My mother left when I was nine. Not dramatically. Not in the middle of the night with a suitcase. She just became less and less present over a period of months until one Tuesday she was simply not there anymore, and my father explained it in a voice that was trying very hard to sound neutral. I spent fifteen years being angry about it. Then I spent five years understanding it. And now I am somewhere more complicated than either of those places, a place where both things are true simultaneously and neither one cancels out the other. She was hurting. I know this now. I know about the depression she carried from her own childhood, the marriage that had become a daily exercise in erasure, the way my father's particular brand of emotional absence had worn her down to a person she did not recognize. I know the leaving was not about me. I know she was trying to survive. And I also know that a nine-year-old boy stood in a kitchen on a Tuesday and learned that the most important person in his world could simply choose to leave. And that lesson shaped everything that came after. Every relationship I entered with one foot already out the door. Every time I left before someone could leave me. Every time I interpreted distance as abandonment and closeness as a trap. She was hurting. She also hurt me. And I need both of those sentences to exist in the same paragraph without one erasing the other.

The Complexity We Owe Each Other

There is a phrase that circulates constantly in therapy culture and self-help spaces: hurt people hurt people. It is meant to generate empathy. And it does, to a point. Understanding that the person who harmed you was themselves carrying wounds is genuinely useful information. Neff's 2023 research on self-compassion at the University of Texas demonstrates that contextualizing harm within a larger framework of intergenerational pain reduces the chronic stress response associated with unresolved anger. In plain language: understanding why someone hurt you can help your body stop carrying the injury. But here is where the phrase becomes dangerous when left unfinished. Understanding is not the same as excusing. Explaining is not the same as absolving. And the cultural pressure to skip straight from anger to empathy, to perform forgiveness as proof of emotional maturity, to demonstrate that you are evolved enough to see your abuser as a whole person, that pressure can become its own form of silencing. I have watched people use this phrase to shut down their own legitimate anger. To pre-forgive someone who never asked for forgiveness. To take the most painful experience of their life and flatten it into a bumper sticker about human interconnectedness. And the anger they swallow does not disappear. The Surgeon General's 2023 advisory on social disconnection noted that unprocessed emotional pain is one of the primary drivers of isolation. People do not withdraw because they are weak. They withdraw because the available frameworks for processing their experiences are insufficient. Hurt people hurt people is an insufficient framework. Not because it is wrong, but because it is only half the sentence.

Both Things, Simultaneously

The full sentence, if I were to write it, would be: hurt people hurt people, and the people they hurt are allowed to be hurt. Understanding does not require minimizing. Empathy does not require surrender. You can hold compassion for someone's pain and accountability for their actions in the same hand without dropping either one. Waldinger and Schulz's research through the Harvard Study of Adult Development found that the people who aged most successfully were not the ones who had no difficult relationships. They were the ones who developed the capacity to hold complexity. To say: this person was not a villain. This person was also not innocent. This relationship caused me real harm. This relationship also contained real love. And none of those truths cancel any of the others. My mother was not a monster. She was a woman in pain who made a choice that caused pain. I can understand her reasons. I can even, on my better days, feel genuinely sorry for the impossible position she was in. But my understanding does not retroactively comfort the nine-year-old standing in that kitchen. It does not undo the decades of relational patterns that crystallized in that single moment. And I refuse to pretend it does, because that pretending, that rush to empathy at the expense of honest reckoning, is just another way of abandoning myself. The hardest thing I have ever learned, harder than forgiving her, harder than being angry, is holding both. Sitting in the discomfort of a truth that does not resolve into a clean narrative. She was hurting. She hurt me. Both. Always both. If someone in your life caused you damage and you can see that they were also damaged, I am glad you can see that. That seeing is a form of wisdom. But do not let that wisdom talk you out of your own experience. Do not let understanding become a shortcut past the grief. Your pain is not less real because theirs was real too. Both things. That is not contradiction. That is the full picture.