Bridge-Building Takes Courage

Sometimes we maintain an estrangement because we don't want to face our own worst actions.

Love, by Alexander Milov. Source: https://wherecreativityworks.com/love/

“I forgive you. I still love you, and I would like a relationship with you.”

That’s the message that I recently sent to the person who abused me as a child (let’s call her Emily, not her real name).

Emily wasn’t, deep down, a bad human being. She had a good heart. But she suffered from intense mental illness, compounded by drug addiction, and her inner pain and turmoil would often spill out onto me in ways that were profoundly painful. In early 2020, at 29 years old, I made the difficult decision to cut off contact with her so that I could heal. Now, almost six years later, I finally felt like I was strong enough to reach back out.

I had burned a bridge, albeit one that many people might say that I was justified in burning. And now I was going to attempt to rebuild that same bridge.

This prospect was terrifying for at least two reasons.

First, because Emily never actually healed. She is still deeply mentally ill. Last I heard, she still does drugs. Cutting myself off had been a way to protect myself: to wall myself off from someone who had the power to hurt me, to build a fortress around my heart so that I didn’t run the risk of falling to pieces after one of our interactions.

Removing those walls left me feeling immensely vulnerable. By attempting to rebuild that relationship, I was baring my heart to her. I was deliberately taking off my psychological armor, knowing that she might cut me and that those cuts would hurt more for my vulnerability.

One possible cut that I anticipated was that she could simply meet my overture with silence. She could decide, despite our long and once-loving relationship, that I was no longer worth having in her life. I knew that that reaction had the potential to cut me deep.

But what if Emily responded? I knew that that could be fraught to. My abuser suffers from Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). I once heard BPD described as “unstable moods.” That’s an accurate description, in the same way that it’s accurate to describe a tornado as “a bit of wind.” I knew that if I reached out, there was a nonzero chance that my overture would be met by a storm of raging hostility.

And then, what if Emily actually agreed to meet for lunch and try to reconcile? The danger wouldn’t be past. She can go from “It’s wonderful to see you again, I’ve missed you so much” to “You’re dead to me” in 0 seconds flat. By opening myself up to that relationship again, I knew that I was taking an enormous risk.

A quick aside here: why would I want to reach out to someone who had hurt me so badly, and who would potentially do so again? I saw three reasons, and I think they might apply even to people estranged from friends and family who were never abusive.

First: we sometimes talk about forgiveness as a gift that we give to ourselves. The idea is that I forgive you so that I might be free of the resentment and anger that I’m carrying towards you. I think that’s true and useful, but it’s also only part of the truth. I think it’s more accurate to see forgiveness as a gift to both parties. It’s a gift we give ourselves, and also a gift that we give to the other person. I think that sometimes when we forgive someone, that can give them permission to forgive themselves. In that way we can sometimes contribute to lifting a great weight from their shoulders.

Second: in spite of the past pain and the risk of future pain, I do still love and care for Emily, and if I’m honest with myself, I want some type of relationship with her. When I left, I never intended for our estrangement to last forever; I only wanted it to last until I felt strong enough to come back.

Third: Emily has lived a very hard life. Her childhood was awful, and BPD is a brutal mental illness to live with. From getting to know her over the course of years, I know that there’s a lot of darkness in her life. I wanted to be able to shine a light into her life, and to lift the darkness from her soul in some small way. Letting her know that I was open to being in relationship with her again was my way of doing that.

Now that said, good intentions aside, reaching out to Emily was scary, and not just because of what she might do to me. The second reason that reaching out to Emily scared me was that I knew that I had also hurt her. I could justify my abrupt decision to cut her off in 2020 all I wanted, but deep down I knew that I had caused Emily pain. There was a part of me that didn’t want to face that.

I heard a quote awhile ago along the lines of: “Some people are still mad at you for things they did to you.” I think that when we hurt someone, it can be hard to be reminded of our actions. It sucks to have to reflect on the fact that we’re not a saint. The other person becomes a walking reminder of our capacity to hurt others, and I think it can be a lot easier to keep that person—and that reminder—at arms’ length rather than to seriously grapple with our worst behaviors.

As Russian author and philosopher Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn writes:

“Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains… an uprooted small corner of evil.”

This is one of those uncomfortable truths which none of us want to face. It’s so much easier to pretend that we are all-good, and that all of the badness in the world is located in people in the out-group. We want to pretend that there is no “uprooted small corner of evil” lurking in our own hearts.

But we can only maintain this fiction by refusing to seriously grapple with the bad things that we have done. The minute we face our own worst actions, the fiction crumbles and we are forced to admit that—just like in everyone else—there exists inside of us the capacity for evil.

Our culture has an epidemic of bridge-burning. A recent poll found that 50 percent of respondents on the left, and 11 percent of those on the right, considered it acceptable to cut off contact with a family member over politics. A lot of what happens seems to be: we convince ourselves that the other person is a Bad Person (™). We tell ourselves that they are racist, or sexist, or even downright evil because of who they voted for. And then, as Good People (™) ourselves, we cut off contact with the other person.

And sometimes, we really do need to cut off contact for our own mental health. But sometimes, I think that we maintain the separation because building bridges with estranged loved ones is hard. We maintain the separation because it’s scary and vulnerable to lower our walls, knowing that we’re building a bridge the other person might use to cross and (perhaps accidentally, perhaps not) to hurt us.

I think some of us also maintain this separation because, when we cut off contact, we know that our actions hurt the other person. Often, what precipitates the estrangement is a blow-up fight in which we say things that we’d rather not have to defend.

If we really faced our own behaviors, then we would have to admit that Solzhenitsyn was right about us just like he was right about every other human being who ever lived. That’s a hard fact to face, and so we hide from it—and from the person whom we hurt and whose presence therefore threatens to remind us of Solzhenitsyn’s insight.

But for all that it was terrifying, and for all that the outcome right now is uncertain (my overture’s been met with silence for a couple of weeks now), I’m deeply grateful that I chose to try to rebuild a bridge with this mentally ill person whom I once loved.

For one thing, it did force me to grapple with the fact that I had hurt Emily when I abruptly cut off contact. I actually reached out to her and apologized for that, and asked her to forgive me for the hurt I caused her. That action was teeth-pullingly-hard, but it made me more of the man I aspire to be.

I’ve also noticed that I feel more at peace since making my overture. I feel like a great burden of anger and resentment has been lifted from me. I forgave Emily, and that’s been an incredible gift to me.

Finally, I’ve also been more able to forgive other people in my life too—people who didn’t hurt me nearly as badly as Emily did, but towards whom I still harbored some lasting bitterness. It turns out that when you forgive the great white shark who mauled you, it’s a lot easier to forgive a few minnows who nibbled at your wetsuit into the bargain. I feel more free and light now than I did even a month ago.

I understand why people cut off contact with friends or loved ones. Sometimes it really is a matter of physical or psychological safety. Sometimes it’s our way of trying to impose our own rules on a chaotic world. A lot of us feel afraid, and like our world is spiraling out of control, and anger and self-righteousness can make us feel strong and powerful. Imposing boundaries can give us a sense of control over our world.

Sometimes, especially for people pleasers, imposing healthy boundaries can be an act of self-care and even of personal growth.

I begrudge no-one their healthy boundaries.

But take it from someone who’s done both: it takes a lot more courage to build bridges than it does to burn them.

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