Some months after my 35th birthday, after three years of being my own “significant other,” I entered a relationship that profoundly changed my life. From the beginning it was intense and compelling. It stirred longings that I hadn't experienced since my painful and complicated childhood relationship with my mother. My heart opened in ways it never had in any other adult relationship. I felt a kind of loving I had never before felt toward anyone.
I was deeply drawn to my partner, whose woundedness seemed so parallel to my own. We both had always been seen as the rock, the nurturer-the one on whom everyone could depend. Those who looked to either of us for
Our coming together was, at first, a joint commitment to risk becoming visible to each other in these damaged places. It seemed that we both might, at last and safely, explore being our strong and our vulnerable selves with one another. Yet, many less than conscious agendas and reluctances in both of us quickly led into very tangled emotional territory.
My partner, who could be incredibly sympathetic, tender and caring was, more often, cold, distant, critical and sarcastic. I found myself caught up in gyrations of conciliation. I became totally preoccupied with finding ways to re-create closeness, softness and warmth in the midst of the freeze. I involved myself in endless attempts to nurture, express love, placate, propitiate, cajole. More often than not, my attempts to bridge the gap between us only widened it. Still, every once in a while, warmth re-emerged in response to my exertions. These occasional rewards encouraged my escalating efforts and kept me obsessed with trying.
I found myself immersed in profound pain, confusion and self-doubt. During the few years just before this, I'd begun to feel that I pretty well knew both myself and what I wanted in my life. Now, for the first time in my adult life, I felt completely lost to myself. I felt utterly stripped. I could watch it happening. I would bend and twist and re-invent myself in my efforts to avoid the cold, critical distancing
responses. I felt devastated by all of it. I felt depressed most of the time. I loved and hated my partner in equal measure. Yet, I repeatedly dismissed my hating and my internal rage-full rantings as “my craziness, my resistance to partnering.”
Despite the intensity of the pain and turmoil, I felt bound to the process: the struggle to make this relationship blossom. I kept meeting coldness with loving, caring, understanding and nurture. I kept believing that my willingness to do this would eventually help my partner to heal the wounds that led to the cold, critical distancing behavior. I kept believing I could love and nurture my partner into a wholeness that could include loving me as I believed I wanted to be loved!
My close friends were horrified as they watched me come undone. They suffered much upset and anguish of their own on my behalf. They reflected. They interpreted. They implored. They offered all kinds of support to help me sever the connection. One couple even arranged for me to “accidentally” meet someone they thought might be attractive to me. Unable to fathom my participation in my own coming undone process, they demonized and blamed my partner for all that was happening in me.
In the vortex of my turmoil, I was continually bombarded by others' views, interpretations and advice about my circumstances and behaviors. Friends, and even a therapist I consulted with during the worst of it, constantly pushed for me to leave the relationship with the “emotionally destructive” partner. All agreed I shouldn't have to “put up with” what was “coming from” my partner. All agreed I would be “better” once I'd left.
With all of this input overlaid on my turmoil, I had to work very hard to stay with my own deep sense that it was important for me to continue being right where I was. It was work to hold onto my inner knowing that something very important was in process here. It was work to keep honoring my conviction that all this anguish was teaching me something, growing me and taking me somewhere I needed to go. My coming undone felt like an enormous, if still incomprehensible, part of my healing journey-not just the doing of a “demonic” partner.
I had to ask my friends to stay out of it. I implored them to handle their own upset about my situation. I asked them to do this without expecting me to make changes in how I was handling my life. I asked them to trust with me that, despite appearances, something really powerful was happening in me. Some were able to give me that trust. With others, I had to disconnect entirely.
It took a very long time for me to work my way through this extraordinarily challenging life experience. I was cracked completely open, scoured to the bone. Finally, after seven years, I could begin to accept that no amount of my caring/loving/nurturing was ever going to heal my partner's woundedness or expand my partner's self-love.
