When Hurt Becomes a Verdict

Demonizing is a harsh word. But sometimes it describes what happens when our compassion runs out and we begin painting another person with shame. We do it to men. We do it to women. We do it across race, religion, sexuality, and nearly every difference we can turn into a dividing line. We take something we fear, something that hurt us, or something we do not understand, and allow it to become our explanation for an entire person.

Eventually, we stop asking why.

We believe we already know who they are.

I recognize that impulse in myself. That matters, because a reflection about how other people judge can easily become another way of judging them. The pot calling the kettle black, only this time the pot has written an essay.

I can call for compassion while withholding it. I can explain my pain so thoroughly that I leave no room for yours. I can ask to be understood while deciding that understanding you would somehow betray me.

That is where this reflection has to begin. With me.

My album Love Is… is an honest attempt to put into music what I want in a loving, monogamous relationship. It explores the emotional and intimate abilities I hope to develop, the love I want to offer, and the reciprocity I hope to experience. Those songs give me something to aspire to. They also give me something to answer for. If I write that love is accountable, I have to examine how I respond when accountability costs me something. If I write that love is gentle, I have to notice what happens to my gentleness when I feel rejected. If I write about boundaries and reciprocity, I have to make room for another person’s boundaries while speaking honestly about my own needs.

Living with complex trauma has sometimes made a healthy relationship feel impossible to me. Closeness can carry longing and fear at the same time. I can want to be seen and still struggle with what being seen awakens.

But I have spent so much of my life doing things that once felt impossible that I am no longer willing to treat that feeling as a prediction.

I want love. I want to keep learning how to participate in it.

That begins with being accountable to myself.

When something goes wrong, I learn more by examining my contribution than by building a flawless argument about someone else’s failures. That does not require me to take responsibility for everything. It requires me to take responsibility for what is mine.

As my dad always said, it takes two to tango.

So focus on your steps.

I cannot use that saying to make every relationship an equal division of blame. Abuse belongs to the person choosing abusive behavior. But in a relationship where both people can safely take responsibility, I want to understand my steps before I spend all my energy criticizing theirs.

Where did I stop listening? What did I defend because admitting it would hurt? What did I expect another person to understand without my saying it clearly? And what pain did I turn into behavior that hurt someone I loved?

Resentment makes these questions difficult.

Sometimes a partner has spoken plainly, repeatedly, and with increasing exhaustion. “She told me a thousand times” can be an uncomfortable admission that I heard the words without taking their meaning seriously. I may have mistaken another chance for evidence that the problem was not urgent.

If that happened, accountability asks more of me than an apology. It asks me to understand the pattern and change it.

I need to look beneath my behavior, too. What am I afraid of? What am I protecting? Why does a reasonable request sometimes feel like rejection, criticism, or a threat? Understanding those answers does not erase the effect of my actions. It gives me a better chance of changing them.

This is also where I feel a double standard can enter the conversation. A man’s behavior may be judged entirely by its impact while the pain beneath it goes unexplored. A woman’s resentment may be understood through her hurt while the impact of her response goes unexplored. The roles can reverse, but the imbalance remains whenever compassion is extended to only one person.

I want us to be able to examine both.

My brokenhearted why matters. So does what I did with it.

Her brokenhearted why matters. So does what she does with it.

Neither of us becomes accountable simply because our pain is understandable.

There is a quiet loneliness that men can struggle to name when warmth, affection, and connection disappear from a relationship. I want that pain to be speakable without immediately turning it into an accusation against women.

Nobody owes another person sex. Affection cannot be demanded as proof of love, and someone pulling away may be exhausted, hurt, afraid, or trying to protect a boundary. There is also a difference between needing distance and deliberately using connection as punishment. We need enough honesty to discuss that difference without assuming we already know the other person’s motives.

I want to be able to say, “I feel lonely with you,” and have that feeling heard. I also need to be able to hear, “I do not feel safe being close to you,” without turning the conversation into a trial of whether that feeling is justified. Hearing each other does not guarantee reconciliation. It gives us something more truthful to work with.

Resentment deserves that same honesty.

The hurt beneath it may be real. It may come from repeated disappointments, ignored requests, or needs someone never learned how to express. Sometimes silence follows years of trying to speak. Sometimes we stay silent because we are afraid of conflict, then expect another person to recognize what we have concealed.

Those are different histories. They deserve different responses.

But when resentment becomes the place we live, it can begin interpreting everything for us.

A mistake becomes evidence. An attempt at repair becomes suspicious. A painful moment becomes a permanent description of the person who caused it.

We start saying “You always” and “You never,” until even the moments that contradict us have nowhere to go.

I know how tempting that certainty can be. If I can decide who you are, I do not have to remain vulnerable to what I still do not understand.

But I cannot build reciprocal love while treating another person as a verdict I have already reached.

I need to speak before silence becomes punishment. I need to listen before defensiveness becomes dismissal. And when I have caused harm, I need to stay present long enough to understand it without demanding that my intentions settle the matter. I want that willingness from a partner, too.

Accountability cannot be one person endlessly studying themselves while the other remains beyond examination. Both people need room to name their hurt, acknowledge their behavior, and decide what they are willing and able to change.

Sometimes that work brings people closer. Sometimes it reveals that the relationship cannot continue. I do not want compassion to require either person to abandon themselves.

I want it to help us see clearly.

That is the reflection accompanying Love Is…. The album asks what kind of love I hope to experience. This writing asks how I will practice it when I am hurting. I will not always get that right.

But I want to notice when I begin replacing curiosity with certainty. I want to recognize when my account of someone else has become so complete that their humanity no longer fits inside it.

Because that is how I can begin painting someone I once loved with shame. One hurt, one unspoken feeling, one unquestioned conclusion at a time. And before I add another brushstroke, I want to ask what I still need to understand.