The Ache for What Was Stolen

There’s a certain ache that lives inside many of us who survived incest, an ache that shows up when we witness love. Not just romantic love, but tenderness. Safety. The kind of connection that looks so natural on others it almost seems effortless. And while part of us yearns for it, another part feels like it’s staring through glass, close enough to see it, but never to touch it.

If you’ve ever caught yourself feeling bitterness, envy, or resentment toward someone else’s relationship, please hear this:

You are not broken.

You are grieving.

These feelings don’t make you cruel or ungrateful. They’re signals, sacred messengers from the parts of you still aching for what you never got.

The Hunger for Love and Safety

For many of us, love was a battlefield before it was ever a blessing.

When the people who were supposed to protect us became the ones who hurt us, love and danger got tangled up like vines around our nervous system.

So when we see someone held gently, loved openly, and chosen safely, it touches that old, unmet need inside, the one that still whispers,

“Why not me?”

It’s not jealousy. It’s recognition. A remembering of what should have been.

The child in us is still looking for the arms that never held her safely. The adult in us is still trying to prove she deserves to be loved differently now.

And sometimes, when healing feels far away, that mix turns into envy. Not because we want to take love away from others, but because we want to finally believe it’s possible for us, too.

The Pain of Feeling Unworthy

Incest rewires our worth. It tells us, in every unspeakable way, you are the problem. That lie becomes our internal compass until we start to heal.

So when love passes by, tender, mutual, safe, it can sting like salt in an open wound. We might find ourselves comparing, wondering why others seem so naturally lovable while we feel like we have to earn every ounce of affection.

That’s the grief of someone who was made to believe love had to be traded for silence, obedience, or performance.

Healing asks us to unlearn that. To look at love not as a prize for the pure, but as the birthright of every soul still standing after what they’ve survived.

The Grief of a Stolen Childhood

Sometimes what we call bitterness is just grief wearing armor. We didn’t just lose our innocence, we lost the timeline that love was supposed to follow.

While others were learning how to trust, we were learning how to survive. While others were playing, we were pretending.

That’s why joy can feel foreign and intimacy can feel unsafe. We missed entire seasons of emotional growth, and now we’re trying to plant flowers in a soil that’s still full of shards.

It’s okay to mourn what was stolen.

It’s okay to feel angry that others got what you didn’t.

It’s not petty, it’s honest.

The Fear Beneath the Envy

Sometimes resentment isn’t about others at all. It’s about fear. Fear that we’ll never feel that safe. Fear that if we open our hearts, we’ll be betrayed again.

So we keep love at arm’s length, convincing ourselves we don’t need it while secretly longing for it. We scroll past engagement photos and date nights and “just because” flowers, whispering, “Good for them,” but inside, a quieter voice admits,

“I wish I could believe in that, too.”

That’s not weakness. That’s your heart, testing the edges of its own hope.

When Life Feels Unfair

There’s a certain kind of anger only survivors understand, the “why me” that never fully goes away. We didn’t get to choose the story we were born into, but we have to live with its aftershocks every day.

So yes, sometimes it hurts to watch others live with a kind of innocence that feels extinct in us. It feels unjust, like the universe skipped us when it was handing out “normal.”

That’s not bitterness, it’s longing for balance. It’s the deep desire for life to finally feel fair.

Unhealed Anger and the Shadow of the Abuser

If love was weaponized against us, then seeing it used tenderly by others can ignite rage we didn’t know we were still carrying.
Rage that says, “They got the version of love I was denied.”

Sometimes we project that anger onto the world because it’s safer than facing it head-on. But underneath the resentment isn’t hate, it’s heartbreak.

It’s the part of us that still doesn’t understand how something as sacred as love could have been turned into harm.

The Truth Beneath the Bitterness

Here’s the truth most of us eventually discover on our healing journey: The envy, the resentment, the bitterness, they’re all love stories waiting to be rewritten.

They’re not proof that you’re unhealed. They’re proof that your heart remembers what love is supposed to feel like.

And when you start to give yourself the tenderness you crave from others, that bitterness begins to soften. You start to see someone’s happiness not as evidence of your lack, but as proof that love exists, and if it exists, then healing has not failed you.

You are not behind. You are rebuilding. The fact that you can still long for love after what you’ve endured is a miracle in itself. Let that longing guide you, not into comparison, but into compassion.

Love isn’t gone from your story.

It’s just waiting for you to feel safe enough to receive it.