A friend of Shadow Soup recently asked about how to handle the difficult feelings that come up for us when others respond negatively to our new boundaries. They correctly noted that it’s particularly challenging when we feel guilty about the reactions of others.

We need a lot of support and tools from professionals and close friends during this time. The honest and agonizing answer also involves knowing how unlikely it is that others will change as we do. We have to make changes and enforce boundaries for ourselves because of what is right and what is important for us. They may never understand, and it may always be frustrating.

That is the classic toxic dynamic. The toxic person is not capable of engaging our authentic feelings or facing their own. The only outlet they have is to try to make us feel bad for “creating the problem” by having feelings and talking about them. These are often the same people who have trained and conditioned us not to show our emotions because they are not able to help us regulate or resolve them. They need us to have emotional reactions to them and their issues instead because of their own deep insecurities.

A good deal of healing from this dynamic involves becoming willing to change your entire perspective. Instead of needing their approval, we have to retrain our brains to give ourselves everything we need from within. We do not take their pain and rub it into our own fresh wounds on command anymore. We put the responsibility of healing from their pain back onto them.

A huge part of the challenge is acknowledging the weight of the necessary changes because they will be incredibly complicated.

My bottom line is this: Living in abusive and traumatic environments in survival mode is hard. Getting help, pulling myself out of the dynamic, processing trauma, and feeling unresolved problems is hard. One has an end; a light, some hope, a nourishing source of love for my authentic self.

The other option, staying in dysfunction, is just pain with no end in sight. Am I willing to go through another huge amount of pain on top of 35 years of abuse that I’ve already experienced, just to be able to heal? For the chance at getting to feel real happiness, openness, and active love?

Yes, I am. That’s “the work.”

That’s why love is an action verb.