The feeling of “you’re too much, your pain is exaggerated, you’re not worth believing” is an imprint on your psyche from being treated as such. For being made to feel like you’re crazy for feeling for what you’re feeling, for knowing what you know, for seeing what you’re see. Made to doubt yourself for every little thing about you. “You’re imagining, you’re making too much of it, you’re sensitive.”
This level of abuse is insidious and isn’t imaginary, it’s real. But because there are no bruises, no concrete events – it can make you look and feel like the crazy one. And abusive people love that. Abusive families in which you are the scapegoat thrive on that. It’s their food. They love plausible deniability because it keeps them looking ‘clean’ with all of it.
You can’t forgive, you can’t let go, you can’t move on, if you don’t know what you’re forgiving. What you’re moving on from, what you’re letting go of. It’s quite simplistic to say forgive, let go and be faced with the fact that you can’t. It’s too premature. Your system hasn’t even digested the original pain, the original hurt. And so to put a bandaid of spirituality on it and call that ‘forgiveness’ is violent, delusional. It doesn’t sink into your bones, it’s not true. It’s surface-level; moving the furniture around. And that’s not what your system is after.
Your system is digesting in its own time, you can’t rush it, you can’t purge it. Be true to where you are, where your system is, slow down to that level of digestion without trying to jump over the hurdles, fast track to getting over it. That’s true kindness, true forgiveness. Forgive yourself for not being able to forgive, allow yourself the luxury of being who and where you are without any violent ‘should’s’. Slow down enough so that you can catch up with yourself.
Let go of all the things you think you should be doing to be somewhere other than where you are. Give yourself that luxury, that kindness. The kindness to notice the insidious internal critic keeping you in check, keeping you feeling limited and boundaried in what you can or can’t feel, say or do. Keeping you in check by making you believe “you’re too much”. Your pain is too much, your voice is too much, your questions are too much, your needs are too much, your life is too much.