I Judged You Until I Understood You

On repeating the mistakes I once condemned, taking accountability, and finding forgiveness on the other side of understanding.

Jessica Choate RN

For years, I held someone accountable for choices I swore I would never make.

I judged them.

I resented them.

I couldn't understand how someone could love the people around them and still make decisions that caused so much pain.

How could they not see what they were doing?

How could they continue choosing something that was hurting the people who loved them?

How could they allow themselves to become so consumed by another person, by their own suffering, by the chaos of their life, that they couldn't recognize the damage unfolding right in front of them?

I had so many questions.

And beneath those questions was a quiet certainty.

I would never do that.

I would never lose myself like that.

I would never allow a relationship to consume me.

I would never let my own pain spill over onto the people I loved.

I would know better.

I would choose differently.

Until I didn't.

Until life brought me to my own knees.

Until I found myself in a relationship where I slowly abandoned pieces of myself, one compromise at a time.

Until I became so consumed with trying to be loved, trying to be understood, trying to hold everything together, that I could no longer see just how much of myself I had lost.

And somewhere along the way, I began making the very choices I had spent years judging someone else for.

Not all at once.

That's the part I never understood before.

I used to imagine those choices as something deliberate. As though a person simply woke up one morning and decided to abandon themselves, compromise their values, or hurt the people they loved.

But that's not how it happened for me.

It happened slowly.

Through the things I excused.

The boundaries I moved.

The needs I silenced.

The promises I made to myself and then quietly broke.

The countless times I convinced myself that if I could just love a little harder, explain myself a little better, endure a little longer, things would finally change.

I didn't recognize the woman I was becoming because I was too busy trying to survive being her.

And by the time I began to see clearly, I had to confront a truth that absolutely broke my heart.

I had become capable of the very things I once believed I was above.

Not because I didn't love the people who needed me.

I loved them fiercely.

But love and presence are not always the same thing.

And sometimes I was so consumed by a relationship, so desperate to make something work, that the people who depended on me didn't get the version of me they deserved.

That's a difficult truth to sit with.

Because I know what it feels like to be on the receiving end of those choices.

I know what it feels like to wonder why you weren't enough for someone to choose differently.

I know what it feels like to carry the consequences of decisions you never got to make.

And now I also know what it feels like to be the person making them.

There is a particular kind of grief that comes with recognizing yourself in someone you once resented.

It strips away the comfortable distance between their mistakes and your humanity.

Suddenly, the person you spent years trying to understand is no longer some impossible contradiction.

They're human.

Wounded.

Afraid.

Desperately trying to find safety, love, or relief in places that cannot give it to them.

And the hardest part?

You realize that you were never as different from them as you needed to believe.

Understanding Isn't the Same as Excusing

I want to be very clear about something.

Understanding why someone caused harm does not erase the harm they caused.

Trauma is not a free pass.

Abuse is not justified by a painful childhood.

And loving someone does not automatically make the consequences of our choices disappear.

The pain I experienced was real.

The pain I caused was real, too.

Both deserve acknowledgment.

For years, I thought forgiving someone meant minimizing what happened. That if I softened toward them, I was somehow betraying the version of myself who had been hurt.

But I'm beginning to understand that forgiveness doesn't require me to rewrite history.

I can look back and say, That should not have happened.

And still recognize that the person making those choices may have been drowning in wounds I couldn't see.

I can hold someone accountable without reducing their entire existence to the worst decisions they ever made.

And perhaps most importantly, I can extend that same understanding to myself without escaping responsibility for my own.

Because I don't want to use my trauma as an explanation for everyone else's behavior and then as an excuse for my own.

I want to understand it.

I want to recognize where it influenced my choices.

And I want to take responsibility for making different ones.

Not from shame.

Not from the belief that I am a terrible person.

But from the realization that I cannot change a pattern I am unwilling to admit I have participated in.

The Woman I Couldn't See Before

Something shifted in me recently.

After years of trying to make sense of what someone had done, I stopped looking at them exclusively through the lens of how they had hurt me.

And for the first time, I wondered what life must have felt like from inside their experience.

What had they been surviving?

What had they been taught about love?

How many times had they abandoned themselves before abandoning what mattered most?

How many things had they normalized because chaos was all they knew?

How much pain had they been carrying while everyone around them was asking why they couldn't just make better choices?

I began to wonder whether they had ever felt safe enough to see clearly.

Not because I believe they had no responsibility for their actions.

But because I've learned firsthand how difficult it can be to recognize an unhealthy pattern while you're still living inside it.

Especially when you've mistaken survival for love.

When your sense of worth has become entangled with whether someone chooses you.

When leaving feels more terrifying than staying.

When you've spent so long adapting to pain that you no longer recognize it as pain.

I used to see weakness.

Now I can recognize fear.