My endless exertions had only depleted and undone me. I had spent myself giving to my partner the kind of loving I thought I needed from a partner. My less than conscious agenda had been to have my loving fix my partner enough so that my partner could then love me enough to fix me. It didn't work that way. It never does. I was filled with resentment and despair. I was exhausted and bereft.
This long, painful journey taught me that healing into self-loving is unquestionably and always an inside job, a gift one can only give oneself. My experience forced me to give up my conviction that anyone could love another being into wholeness and self-love. And, it moved me to give up my long-cherished fantasy that someday someone (outside myself) would love me so fully that I'd have to love myself!
As I worked on disentangling the endless layers of the psychic/emotional enmeshment with my now ex-partner I simultaneously began what has become the most important journey of my life. Over the past 20+ years, I have been living a passionate commitment to the practice of treating myself as lovingly, tenderly, gently, compassionately and unconditionally as I'd hoped some fantasized lover might. I have been becoming the fiercely loving, protective “Big Momma” who can love me into wholeness and self-loving. (See the Little Ones Story and Coming Home for more about how this process unfolded.)
Often our journeys into darkness are ways that our pasts become present. Old unresolved material from earlier times reappears in the context of our current life. As we live through this current version of the repeating story, we have an opportunity both to move further toward becoming conscious of the process and toward bringing resolution to it.
The devastating experiences with my ex-partner were my past become present: My experience of my partner's ambivalent, painful treatment of me was an emotional replay of how I experienced my mother's treatment of me as a child. My spiraling exertions and obsession with trying to fix my partner absolutely paralleled my way of trying to fix my mother. The resentment, despair and rage-full internal rantings were also the same. This time around, I was able to go all the way through to the other side: I learned to stop trying to make someone into the mother for whom I yearned. I learned to stop giving to another the very mothering for which I yearned. I learned that I needed to turn the mothering toward myself.
The advice and reflections from all my loving friends asked me to abort the dark, incomprehensible, painful process in my life that was being so excruciating for them to watch. Listening to my own inner knowing, I was able to choose to stay, to live fully into this long, incredibly anguishing cycle of devastation. The commitment to see it through to its own, organic resolution opened me to the most profound healing of my life.
May you find the courage to consider choosing to listen inwardly, especially in the most confusing times and particularly when others are having a lot to say about what they think you should be doing!
And, PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE if you recognize your current situation in my story:
Remember that the only wounded one your love can ever heal is YOUR VERY OWN SELF!!! No matter how exquisitely you love, you cannot love an unavailable or emotionally abusive (or physically abusive) partner into wholeness. Healing into wholeness is always an inside job, one best supported by a therapist or a support group!
If we are in relationship with someone who treats us poorly, it is OURSELVES we need to love and heal, not our partners! Getting support to help us to give ourselves permission to turn and give our unconditional loving to our own selves can help a lot. A good therapist and/or Al-Anon groups can offer that help.
Remember, too, that when we pour loving onto someone who does not love himself or herself, they devalue and trash both that love and the one who gives it. Groucho Marx described that person's basic attitude years ago: “Why would I ever want to join any club that would have me as a member!”
Consider being incredibly gentle with yourself.
P.S. So many of your delicious e-mails send appreciations for the affirmation, support and nourishment you receive from the site. When I answer them, I don’t always remember to let you know that having your own deck of the Rememberings and Celebrations cards is a way to bring this same loving voice into your everyday world, to have it at hand as you need to remind yourself of the "real" truth moment to moment in the crazimakingness of the so-called real world!
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The card on this page is part of a set of 64 handcolored bookmark-size cards called the Rememberings and Celebrations deck. They can be used as an oracle, a meditation focus or a "book-in-pieces" to kindle and grow a compassionate, gentle, unconditionally loving, fiercely protective inner-Mother to help you carve safe healing space for your emerging self and for the wounded little ones inside.
If you'd like a deck of your very own to support you in your journey, click here to download Order Form.
Please feel free to e-mail me at rposin@hotmail.com. to share your reflections and responses to any or all of what you find here . I'd really like to hear what touches and nourishes you!
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