it or not.

And something inside of me started to understand love in a new way. I found that as I created compassionate space for myself, I could also create space for other people.

Pain makes us live in a dichotomy of good versus bad.

When we are in pain, its hard for us to feel safe and so instead we look for answers.

Was I right? Wrong? Normal? Abnormal? Accepted? Rejected?

Good?

Or bad?

When we learn to forgive ourselves, there is space for other possibilities.

We take responsibility for ourselves while also remaining in a loving position towards our difficult parts.

So, I am practicing living in the compassionate in-between.

The reality of my emotions is one that will take a lifetime to accept—mental illness, trauma, the stickiness of human relationship—we really all are just doing the best we can with what we have.

So today, if you find yourself in an endless loop of self-loathing, take a seat.

It’s likely I’ll be sitting right there with you.

And while the road to self-forgiveness is long, take heart.

Because in all of our humanity, we are never walking alone.

on pushes and pulls.

The thing about depression is that is pushes you down, way down, until all you can really get a good look at is yourself. It creates a dense fog around you, amplifying your fears and reflecting back to you all the things you have desperately tried to hide from your entire life. Sometimes, it's accompanied by anxiety, forcing ruminations of deprecation to the forefront of your brain, like a movie reel on an endless loop of self-perpetuating hell. You are frozen, watching in horror as the worst parts of who you are tortuously crawl through the night.

So often, this trauma lives within in our bodies, trapped by years of neglect and self-abuse. And if you have struggled for a long time, these emotional responses can almost become routine, like riding a bicycle or brushing your teeth--patterns of behavior so familiar we can scarcely imagine a different way of being. Our feelings become a part of us, like breath to air, and we hardly know who are anymore. The trauma, ingrained in our DNA, pushes us into these behavioral habits and turns us upside down.

The world inside us can be far more troubling than what lies beyond the trappings of our body. 

Emotion regulation is a tricky thing. Our responses can be so strong at times that it's impossible to distinguish reality from fiction. Our feelings can tell us truths that we are so certain are accurate, that we behave out of them without a second thought. I have, very frequently, been beholden to my emotional states. Later, back in my "wise mind" I could recognize my intensity as trauma responses, my body and brain working together to keep me safe from whatever perceived threat had triggered me prior. But the coming of this realization was always followed by the weight of unbearable shame--a crushing belief in my own unrelenting badness, which seemed to me to be both automatic and inescapable. 

When I am in the dark place, it feels like there are two tiny versions of myself inside my heart. One is angry, volatile. Her rage is unmeasurable, uncontainable, and she is a danger to herself and others. Because she is so caged in she wants to hurt herself, she wants punish the people who have hurt her but mostly, she wants to punish herself. Her hate runs white hot, deep in her veins like lava, ready to self-destruct with little thought to the consequences. Her pain is so unbearable that it is explosive, shaking the bars of her cell and screaming relentlessly to be let out.

The other version is very, very afraid. She sits in a corner of her own free will, one that is both dark, and damp. She is huddled under the weight of her own body, tiny and scared, tears of grief silently sliding down her little face. She makes no noise, has no requests, and desperately wants to hide from that other person. She is sad, and alone, a ghost of a child who once existed. She will not come out under any circumstances because she does not trust that she will be safe in my care.

Two versions, two ends of the spectrum. I learned to manage--pushed into corners and cells by a system within that seemed to be monitored by something else all together.

When I finally went to therapy and got on medication, it was like walking normally for the first time. I didn't know it was possible to wake up and not want to die, to get through a day without a panic attack or to believe that maybe, just maybe, I was alright.

And then this year, I went to neurofeedback. After a series of personal losses, I realized that while I had done great deal of cognitive work, my body was still wrecked by all those years of practiced chaos. I retrained my brain to not go into autopilot at the slightest trigger, I got some distance from my emotional selves, some distance that allowed me to sit with my pain in a newly compassionate way.

Instead of being pushed into emotional states I found I was being pulled towards my hurting selves. What did they need? What were they saying to me? Could I accept the parts of myself that I had tried so hard to ignore? The parts of myself I had deemed bad, and unworthy of love and belonging? 

Many of my clients think that they are coming to therapy to "fix themselves". Maybe they have behaviors that fill them with shame, histories marked by their own self-destruction. But what I have found over and over and over again is that it is not what we are running from that matters, but what we are running to. We won't get anywhere trying to escape the versions of ourselves we are too ashamed to hold. It's like not watering a plant and expecting it to grow. 

We all have parts of ourselves that are hurting, parts that are not reflective of who we are at our center. Parts that we acted out of to protect, parts that didn't know any better.

But if we can acknowledge that and love ourselves anyway, we have a chance at healing.

It's not about rejecting our bad in favor of good. 

It's about taking our good and sitting with our bad.

Instead of pushing these parts into corner and cells, we gently pull them towards the light.

So this year, I'm not making resolutions.

I'm not pushing or punishing myself, I'm not hoping to be someone different.

Instead, I am listening. I am being still and quiet, I am letting my hurting parts speak and tell me what it is they most need.

I am being pulled towards the light.

Which--as it turns out, has been inside all along.

I just had to know where to find it.