When someone tells me about how they’ve made peace with someone who hurt them by understanding them in a new and different way, and finding a place of forgiveness and compassion, and maybe even gratitude or love, etc. I cannot perceive it as wise or benevolent. I perceive delusion and violence.

It is impossible for me to trust a person capable of mistaking this kind of feeling for anything akin to love.

Perhaps the trauma damaged them and distorted their sense of what love is. But if that person conceived of love this way prior to their traumatic relationship, I will automatically suspect that they were the cause of the conflict. It is a serious thing to reduce another human being to how you experience and interpret them, and refusing to allow a person to be more than that to you is profoundly offensive and highly likely to bring out the very worst in a person.

*

Attempting to reconcile with an estranged friend or loved one without that person’s active participation cannot succeed. The attempt will either fail to bring any sense of closure, or it will succeed in bringing closure through the opposite of reconciliation — alienation.

Reconciliation is something that happens between two people who each want the other person to exist to them in a way that transcends interpretation, as an independent, respected other.

*

This does not mean that I think we must work with anyone who hurts us and reconcile with them. All I am saying is finding a place of peace toward someone who hurts us without involving them is amputating the relationship not healing it. Whatever feeling that remains behind in your heart is a phantom limb.