Pain Does Not Always Know Where It Lands: On Healing When the Person Who Hurt You Was Also Hurting

There is a specific kind of grief that does not have a clean name. It is the grief of realizing that someone who loved you also hurt you, and that both of those things are true at the same time.

I have been sitting with that grief for years. I carried it in a way I could not always describe, because how do you explain that you are healing from someone you also love? How do you explain that understanding what happened does not make it smaller?

On a past podcast episode of H.E.A.L. Her, I sat with Lisa Marie Lovett, a poet, photographer, and speaker whose work lives at the intersection of creativity and healing. She told me about losing her father at ten years old and watching her mother, who had been her father’s whole world, collapse inward with grief she did not know how to hold. And because Lisa Marie was the closest person, the grief came at her. Not as comfort. As anger. As physical harm. As names that a child should never hear from her mother.

She told me this story without asking for my sympathy. She told it with the kind of clarity that only comes after years of genuine work. And what stayed with me long after we stopped recording was this: she came to understand her mother not by shrinking what happened, but by expanding her view of what her mother was carrying.

“There is a specific kind of grief that does not have a clean name. It is the grief of realizing that someone who loved you also hurt you, and that both of those things are true at the same time.”

 

Our Reaction Is Our Interpretation, Not Always the Truth of the Situation

One thing I said in that conversation, which I have been thinking about ever since, is this: our reaction to a situation is not necessarily a reaction to that situation itself. It is our interpretation of it.

For Lisa Marie, as a child, her mother’s anger arrived as abandonment. As proof that she was not loved. As a wound she spent decades carrying. And that interpretation was completely understandable. It is what a child’s mind does with information it cannot yet hold.

The hard work came later. It came when Lisa Marie studied psychology and started to understand what unprocessed grief actually does to a nervous system. It came when she read about depression and saw her mother in the descriptions. It came when she was finally able to hold two truths at the same time: her mother’s behaviour was not acceptable, and her mother was not a villain.

That is not a comfortable thing to sit with. There is a version of healing that would be easier, where someone is clearly wrong, and someone is clearly innocent. The kind of healing Lisa Marie did, and the kind I recognize in my own story, is more complicated. It asks you to hold the grief and the grace at the same time.

 “Our reaction to a situation is not necessarily a reaction to that situation itself. It is our interpretation of it.”

 

What Understanding Does Not Mean

I want to be careful here, because this is the place where healing conversations go wrong. Understanding why someone hurt you is not the same as excusing what they did. It is not a requirement that you minimize your pain or welcome that person back into closeness with you.

Lisa Marie and her mother went three years without speaking. Their relationship was in and out for most of her adult life. Understanding her mother’s grief did not automatically produce a close friendship. What it produced was something quieter and more valuable: freedom from the story that her mother’s behaviour meant something about her own worth.

That is the actual work. Not forgiving for the other person’s sake. Not performing grace because it is the spiritually tidy thing to do. But releasing the interpretation that their hurt was a verdict on you.

“Understanding why someone hurt you is not the same as excusing what they did.”

The Part Nobody Talks About: When You Are Both

Here is where my own story sits inside this conversation, and why it hit differently than I expected.

I had my first child at seventeen. I was young, in pain, and working through things I did not yet have the language for. I was loving my children as hard as I knew how to love them, and I was also, in ways I am still uncovering, passing things on that I had not yet healed from myself.

All three of my children are adults now. And one of the most significant things I am doing in this season of my life is healing my relationship with them. Not because I was a bad mother. Because I was a human one, carrying things I had not yet put down, and some of that weight landed on them.

Listening to Lisa Marie talk about her mother, I was not only sitting with her experience. I was sitting with both sides of it. I was the daughter who received. And I am also the parent who, in my own way, gave what I had, including the parts I had not finished healing.

That is the generational pattern, and it does not make any of us villains. It makes us human beings in an ongoing process, doing better when we know better, going back and repairing when we can.

“You can hold both: they were hurting, and they hurt you. What happened was real. And why it happened matters too, not to excuse it, but to free you from the part of you that still believes it meant something permanent about your worth.”

Forgiveness as Physical Release, Not Moral Requirement

Lisa Marie said something about forgiveness that I keep returning to. She said that when we do not forgive, we carry it in our body. In our chest. As anxiety. As a constant low-level tension that has no clean source.

I know this in my own body. When I was going through my divorce, the stress of holding all that anger and all that fight was literally making me ill. Migraines for months. Hospital visits. The kind of physical distress that has nowhere to go because you will not let it go.

The day I decided I was done fighting, done being angry, done making the other person carry the weight of my attention, my body changed. The migraines stopped. I am not speaking metaphorically. Something in my system released.

Forgiveness, in this sense, is not a moral decision about whether the other person deserves it. It is a practical one about whether you deserve to be free of the weight you are carrying for them.

 

What Healing From This Actually Requires

There is no single path through the kind of grief we are talking about here. But after nearly four hundred conversations on this podcast, and after my own years of working through the layers, a few things seem to be consistent.

You have to be willing to expand your understanding of the person who hurt you without collapsing your experience of being hurt. Both truths need room. The moment you flatten one of them, the healing stalls.

You have to speak it out loud. Lisa Marie said something that stayed with me: we heal ourselves by speaking. Not performing our pain for an audience, but saying the true thing out loud so it loses its hold on us. There is something in articulating the experience that the silence cannot provide.

And you have to be honest about what you are still carrying. Not to punish yourself with it, but because healing from a parent who hurt you, or anyone you loved who also harmed you, is not a linear process. There will be days when the understanding is clear and days when the old wound opens again. That is not failure. That is the nature of the work.

 “We heal generational wounds together.”

 

A Final Word

One of the most powerful moments in my conversation with Lisa Marie was when she said, quietly, that healing from her mother was also about healing for herself. Not just releasing the past. Building the capacity to live freely in the present.

That is what I want for you. Not the performance of having healed. Not forgiveness as a box you tick so you can say you are done. But genuine freedom from the story that someone else’s pain, when it landed on you, said something permanent about who you are.

It did not. You are not what their grief made of you in the moments they could not hold it. And healing from a parent who hurt you, or any person who loved you imperfectly in a season of their own suffering, is not about restoring the relationship. It is about restoring yourself.

To go deeper on this conversation, listen to the full H.E.A.L. Her episode  #282 with Lisa Marie Lovett wherever you stream podcasts.