Confusing Pleasure and Pain: X

The thing about abuse is that you believe their lies for your truth. You adopt terrible lies as your truth and start to forget that these actually are lies. You get used to thinking that lies are the way things work, that if someone wants something they shouldn't want or can't otherwise have, that it's ok to use a lie to get around the obstacles.

Because that's what happened to you. Someone wanted something from you and took it, convinced you of the biggest lie ~ that it was ok, that they had a right or reason to do that. And you were asked to believe that lie and repeat it and internalize it and protect it. And so you did. Because you couldn't do anything else at the time. And after a while you couldn't tell the difference between their lies and the truth.

And that spills over into everything. It makes you a sucker for a good line, not because you believe it exactly, but because you want to believe something that sounds good, even if it still feels bad. 'Cause there's so little to actual feel good about. And you don't really believe words of any kind anymore anyway.

So their lies become your truth again and again and again. Maybe it started with one specific person, one specific event, but it confuses everything. And no matter how good your radar is, no matter how much you can see through the falseness of what's being presented, there's still a tsunami of internal confusion keeping you from knowing what to do about it or how to change it.

Thankfully, you don't have to stop being confused to know that something feels wrong. You don't have to understand it all. Not yet. You just have to know that you don't have to keep feeling bad. You don't deserve it, you don't owe it to anyone, and it really can stop.

Once the emotional assault of all the confusion ends, you begin to get your bearings back, and you begin to recognize the difference between their lies and your truth. And you can see how far apart those two things are. And you can't believe you couldn't see it before since it's suddenly so obvious.

The liberation of that moment is the weight of all the sorrows in the world falling from your shoulders, in its place the wings of freedom.