What has happened to you is not your fault. Your reaction is.

We have all faced hardships. We have all faced struggles. Some tragic. Some heartbreaking. All impactful.

A great many of us have faced events and occurrences that anyone would recoil at and would excuse a life less than lived. But that doesn’t mean we should excuse it ourselves.

You can choose to treat others like shit because of how others treated you but that just continues the cycle of abuse. That just creates a cascade of misery perpetrated not by those that have injured you but by you yourself. Making others miserable won’t make you happy. And neither will turning to things outside yourself.

Food, drugs, alcohol, gambling, sex and even shopping can be attempts to control or mask our trauma. We can’t heal ourselves from the external. We need internal work. This is why I’m such a champion of talk therapy with a qualified professional. Now more than ever.

We can not control what has happened to us. We don’t choose the hand we are dealt. But we are the ones who have to play it. You can either quit and knock over the table in a childish display of emotion or sit down and play the game. But if you quit you can never win.