accepting the pain of my past
(This is a picture of me right before my last break up. I took it for an art piece I was doing at the time. I knew in my body something wasn’t right and a couple of months later we went separate ways.)
I have noticed that my go-to trauma response is to freeze. So, when I tore myself away from a toxic relationship of 10 plus years I went into freeze response around trusting and loving again. I lived in silent shame when I was in the relationship because I didn’t know how to let it go even though I knew it was a bad situation. It seemed like I was addicted to the co-dependent cycles and patterns that the relationship perpetuated.
At the time, I didn’t understand that I was giving and receiving love according to what was modeled to me during childhood. I lived in a home where my father was emotionally unavailable and my stepmother was manipulative and abusive. Love was modeled to me through Walt Disney, MTV and HBO. I spent a lot of time in my room fantasizing about the day I would have a love like that in the movies.
This hope and fantasy spilled into my relationships with men. I expected something magical to happen for me and the right guy. With each guy I dated, I hoped that we would fall in love and ride off into the sunset together like Sandy and Danny from Grease. Unfortunately, I was disillusioned.
It wasn’t until I started looking at myself and asking why I couldn’t bring a healthy relationship into my life that things slowly started to shift. I had to look under every rock and splunk down every dark crevice of my emotional being in order to understand that what happened to me as a child was effecting all of my relationships now.
The past experiences of my childhood and with men continue to influence me today but they no longer run the show. They no longer keep me frozen from opening my heart to people who care about me and want to be in healthy relationship.
In fact, in my prayers nowadays, I ask to be shown what healthy love feels like because I understand that I am still learning what healthy love is. One aspect of healthy love that I have discovered thus far is to have compassion, love and acceptance for the person I was while in that toxic relationship. To forgive myself for not knowing how to stand up for myself, for not having have enough self-love and self-respect to end my involvement with that person sooner. To accept that I was only loving as I was taught to love and that healthy love was not modeled to me.
As a result, the definition of healthy love is currently a set of standards for how I treat myself. I am still developing those standards and, yes, I fumble from time to time, but the first standard is unconditional compassion for what is showing up for me in the moment. Loving that part of me that is having her feelings and holding space for myself until the emotion passes or is resolved.
