Are You Mad at Me?: How to Stop Focusing on What Others Think and Start Living for You

by Meg Josephson

We can start healing when we stop trying to get our pain validated by the people who caused us harm. So often we look for external validation from those who aren’t emotionally capable of seeing the pain they caused and may never be capable of doing that in this lifetime.

Grief doesn’t go away—it’s part of my body’s topography, like rivers and creeks carved into me—but it morphs and changes and moves from the foreground to the background, then to the foreground again. Time keeps passing, and life keeps going—as do we.