31/07/2026
BEYOND WITH KELSON great post 🙏🌻🧡
🚨 According to Research about our Brain :
This is for the person who has spent time trying to understand how someone who claimed to love them could have hurt them the way they did.
Who has turned the question over many times and arrived at many answers and found that none of the answers have fully landed in the place where the question lives. Who has understood, at the level of the mind, that people who hurt others are usually hurting.
That the capacity for causing pain is almost always the residue of pain received.
That the behavior that wounded them so specifically had a history behind it that preceded them entirely and would have found its expression in some form regardless of who was in the relationship.
Who has understood all of that. And who has found that the understanding, however accurate and however compassionate, has not fully dissolved the specific, persistent, quietly devastating question that sits beneath the intellectual explanation.
The question of whether it was them. Whether something about who they are or how they showed up or what they needed or how they loved produced the specific response they received. Whether they were, in some way they cannot fully name, the reason.
Neuroscientist Martin Teicher at Harvard University, whose extensive research into how early trauma shapes the developing brain and produces lasting changes in the neural systems governing emotional regulation, empathy, and attachment behavior, found something that reframes the behavior of people who hurt others in relationships in a way that is both honest and, when it lands, genuinely liberating.
People who cause significant emotional harm in intimate relationships are, in the overwhelming majority of cases, operating from neural patterns that were established by their own early experiences of relational harm.
The specific ways they withdraw, or criticize, or minimize, or betray, or fail to show up with the consistency and care that the relationship required, are not primarily responses to the specific person in front of them. They are the expression of neural patterns that predate the relationship entirely, patterns formed in the specific shape of what they learned early that closeness costs, what they learned that safety requires, what they learned that love looks like when it is being managed by someone who is primarily trying to survive it rather than genuinely inhabit it.
Researcher Sue Johnson at the University of Ottawa, whose emotionally focused therapy has helped thousands of couples and individuals understand the attachment dynamics underneath relationship behavior, found that the behavior most likely to be experienced by a partner as deliberate cruelty, emotional unavailability, criticism, withdrawal, or replacement, is almost always, from the inside of the person performing it, an attachment behavior. A specific strategy for managing the threat of closeness that the nervous system learned before it had any other options available.
This does not mean the behavior was acceptable. It does not mean the harm caused was not real. It does not mean the person should not be held to the account that genuine care for another human being requires. It means that the harm was not authored by the person receiving it. The specific shape of the wound inflicted was cut from a template that existed before the relationship began and would have found its expression in the same or similar form with anyone sufficiently close to activate the pattern.
You were not the cause of what they did. You were the person who was close enough for the pattern to find you.
And the wound they carry, the wound that they could not heal before they brought it into the relationship with you, produced the wound you are now healing. The chain of unhealed wounds passing from person to person across time. Until someone, at some point, heals theirs instead of passing it on.
You have the opportunity to be that person. Not for them. For the people who will be close enough to you in the future to be affected by what you choose to do with what you were given.
Break the chain. Not because they deserve your healing. Because you do.
