I’d known that I needed to figure out how to leave the relationship. Yet, the complicated inner turmoil I felt around breaking away combined with the family crisis to keep me from doing what I needed to do. Until we left Indiana, I’d been able to push thoughts of separating off to the farthest reaches of my mind.

When we came home to California, we had a trying re-entry. We’d planned to live in my old bed-sitter van in a friend’s driveway, hoping this arrangement would allow us some time to decompress after the cross-country move, the driving through blizzards en route and the stress we’d lived with for two years in Indiana. We’d anticipated having a few quiet weeks at our friend’s before beginning the search for more permanent living arrangements. That wasn’t to be. With two cats, unusually heavy rains, unexpected leaks in the van, soaking mud all around us and our friend’s life having pretty much fallen apart just before we’d arrived, the situation was untenable.

We tried a week-to-week arrangement at a motel with a hot plate and our ice chest. In the continuing monsoon rains, this was yet another depressing, gloomy and disconnected situation. Having neither a real nest nor comfortable separate spaces added to our stress and dislocation. Our attempts to deal with the taxing physical circumstances exaggerated the already irritating differences in our values, preferences, coping skills and interpersonal styles – the differences that had long been at the core of our ongoing struggles with each other.

I wanted desperately to throw in the towel, to say I was done with it all, to end the desolation I felt in our painful integration. I’d repeatedly come to the edge of giving voice to this truth and then be overtaken by overwhelming fear. Gut-wrenching terror would constrict my breathing, blur my thinking, leave me panicky and overcome with confusion. From standing at the brink of speaking, I’d bolt backward again into the mire of the intolerable situation.

The hatred I felt for myself around this failure of courage was intense. As we moved forward together to finding a place to rent, buying stuff to replace what we’d left behind in Indiana and beginning again to make a home for ourselves, I felt humiliated by my self-betrayals.

For months, as we did this and as I worked to build yet another psychotherapy practice, I sank further and further into despair and self-blaming. The Hatchet Lady, my ferocious inner critic, kept up her relentless litany of vicious self-criticism. I was hopeless, depressed and plagued by sleepless nights filled with obsessive self-condemnation.

We’d move between tense, cold silences and long hours of trying to talk and process what was happening between us. I couldn’t speak the simple truth of what I was feeling so my desperate need to find a way to leave was never given voice. I hated how I would dissemble during those hours of our trying to problem-solve issues that were, for me, truly beside the point. I hated myself for feeling so crazed and crazy. And, most of all, I detested myself for violating my core commitment to always speaking my truth.

All the self-blaming, self-hatred and self-criticism for being unable to find a way to extricate myself from living this destructive lie-of-a-life further undermined my already devastated self. I could barely get out of bed each day. I wanted to die: it seemed the only way I’d ever get free of this tangled, suffocating enmeshment.

Being ready to die opened a tiny crack of possibility for me. I finally found the strength to risk leaving physically, even without being able to speak my reasons. The emotional entanglement continued and actually escalated as I left. There were several short, repeating cycles of coming back together and moving away from each other again. Still, being in my own separate energy field even some of the time was quite calming. In my desperation, I was able to let in some loving support that a couple of new friends generously and unconditionally offered. It was okay with them for me to be as crazy, confused, obsessed and even as self-destructively addicted to the relationship as I might be. Their ability to stay with me without judgment, no matter where I might be, was helpful and healing for me.

Their acceptance of my process, their willingness to let me be wherever I needed to be until I was done being there, their belief that I would indeed somehow, someday truly be done being there and their capacity to stay out of trying to fix me – all this gave me a template for new ways to be with my self. Gradually, I began talking differently to my self. I began being more generous with what felt like my craziness: my despair, my inability to speak my truth, my inability to let go of this destructive entanglement. I began holding all of it without so much scathing self-hatred. I began reminding myself that I really was doing the best I could in the moment. I began giving myself permission to be just where I was – even if I hated being there – because I understood that I would be where I was just as long as I needed to be there.

Despite how convoluted it all looked to my inner critic, I understood that I was involved in the process of healing myself. It felt so different inside of me when I gave my self the same permission I’d been helping my clients to give to themselves for years: permission to let myself be without judging myself for where or how I might or might not be. Now I, too, could be allowed, honorably, to be imperfectly stumbling along until I found my way. My friends had given me the outside voice of permission that appeared to be essential in helping me create a strong inside voice of permission. This new-inside-of-me voice was what grew into the good-Mommy-inside-me.

Baby step by baby step, I became better at accepting my process. I could hate how tangled I was feeling without hating myself for feeling so tangled. I felt sorry for my poor struggling self. As I grew more caring about, accepting of and compassionate toward this struggling self, I became more present in my experience, able to simply witness all of my turmoil.

More present in the experience and as witness to it, I had glimpses of insight into what my struggle was about; glimpses that all the self judging and criticizing had kept me from seeing. I saw and understood some of the complex primal attachments that were keeping me tied to this undermining connection.

When we had first begun our sharing, my partner and I appeared to be two significantly empowered figures in our community. Yet, I had been magnetically drawn to the broken, damaged, wounded little selves I saw beneath the surface of my partner’s public big-person persona. I immediately became irresistibly dedicated to nurturing those unacknowledged wounded parts. I’d never had permission to own or to nurture the similarly damaged little selves hidden within my own self. But in this relationship (and unbeknownst to me) those wounded parts of me identified with my partner’s wounded parts. When I loved, nurtured and mothered those parts of my partner, those unacknowledged parts of me were, by identifying with my partner, able to have some illusory sense of being fed by me.

Leaving the relationship would have meant cutting off the vicarious nourishment that till then was the only sustenance these parts of me were getting in the world. These starving parts of me were terrified that they would die if I left the relationship, if I stopped nurturing my partner. Every time I took another step toward emotionally separating from the relationship, I would feel terrified of annihilation, annihilation both of my self and of my partner. It was this terror that would, each time, pull me back into the enmeshment.

Giving myself permission to open to the hungry, wounded parts of me provided a doorway for deep healing to happen. As the starving parts of my self became more visible to me I – without judgment – began to own just how broken I was beneath the layers of strength from which I’d lived. I began to feel as loving toward and devoted to my own damaged self as I’d till then only been able to feel toward my partner’s damaged parts.

As I turned my capacity for unconditionally loving mothering toward the broken little parts of me, I began directly to feed the denied hungers within me. This change in focus began the arduous but now successful process of individuating my self out of the harming entanglement.

Giving ourselves permission to be just exactly how and where we are while we’re there allows us to be fully present in/to the most challenging times. The more present we are to these times, the sooner we get what it is we need to learn in and from them and the sooner we come to the other side of them. This is true even when where we are is someplace we hate. And, it’s especially true when we seem to be staying in that hated uncomfortable place for what seems like an excruciatingly long time.

Consider giving yourself permission to be just exactly where you are while you’re there–even when you truly wish you didn’t have to be there at all.

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 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!