#rebirthleadership #jencoaching
Recently, during a coaching conversation, someone shared an experience she had carried for years. Early in her career, she trusted someone and devoted several years to working with them. When that journey ended, she felt deeply hurt. She felt deceived. She felt she had lost something.
Most painfully, she wondered:
“Did I waste those years of my life?”
I listened. Then I asked her:
“When you think of that person now, what face do you remember most?”
She paused. She might have remembered a controlling face. A powerful face. The face of someone determined to have things their way.
Instead, she remembered:
“A miserable face. A very tired face.”
Behind the strength and control, behind someone trying so hard to make things work in their own way, she had also seen an exhausted human being.
Then I asked:
“And what was your face?”
She became quiet.
After a while, she said:
“Maybe I had that inside me too.”
Years had passed. There had been consequences and accountability. Some of what she had lost had eventually been returned.
Then I asked one more question:
“If that person were sitting in front of you now—not as the person who hurt you, but simply as that tired, miserable human being you remember—what would you want for her?”
She paused again.
“I just hope she will be okay.”
Something became very still. Not because what happened was right. It wasn’t. Not because painful experiences should be forgotten. And not because compassion requires us to accept harmful behaviour, remove necessary boundaries, or return to a relationship that hurt us.
It doesn’t.
What moved me was: After everything, compassion was still there.
When two truths can live together, part of becoming more whole is learning that we do not always have to choose between truths that seem to contradict each other.
We can say:
What you did hurt me.
And still say:
I hope you will be okay.
We can hold someone accountable without building the rest of our lives around resentment. We can create boundaries without denying another person’s humanity.
Understanding does not excuse harm.
Compassion and accountability can live together.
Forgiveness sometimes begins somewhere quieter:
What happened to me did not take away my capacity to love.
That does not change the past.
But it may change our relationship with it.
Those years no longer have to remain only:
“Years someone took from me.”
Over time, they may also become:
“Years whose meaning I chose to reclaim.”
...
Question for us:
When the anger, judgment, and old stories become quiet for a moment, what face do you see?
And beneath everything that happened,
what is still alive in you?
