Your Feelings Deserve To Be Heard
You deserve to express your hurt feelings about a situation, even if there is nothing that can be done to fix the situation. And you deserve people in your life who can hold space for and support you without taking it personally, minimising your hurt or internalising fault/blame.
It's completely normal to want the people you care about to be happy, but sometimes you're not in control of whether that is the case. A core skill that I'm learning, especially now that I'm training to become a therapist, is to hold space for people's difficult emotions without trying to jump in to fix/rescue them from the situation.
An EVEN MORE difficult skill is holding space for those emotions even when nothing can be done to fix the cause of them. In these situations it's important to set your own ego aside and just listen to the person who has been hurt. Yes, it's uncomfortable, especially if you are (directly or indirectly) the cause of the feelings and especially if you didn't mean it but it still happened - but that isn't an excuse to deflect, minimise, or shift blame.
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