Beyond Justification: Healing the Pain Without the Story
Justification is an attempt to rationalize or explain an experience. When something happens that we don’t like, we immediately try to understand and justify it. We explain it because we’re trying to decide how to feel. The underlying question is often, Do I need to defend myself?
The feeling shifts when we find a reason to be mad instead of just hurt. If the other person intentionally hurt me, I feel like I have to defend myself—I can’t just be hurt anymore. It creates a different kind of story, one based on self-defense rather than hurt feelings. But does the story matter? That’s what I’m here to question.
What would happen if we simply dealt with our hurt feelings instead of worrying about whether we needed to defend ourselves? How would that change the healing process?
If we stopped trying to understand why people do what they do and instead focused on processing and releasing our own hurt feelings, the experience—and the emotions tied to it—would fade much more quickly. It’s a cleaner process.
As for what would happen if we didn’t tell the story of self-defense—nothing would happen. There is nothing to protect ourselves from. The story we tell ourselves is that we have to stop it from happening again, but that’s really a story of control. We believe self-defense gives us power over the other person, as if it will prevent the situation from happening again. But what if that’s not true?
What if, instead, you’re just fighting a battle that won’t change anything? And if it happens again, you’ll still face the same unavoidable choice—what to do with the relationship. Our need for control doesn’t change the outcome—it only makes the path to the choice more complicated and painful than necessary.
Trust yourself to handle what happens next. The need to control the outcome is typically based on a fear of the unknown. If we have control and know what the outcome will be, we can prepare for it. We can’t prepare for an unknown outcome. But here’s the truth: your whole life has been an unknown outcome, and you’re still here. You’ll handle the next thing, too.
You don’t need to prepare to defend yourself because, regardless of what happens, you can manage the situation. Defending ourselves by picking a fight doesn’t solve anything. It doesn’t change the outcome in a positive way—it actually makes it worse. If you pick the fight, you’ve given the other person ammunition to be even more mean to you. We don’t need to provide them with that. Keep it to yourself. Don’t tell that story; instead, allow yourself to move past the hurt feelings and move on.
Justification leads us to question the story in a way that compels us to search for a problem, creating a reason to defend ourselves. But when we question the story, we’re not doing it to find a problem—we’re doing it to understand ourselves within the experience. Why do we feel the way we feel?
When we ask that question, we shouldn’t look for trouble in the external world. Instead, we should turn inward for the answer. Maybe you feel this way because it has happened before, because it reminded you of a different experience, or because there’s a trigger there. Whatever the reason, none of these things are external—they are internal feelings, and they are your responsibility.
Managing ourselves in the experience comes down to understanding our own internal feelings without using the external world to justify them. It also means retaining our power of choice, knowing that we can handle whatever happens next. We don’t search for problems outside ourselves to fight against. Instead, we leave those stories alone and trust ourselves to navigate life as it unfolds.
When we look for a problem, we’re projecting our pain outward. The ego steps in, trying to defend us from the unknown, but that isn’t helpful. It pulls us into the justification rabbit hole, creating a story about our experience that may or may not be true.
The bottom line is simple: deal only with the feelings that arise from an experience. This makes processing events much easier and far less painful. We’re not adding to the story, inventing a problem, or assigning blame, shame, guilt, or victimization. We’re simply acknowledging and managing our internal feelings, separate from the outside world. The separation is necessary to avoid embellishing the story of the experience you’re already telling.
Letting go of justification isn’t about ignoring what happened—it’s about freeing yourself from unnecessary suffering. When we stop searching for reasons to defend ourselves and instead focus on processing our emotions, we feel better quicker. The stories we tell shape our experience, but they are not the experience itself. By choosing not to engage in stories of self-defense, we allow ourselves to heal, move forward, and trust in our ability to handle whatever comes next.
Love to all.
Della
