The Untold Toll of a Bad Relationship…
Before HIM, I had a life. Before HE came along and ruined pretty much everything, I had a life. It was full and rich and amazing. I was really living my best life.
But then, due to unhealed parts of ME, that I was not really conscious of, I allowed HIM in and that changed everything. MY living situation, MY finances, MY trusting nature, MY security, MY safety, MY emotional and physical well being. Like a hurricane, HE came tearing through MY life, leaving ME barely functional and chasing the ghost of all that HE promised and never delivered.
No, I am not blaming HIM. I was an all too willing participant in MY own demise. I curtailed, shut down, overlooked, gaslit MYself, reasoned, made excuses, and generally failed to treat MYself very well. And HE capitalized on all of that. I am sure our relationship looked like I loved HIM and hated ME. That was painful to write…but oh so true.
Anyway, this isn’t about HIM. It is about ME. All the things I gave up to participate in that shitshow. Of course, there are the obvious ones: self respect, self esteem, financial outlays for someone who refused to work or get a job or do much of anything. I lost sleep attempting to sort through all the lies and omissions. I became an unwitting detective in MY own life, trying to find proof of all MY subconscious knew to be fact. That took a long time to come but gratefully I left before I had the proof.
Before HIM, I meditated, yoga’d, worked out, hiked daily. MY life was calm and serene and routine. Slowly, MY ever increasing participation and occupation by HIM, removed the stable foundation in MY life. I stopped meditating because I could not sit with MYself knowing what I was doing to MYself with HIM and all HIS bullshit. I stopped yogaing because I was offering up MY body to a person who did not respect ME, was unfaithful and largely treated ME and MY body with disdain and disregard. Why should I care, when HE didn’t? MY hiking came to a standstill, HIM always promising we would go together when HE got back, but then it was always hours without a call or text and I would end up just waiting for HIM and then missing my window of opportunity. MY gym attendance remained but it was also sporadic, always coming in second to HIS whims and demands.
To be clear, I lost myself in HIM. I willing gave ME up to have HIM. I cannot for the life of ME on this side of it figure out why. I mean what the actual fuck was I thinking??? I wasn’t. I was in a trauma response trying to resolve past hurts with present ones. Never works, yet we all keep trying. I see it at work every day. So seductive the promise that this time it will be different…it rarely is. We become the liars in their stead. We take over lying to ourselves to survive the lies we are living every day.
I cut a deal with a devil that was content sponging off ME, using ME for HIS own gain and purpose, while I charged myself with huge costs and deficits in my emotional, spiritual and physical well being. HE didn’t cause me to to do that, I thought I was in love and that I was loved back. So very sad and painful to admit that I was only being used. But I am grateful that that wasn’t love, allows ME to have some semblance of hope for the future. Because if THAT was love, I want nothing to do with it!
I ended things for good last July but the relationship was on life support for a year before that. I was mostly gone, but I allowed a continued access that always resulted in ME getting roped back into the drama and the lie that I actually meant something to HIM. I left a number of times but the last one in July finally stuck. And then, as if the universe wanted to reward ME with confirmation of MY intuitions being right, I found out in August all that I feared was true over the course of this whole debacle, was in fact, true. The door was shut and locked, but August made ME bar it and then toss the key into the ocean.
The recovery has been slower than I would like. So hard to reconcile who I think I am with how I showed up in that shitshow. It has been a painful healing. I have had to own some hard shit about MYself and get to work on MY own wounds that left ME vulnerable to the likes of HIM. Some things I lost came back quickly, and some have taken a lot longer than I would have liked…
The gym attendance was an immediate rededication. I was up in there just working on MY fitness daily. Nothing like a break up to motivate you in this department.
The hiking resumed immediately also. It is only in nature where I find the solace, grace and permission to heal, so I went there to my temple to worship and gather myself up once more before the dusty hillsides, reluctant streams and wildlife. When I am in pain, the only place I can really experience it is in the safety of the great expanse of wild landscapes.
