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Sunday afternoon, I was in a class with my 11-year-old at our church, learning about forgiveness. To practice, they gave us the task of asking each other, “Have I hurt or wronged you in any way in the past week?”
She said, “When you tell me that the things in my imagination aren’t real, that hurts my feelings.”
She spends time every day laying on her bed, listening to music, and interacting in an imaginary world. It helps her exercise her amazing creativity, process her experiences, and interact in a world of her own making where anything is possible.
TTRPG players, maybe you can relate.
But while we love hearing about the stories and events in her world, we emphasize that they’re not real. Yet, as I heard her express her hurt, I realized that those experiences shape her as much as any other and that they are an authentic part of who she is.
Those of you with mental illness, maybe you’ve been told, “It’s all in your head,” as if an experience that originates inside your body is less real than one beginning outside. Or maybe you have an experience similar to a diagnosable condition but don’t have a formal diagnosis to label it, like the Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria that I just learned about on the ADHd20 podcast that accurately describes my lifelong experience. All of your experiences are “all in your head” since that’s where our bodies process information, whether that begins internally or externally, in the present or the past, in your brain, arm, or pituitary gland. Regardless of what causes the experience, the experience is an undeniably real part of who you are.
So I affirmed the reality of her experience and apologized to her.
And she forgave me. |
