This is the one place on the site where I’m not answering a specific question — I’m just telling you what stuck. Twenty years at hundreds of bedsides left me with more than tidy lessons; some of it never resolved, and some of it contradicted what I believed before I started. These are the posts where I write about that directly — the patterns I kept seeing, the research that confirmed what I’d already noticed, and the parts of the job I never figured out how to fix. Nothing here is packaged as advice. It’s just what’s true, as far as I can tell.
Most people trying to forgive someone who hurt them are blocked by a version of forgiveness that has nothing to do with what forgiveness actually requires. They think it means accepting that what happened was okay, releasing the other person from accountability, or agreeing to repair what was broken. None of that is true. What … Read more