A lot of people will tell you addressing the root of your issues will make them go away, but that’s not always the case. If you are someone who grew up facing neglect or abuse, you have to work through that in your own ways.
You see, what works for someone else might not work for you, and what you find as effective for you might not really benefit anyone else. There is no set one size fits all means of getting better, and you need to know that going into things. The leftover effects of the trauma you’ve faced won’t just disappear overnight. This thing we call healing takes time.
Something I consider a hidden truth is that when healing from a toxic childhood, you don’t have to forgive your abuser. While a lot of people will push you to and tell you that it’s for you and not for the abuser as a whole, it’s not always necessary. Sure, if it helps you then it helps you, but it’s not going to help everyone, and you shouldn’t feel bad if you cannot accomplish it.
Forced forgiveness in this sense only makes things for many of us worse. It makes us feel like we’re the ones in the wrong and brings to our minds even more-so how we’re currently unable to move on and past the things we’ve experienced. You will be able to move on in time, again it’s not going to happen overnight.
Psychology Today noted as follows on healing from a toxic childhood and I believe these things are extremely important to be aware of:
But letting go doesn’t mean pretending that the past never happened, that you weren’t hurt or affected, or that your parent or parents should be somehow let off the hook and not held responsible. It means learning to discriminate between the ways of thinking you must let go of and the emotions that need to be tossed aside that keep you stuck, and the ways of thinking and feeling that will help you move you forward and help you heal.
The fancy name for the kind of letting go I’m talking about is goal disengagement. This isn’t a one-step thing, like the image that comes into your mind when you think of the words “let go”—you’re likely to visualize the string falling free from your grasp and the balloon rising in the air, or the moment your hand slips and what you’re holding falls with a thud—but a process, and a complex one at that.
Regardless of what you’ve gone through letting go won’t be easy and if things are a struggle for you that are not a struggle for others please remember everyone deals with things differently. Just because you think someone else is doing better off somehow despite having gone through ‘worse’ doesn’t mean that they are. They might be good at putting on a happy face, but they’re dealing with things inside whether you can see it or not.
Sometimes forgiving the person who hurt you is not the right thing for you, and that is perfectly fine. You do not have to forgive someone you do not want to forgive. You are a survivor, and you are getting stronger each and every day.