The meditation took a very long time to come back. I would start then fall off again immediately. It took ME the better part of six months to realize that I was unable to sit with myself and God because of all the shame I felt about ever getting involved with HIM in the first place. I allowed that shame to keep ME off and away from MY cushion for a very long time. Until, I figured out that I needed to deal with the shame or it would consume ME. It was a hard day indeed when I sat with myself and God and allowed all the harsh criticism to descend upon MY shoulders. Of course, that was all ME, God was much more forgiving.
The yoga has been the last thing to come back online. Which is weird because I would have thought the shame of it all would have been the leader, barring meditation and stillness because of how much the busy is a great defense mechanism…but alas, no, it was reclaiming MY body that was the last to reappear. I guess that is because the thoughts of shame and remorse and recrimination lives in the mind but the body keeps the score. Always. And MY body was no different. I had to get honest about all the things I did and allowed to happen or not happen to ME to find a final resting place and then deal with the horrors that conjured up for ME.
When your childhood is punctuated by abuse, sometimes you lose your connection to your body. The mind and body separate, they coexist sure, but they are not in harmony. One does some things and the other does other things and that is just the way it is. They share a system but are wholly and largely unaware of their delicate and intricate interplay.
And if I am honest, I walked into that relationship with scars and wounds that were not healed and were festering. MY body was the landscape of MY own abuse, ME picking up where others’ left off. So I guess it makes sense that yoga, this practice of being in MY body and mind at the same time, of breathing through the poses, of noticing places I am tight or sore or needing to be stretched, was the last to come online…
But it has, and it is different than before. I am oddly more flexible than when I left the practice. I am more deeply in MY body and MY mind doesn’t flit off in a myriad of thoughtful excuses, a final truce between the two appears to no longer be a tentative peace, or ceasefire. What it feels like is an occupation that is total and complete; the two forces melding together in a way that a future extrication of either is impossible. It is like all the fragmented and broken parts of ME have finally found some sort of homeostasis with each other that has proven to be a very reliable and consistent path to living.
I paid dearly for MY participation in the disaster that was HIM. I didn’t even know it until I was all the way out. It has taken ME months and months of work to arrive at such a place of peace and humble consistency with MYself again. It has taken six months to return to the cushion and almost eight to return to the mat. And while that seems like a very long time, I am grateful I have been able to return at all.
If you are in a horrible relationship that has removed you from yourself in body, mind and spirit, I hope you ask yourself some hard questions:
Is it worth it?
How do you feel?
What are you getting out of this?
Why is abuse so familiar to you?
What are you going to do about it?
And if you need help answering these questions, please reach out. I am happy to share MY experience, MY strength and MY hope. Because I remain committed to the idea that when one person finds their way through the darkness, it then becomes our responsibility to help others do the same.
For ME, I am grateful to return to a place I have never been before. I am doing all the things I did before but they are landing in ME quite differently. They have become things I value so much that I will not ever throw them away again. They are MY becoming, most especially with all MY drive to be MY own undoing. I would love to tell you that after almost 30 years of living in the soultion, I don’t have to still work at not blowing MYself up daily. But I do. Most days this isn’t hard, and then there are still those days that are…
I made a choice to live. And I have done MY best to honor that choice ever since. Sometimes I do it by learning new life skills and sometimes I have to learn it by practicing the destruction I already know…both are valuable, both are teachers…I just happen to really enjoy the former over the later as it turns out. Sometimes the worst self destruction occurs in our lives by the company we choose to keep…sometimes relationships are just another way to self destruct.
So the toll is and was high. That seemingly fun side adventure could just take over your life and occupy you so completely that you lose all your routines and practices you have worked so hard to develop and hone. All the things you do for yourself everyday, that support this peaceful, loving life, get stripped away. They don’t do it to you, you do it to yourself. And, for the most part, you never even saw it coming…and the plot twist that you were the architect of your own demise, the ultimate cliffhanger. But cliffhangers are always good setups for a sequel…and maybe we can all defy the odds and make the sequel better than the original. That is the hope anyway…
Again..still.
Sigh.
Healing really does take an awful lot of work, but the payoff is worth it, every motherfucking time.
Again…still.
Yay.
