I Needed It to Make Sense

by Tawnia Lives

When I was in the early parts of recovery, I remember feeling confused.

Not because I didn’t know what had happened.

Because I couldn’t understand how it could happen.

I could not understand how someone could be cruel to another person.

I could not understand how someone could repeatedly hurt someone they claimed to love.

I could not understand how someone’s words and actions could be so far apart.

And because I couldn’t understand it, my mind went looking for answers.

Maybe they were stressed.

Maybe they were hurting.

Maybe they didn’t realize the impact.

Maybe there was something I wasn’t seeing.

Maybe there was a reason that would make it all make sense.

Looking back, I understand that I wasn’t searching for excuses.

I was searching for relief.

Because confusion is painful.

When something doesn’t make sense, the mind keeps returning to it.

Turning it over.

Looking at it from another angle.

Searching for the missing piece.

We tell ourselves that if we can just understand it, maybe the pain will settle.

Maybe we’ll finally feel safe.

But some experiences refuse to fit into the explanations we’re searching for.

Not because we aren’t trying hard enough.

Because we’re trying to make sense of something through the lens of our own values.

We imagine what we would do.

What we would feel.

How we would respond.

And then we try to apply that logic to someone else’s behavior.

That’s where many of us get stuck.

Not because we are naive.

Not because we are weak.

Because we assume other people are operating from the same rules we are.

The same empathy.

The same care.

The same concern for the impact they have on others.

When that isn’t true, confusion follows.

For a long time, I thought my confusion meant I was missing something.

Now I think the confusion was telling me something.

It was showing me the distance between what I believed relationships should be and what I was experiencing.

The confusion wasn’t the problem.

The confusion was the clue.

Because healthy things tend to make sense over time.

Unhealthy things often require endless explanations.

And there came a point when I stopped asking myself to make it make sense.

I stopped searching for the explanation that would finally bring me peace.

Instead, I accepted something much simpler:

I was hurt.

What happened was painful.

And I did not need to fully understand someone else’s behavior in order to understand my own experience.

That realization changed everything.

— Tawnia Lives

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