"I'm so sorry I hurt you." in Mental Health

I think I was wrong.

In therapy, back in 2012, she tried to get me to talk about my mother. My mother who died in 2011. And I said no, no point in talking about that, she’s dead, she’s gone, there is no closure to be had there and I’m at peace with it.

Now my dad is gone, too, and I thought okay, you know, he’s not suffering anymore, at least. Right? He suffered for over 8 years after my mom died. He was never right without her to take care of. I think he lost all sense of purpose. He spent 8 years just waiting to die. Getting ready to die.

I was just watching a TV show and a deadbeat dad said to his grown daughter, “I’m so sorry I hurt you.”

I don’t feel like I’ll ever have peace with anyone who has hurt me. Not one of them has ever acknowledged it or apologized for it. Not one. I had an okay relationship with my parents when my mom died. I moved away not long after, only a year and a half later, and my relationship with my dad deteriorated from there. Our calls were fewer and farther between. And then 2016 happened. Trump happened. My dad, who I didn’t even know was a republican (how did I not know?!), damn near lost his mind when Obama won his first term. A black man (except my father was not so kind as to call him that) in the WHITE House?! The abomination of it. I always knew he was a racist, but lordy, this was something new. My dad literally went out and bought a handgun because he believed Obama was coming to take our guns. I. Shit. You. Not. He bought a gun to… taunt Obama? I guess? That was his white trash version of “I wish a motherfucker would”? And I watched as it came out of every, single family member with the exception of my mom and my niece, my sister’s daughter. Every one of them on both sides. My mom’s family were mostly Pennsylvania Dutch a hundred years ago or whatever. They were just as bad as my dad’s Arkansas-based family. Every last one of these people born and raised in NW Indiana.

Someone forgot to tell them than Indiana wasn’t part of the Confederacy.

Look, I’m high and rambling on because I’m manic, okay? So if you’re looking for continuity of thought, this is the wrong place.

“I’m so sorry I hurt you.”

No one has ever said that to me. Not my parents, family, exes. Not one of them has ever acknowledged and apologized for the pain and trauma they caused me.

And none of them ever will.

I can admit my own flaws. I acknowledged them, openly. I never hesitate to apologize when I’ve hurt someone. If someone says to me, “You’ve hurt me,” I want to know why and how so I can apologize and alter my behavior. Well, the behaviors I’m capable of altering, anyway.

I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing, really.

Maybe no one ever felt the need to apologize for the things they did to me because I was the one always apologizing.

I was wrong. I don’t have peace with my parents, not really. I don’t know if I ever can. Like, do I just convince myself that they knew but were just too prideful and stubborn to acknowledge it and to apologize?

It does no good to hold grudges against the living, so why should I hold them against the dead?

And did I just discount my own trauma by calling it a grudge? (sigh) Why does it feel like a grudge when I know damn well that I don’t choose to hold on to these things and continue being affected by them?

Last updated October 15, 2020