What If the Ones Who Hurt You Did It Out of Love?
What if the people who hurt you most did not enter your life by accident?
What if, before this lifetime ever began, they stood beside you in love and said, “I will help you grow”—even knowing the cost?
This is not an easy question.
It presses against our wounds, our anger, our grief, and our sense of justice.
And yet, it is a question that has followed me for years, quietly asking to be witnessed.
What if, before we were born again, there was a moment of profound honesty? A moment where the soul reviewed what it still needed to learn—strength, boundaries, self-worth, compassion, sovereignty, forgiveness.
What if all the souls who would touch our lives—the good, the bad, and the ugly—were present?
And what if someone raised their hand and said, “I love you so much that I will be the catalyst.”
Not out of hate.
Not out of cruelty.
But out of love so deep it was willing to fracture itself in service of your growth.
In this lifetime, we experience the pain as real.
The harm is real—mental, emotional, physical, spiritual.
Nothing about this perspective denies that truth.
But what if part of the journey is not just surviving the wound…
What if part of the journey is choosing what we carry forward?
I have been hurt many times in my life.
Deeply. Repeatedly. In ways that reshaped me.
And it was not until I chose to forgive—not forget, not excuse, not condone—but forgive, that I felt something loosen inside me.
Forgiveness did not absolve them.
It freed me.
Because every ounce of ill will we hold lives inside us, not them.
Sometimes it even feeds the very dynamic that wounded us in the first place.
That is the quiet cruelty of resentment—it punishes the wrong person.
I speak with people every day who are in real pain.
My heart bleeds for them because I understand the frustration of trying to reconcile love with betrayal, meaning with suffering, growth with grief.
And here is where the lesson folds into itself:
Can we step back, just for a moment, and ask—
What did this pain shape in me?
Can we see the strength, the boundaries, the wisdom, the clarity that would not exist otherwise?
And if we don’t like who we’ve become as a result of the pain…
That is not a failure.
That is an invitation.
Forgiveness is not a single act.
It is a practice.
It does not mean reconciling.
It does not mean reopening doors.
It does not mean pretending it didn’t hurt or that it did not happened.
Forgiveness means taking your power back.
It means removing the bricks of unhappiness someone else placed on your shoulders and handing them back—without drama, without explanation, without guilt.
Your responsibility is not to carry another person’s actions.
Your responsibility is to tend to your own inner landscape.
Put your oxygen mask on first.
Always.
We cannot control what others think, do, or choose.
But we can choose whether we continue to bleed from wounds we refuse to tend.
And then there is the deeper question—the one that makes us uncomfortable:
What if what was done to us…
Was once done by us?
Not as punishment.
Not as condemnation.
But as balance.
Ask yourself honestly:
Is an eye for an eye enough?
Or does perpetuating pain—through revenge, resentment, or self-destruction—only create more karma to unravel?
Sometimes the most radical act of justice is saying:
Payment paid. Lesson learned. I choose to move on.
Closing
Growth rarely arrives gently.
Most lessons hurt.
Especially the ones that change us forever.
But pain does not get to decide who you become—you do.
Forgive, not because they deserve it, but because you deserve peace.
Forgive, not to excuse the past, but to reclaim the future.
Forgive, again and again if needed, until the weight finally lifts.
And when I get to the other side, I fully intend to have a conversation about this particular construct— because I have questions.
Until then, I will continue to choose freedom.
And maybe, just maybe, that was the lesson all along.
Taking my power back, and inviting you to do the same,
Theri
Visionarylightjourney.com
