By Jasmin Acosta
We all have our faults as human beings since we cannot be perfect, and we are prone to make mistakes in life. It is only natural that we trip over life’s unexpected events that occur in our lives, but it is essential how we react to life events that are rooted in pain, depression, frustration, and anxiety. At times we react from our emotions and push that onto the people that we love and care about by using our words as weapons for self-defense. Where not only do our actions and our words affect the people we love but also ourselves.
Sometimes in life, we are unexpectedly faced with the death of a loved one, financial issues, relationship problems, and pressures from work. When our loved ones reach out to help us when they see us struggling, at times we tend to fight back believing that we could take on the world with our whole body, which leads many of us to become defensive when help is offered. Our feelings of depression, anger, anxiety, and pain rather fuel how we respond to help and we respond from a place of hurt since we want to avoid being vulnerable. The fear of being judged by our loved ones leads us to sabotage our relationships to affirm our fears of needing to avoid vulnerability. This causes us to have responses to help such as: “I hate you”, “Leave me alone”, or “I don’t need help from you”. In the process, we are not only shattering the hearts of our loved ones by piercing their ears with a never-ending echo of our voice murmuring our cruel words, but we are also hurting ourselves in the process.
Our loved ones remember the agonizing words that we say as it plays over and over in their mind as if a tape recorder is being held to their ear on replay. Where they hear our voice on replay and each time it plays it further destroys their mind. Then once we do come down from our intense emotions we soon come to realize the words that came out of our mouths that were pressed onto the people that we love. In this realization, our hearts drop to our feet and we sink into the words that we said, and how our loved ones must have felt. Ultimately, then we tend to bind ourselves to those actions after seeking and receiving forgiveness from our loved ones.
As human beings, we tend to hold onto our mistakes and hold ourselves to our past actions despite changing ourselves for the better through seeking self-improvement along with forgiveness. Through means such as therapy, using better coping mechanisms, and learning to not commit the same mistakes of our past. However, we tend to hold onto our past actions and we ensure that we suffer by replaying our actions along with all the possibilities of ways that we could have prevented them, but this does not serve a purpose in achieving genuine self-improvement. Self-improvement relies on us taking action through shifting how we respond to situations, through how we communicate, and seeking forgiveness when we hurt the people we love unintentionally. Along with forgiving ourselves to provide ourselves with room for growth.
We cannot trap our minds in our past when we have actively sought to achieve change, as we are more than our past mistakes and the past versions of ourselves. Just because we made mistakes does not mean that we need to suffocate ourselves with a version of ourselves that no longer exists. Vulnerability and accountability, allow us to acknowledge our faults for us to strive for growth. In pursuing growth we learn that there is strength in acknowledging our faults, working on self-improvement, seeking forgiveness, and that there is strength in forgiving ourselves.