It is a weird thing to hurt the ones we love. It seems the very opposite of what love is supposed to be. Unfortunately my experience growing up was as a living witness to this again and again and again, until it seeped like a poison into my skin.

My mother, a single woman living on welfare with four kids, and no friends to speak of sometimes showcased this. In moments of deep depression at her state and her life’s experience, with no outlet, mum would sometimes turn to the only ones close to her and express rage.

For us this never meant being struck. I was never hit as a child, not once. It did mean exposure to incredible pain we were not mature enough to deal with. It leaves scars. Sometimes those scars hurt others.

I know as I have grown into an adult I have sometimes lashed out even at the ones who are closest to me in the mistaken belief that they have nowhere to go and are the safest people I can pour my rage and sad into. After all they have carried so much of my load, why not more?

Unfortunately one of the problems with the instinct to turn our sadness on our loved ones is that after awhile, in order to keep doing it without feeling horrible about ourselves, we come to a crossroads where we have to choose to dehumanize and push our loved ones away.

Over time the guilt of directing so much darkness at our loved ones becomes so great we begin to resent them and even become angry with them so that we can continue to drown them in our own darkness. Once we push them far enough away they begin to feel like they were the reason we were sad in the first place and, if we can simply get rid of them or replace them, we will find our happiness.

I watched my mum do this again and again with the people who came into her life (both the few good ones and the many bad ones). Mum never came to see how she would regularly redefine her loved ones with her pain until they seemed to be the source instead of the evil people who had abused her and the resultant deep inner experiences and scars she carried.

When she finally realized what she had done with her pain she often felt it was too late and she was trapped in her new circumstance. She felt that she had pushed too hard, hated too much, and thus was not forgiveable. That people needed to be away from her. This is the saddest part of her cycle – a failure to understand love having never experienced it as a child growing up. She never really believed she deserved love and forgiveness and so instead she just kept searching for human painkillers through crowds of the unworthy each of whom would disappoint her in the end but never as much as she disappointed herself.

To my shame I have been guilty of doing this to my own loved ones – children, friends, and even my wife. My darkness has sources different than my mum’s but they overlap. For years as a child I experienced regular, sometimes daily, sexual abuse at the hands of men who I was supposed trust. Men who were supposed to be good. This has a way of twisting a person to their foundations. I have spent the years since working hard to untwist myself, and where I cannot, I seek to incorporate the brokeness into something new and beautiful like the Japanese art of kintsugi.

Pain manifests in odd ways. For me it becomes a fertile field for anxiety, paranoia, self-doubt, self-destructive behaviour and worst of all…black seeds of hate that I work very hard at exterminating when they rise up.

Unlike my mum I have come to believe I am worthy to be loved, worthy of forgiveness, and capable of forgiving.

Ironically I am these things because of my mum. She was so terrifed we would embody what she perceived as her own lack of value that she relentlessly and with great force poured all of her available love, broken and torn as it was, into us. She made us believe we could find and hold love…she took every value and belief she should have held for herself and gave it to us never realizing there was enough for her too.

I miss my mum in ways these days I cannot understand nor adequately express. Even as I type this I weep at her absence. No one understood sadness the way she did. I could tell her anything without fear of judgement and she would often ground me with her own words of experience.

She would say:

“Peter, you need to step back and trust you are loved by the people in your life. You cannot constantly live in a state of doubt and fear or it will push people away. Peter, you need to be the outstanding man I know you are. Love yourself ferociously and others will too.”