It can be so helpful to express our unsaid words, anger and grief to those who have hurt us.
There is no good reason to carry someone else's baggage up the mountain.
It weighs us down on a journey that is already challenging enough.
Better to shed it so that we can move into life with greater freedom.
At the same time, we have to be sure not to make our healing dependent on how others receive our expression.
Many of those we share with will be too unconscious, stubborn or defensive to take in our experience, even if we express it in the gentlest of ways.
It may be too shocking to their ways of organizing reality.
It may be too painful to face.
Not everyone is ready or able to do the deep work that self-reflection demands.
This is not to say that we hold back- we must express our truth one way or the other- but it is to say that we are best served by sharing it without expectation. The liberation lies in the expression itself...
- Jeff Brown