I used to see selfishness.

Now I can sometimes recognize desperation.

I used to see choices I couldn't comprehend.

Now I can recognize patterns I have fought to escape myself.

And with that recognition came something I didn't expect.

Compassion.

Not the kind that makes excuses.

The kind that says:

I understand how you got lost.

Because I got lost, too.

I Owe Myself the Same Accountability I Once Demanded From You

This may be the most uncomfortable part of my healing.

It would be easy to stop at understanding.

To say I was traumatized.

To explain that I was doing the best I could with the awareness I had.

To tell myself that I never intended to cause anyone pain.

And I believe those things can be true.

But I also know that intention does not erase impact.

The people affected by my choices don't owe me forgiveness simply because I was suffering.

They don't owe me understanding.

They don't owe me an exemption from accountability.

Just as I didn't owe those things to anyone who hurt me.

What I owe them is something more meaningful than an explanation.

Changed behavior.

I owe them the willingness to see what I once couldn't see.

To stop defending decisions simply because admitting their consequences hurts.

To stop confusing self-punishment with responsibility.

To recognize when my own wounds are influencing the choices I make.

And to do the difficult, often unglamorous work of choosing differently.

I cannot go back and become the person I wish I had been.

I cannot undo every moment I was emotionally absent while physically present.

I cannot reclaim every opportunity I missed because I was consumed by trying to save something that was costing me myself.

But I can be here now.

I can tell the truth.

I can repair what is mine to repair.

And I can refuse to let shame become another reason I remain stuck.

Because accountability without compassion becomes punishment.

And compassion without accountability becomes permission to repeat the same patterns.

I need both.

So I'm Choosing Forgiveness

Not because the past suddenly feels okay.

Not because I've forgotten what happened.

Not because I believe every relationship deserves to be restored.

But because I no longer want to hold someone hostage to a version of themselves I now understand more deeply.

I don't know what they knew at the time.

I don't know what they were capable of seeing.

I don't know whether they have ever looked back with the same grief I now feel when I examine my own life.

And maybe I'll never know.

But I don't need to know every answer to choose not to carry the same resentment forward.

For a long time, I wanted them to understand what they had done.

I wanted accountability.

Recognition.

Some acknowledgment that the pain I carried mattered.

And it did matter.

It still does.

But something has changed.

I no longer need to see them as the villain in my story to validate the suffering I experienced.

I can acknowledge what happened without defining them entirely by it.

I can forgive them without giving them unlimited access to my life.

I can offer compassion without abandoning my boundaries.

And I can recognize the wounded human being beneath the choices that hurt me.

Perhaps that's what forgiveness looks like for me now.

Not pretending it didn't happen.

Not declaring it acceptable.

But finally allowing someone to be more than the worst thing they ever did.

And allowing myself the same grace.

Maybe This Is How We Break the Cycle

I used to believe breaking generational patterns meant never making the mistakes of the people who came before me.

That healing meant becoming so aware, so intentional, so different, that I would never repeat what hurt me.

But I did repeat some of it.

And admitting that has been one of the most humbling experiences of my life.

I cannot build a different future on the belief that I am somehow incapable of causing harm.

I have to be willing to see myself clearly.

Even the parts that make me uncomfortable.

Even the choices I wish I could take back.

Even the ways I betrayed my own values while trying desperately not to lose someone else.

Maybe breaking the cycle isn't about being the person who never gets lost.

Maybe it's about becoming the person who can finally recognize when she is lost.

The person willing to stop.

To tell the truth.

To take responsibility.

To choose a different way forward.

And perhaps part of that process is recognizing that the people who hurt us were human long before we understood what that meant.

We don't have to excuse their choices.

We don't have to invite them back into our lives.

We don't even have to forgive them.

But sometimes, after walking through our own darkness, we find ourselves standing somewhere we never expected.

Looking back at someone we once judged.

And instead of asking,

How could you?

We find ourselves whispering,

Now I understand how.

Not because we agree with what happened.

But because we finally understand how a person can lose themselves.

How love can become entangled with fear.

How survival can narrow someone's world until they can barely recognize the choices they're making.

And how even someone with the best intentions can leave wounds in the people they love.

I spent years holding someone accountable for mistakes I believed I would never make.

Now I'm holding myself accountable for making them, too.

And strangely enough, that accountability hasn't made me hate them more.

It's made me softer.

More human.

Less certain that I know what someone else should have done from a place I've never had to stand.

I still believe people are responsible for the harm they cause.

I just no longer believe their harm is the whole of who they are.

And today, I'm choosing forgiveness.

For the person I couldn't understand.

For the person I became while trying to survive.

And for every version of me that did not yet know another way.

Not to erase the past.

But to stop allowing it to decide who I become next.

— Jessica Choate, RN

The Unmasked Journal | Plant Medicine Healing