What does happen to the souls of the people in long term relationships and marriages? What happens to them when those unions are based on two individuals understanding their wounds, their part and their responsibility. What happens to the people in long term relationships who have none of the above?
Well, as I am sure you already figured out, I can tell you.
I never meet the first people. They are not involved in my life except perhaps by people I meet in my personal life. Professionally I never see them. They don’t need a divorce coach, a mediator or a divorce attorney because they have created a partnership that is not free of trouble or strife or heartbreak or loss, but they have figured out how to weather it together. The ups, the downs and the living of life. They have figured out how to do it together.
The other camp? Well, I see them every single day.
And the general rule is that the longer the toxic union has continued the worse the damage to all concerned. Two people who should have never been together in the first place, locked into this awful pact to create something that they will only then destroy. It is sad. But it is commonplace.
Generally speaking women seek to reconfigure and recontextualize the relationship while men seek to fix what is broken, but they tend to do this in a much more direct and “quick” fix kind of way. Both partners are seeking the same thing - to alter the relationship, to move it to less shaky ground. But the way we go about doing this couldn’t be farther apart.
I keep talking about men and women, and am leaving out same sex marriage or transmarriage because I do not feel qualified to speak about it. I have divorced same sex couples. And I would say largely there is a power person and a less power person, just like heterosexual marriages. And the dysfunctions that proliferate from the power imbalance play out largely the same. But there are dynamics and issues at play in these relationships to which I am just not qualified to offer up an opinion. I need more study and experience. And so I leave them out of my discussion intentionally because I have respect for the subject matter and the people involved.
We are all so caught up in this delusion of finding THE ONE, that we fail to realize that all we have really done is set ourselves up to be miserable over and over again. We are all married, quite literally to the pattern, the endless pattern of projection, illusion and delusion. And we fail to alter course, even after we have failed quite miserably.
“The moment I heard my first love story, I started looking for you...” Rumi as quoted by James Hollis
And here we are.
We all have the need to be loved. We all have wounds. We all believe with hope beyond hope that this person, this love, this one will save us. We will finally be made whole and complete with the love of this magical other. And so we continue the life long pattern of searching and the wounds deepen and proliferate and instead of any kind of healing, there is just more pain and suffering and then we bring little children into the mix and the intergenerational trauma deepens.
We must heal ourselves first. And then understand the things that can never be healed. There are some things, you know. Some things change us forever and we are never, ever the same. We need to know what those things are. I personally believe there is no wasted effort. Just because you might have childhood sexual trauma that is going to fuck up your ability to be vulnerable, to connect and to be intimate AND sexual, doesn’t mean you shouldn't continue to try and heal.
I have been in therapy for 29 years. I don’t count the time I went to therapy while I was still drinking. I mean, I wasn’t dealing with a sober, rational person. I was just using therapy as some sort of Bandaid. I treated therapy like some sort of defensive strategy “It can’t be MY fault my life is a mess, I am in THERAPY!” But in truth, I wasn’t capable of being vulnerable, connected and intimate about myself, even in the hallowed therapy rooms I sat within.
No, getting real and honest took sobriety to make truth telling and inner work something that could actually happen for me. So I only count the years I have been working on myself since getting sober. Not that there was not value in the years I spent in therapy before sobriety, I mean those therapists kept me alive so there is that.
But for the past 29 years, I have been working on healing that which is mine to heal. And I have made some amazing progress. And I also still have a lot of work to do. I did not have a normal childhood. I have some wounds, and some still fester despite years of treatment and attending to. And I have accepted that I will always need therapy. I will always need that safe place to go to work out and on my shit. That is just me. And I feel that my life, and my enjoyment of that life, works better when I am willing to confront myself and all my issues head on, or at least not sidestepping.
Sure it is exhausting. Sure, I would really like to be done. But I have found the only way to enjoy my life is to do MY work. And my work shall never be over. The last two years have been a relational PhD program that I didn’t know I was entering. And I am now happy to report that I do feel, emotionally, like I have graduated with high honors. It has been a very rough two years. And I have had to accept some pretty hard truths about me, but more about you. I have had to accept that the you I pick is flawed and largely, until now, unconscious. I kept selecting people to be present in my life who were wholly committed to NOT doing the work. Some of them paid great lip service to doing the work, some actually did do some work, but in the end, I have to evaluate that it was not enough to sustain my participation in those relationships.
And that is really growth for me. I chose to do without you, rather than to continue in relationship with you while I felt unseen, unheard, uncared for and alone. Those were just the price of admission to all relationships for me. And I willing paid that price because really I didn’t know there was another way.
But my constant and unrelenting work has paid off for me. I am different. I see relationships differently and I am learning, ever so slowly, to release that which is not meant for me. And to heal the fractured relationship I have had with myself for my whole life. Taking time for myself has been the best thing I have done recently. I am not flinging my dysfunction all over some new poor soul. I am not out there trying to sell myself as better than I am. I am not dating at my pain, or fucking at it, or drinking at it. (I do sometimes eat and shop at it...the works continues). I have had to step back from most of my relationships because I have so lost perspective on what is yours and what is mine. And if I am honest, my last relationship left me reeling, scared, devastated and so very, very lost to myself.
But I know how I got there. And I know, regardless of him and his issues, I picked him. All my unhealed, wounded parts selected that man and I see now that until and unless I heal myself and the reasons my wounds make that particular selection, I will always pick that for me. And I want something different. And I don’t know if I will ever get it, but I do know that every day I work on myself, the question of this magical other recedes a little more. I become less concerned with the promise of love and commitment and HIM, and more concerned with me and how I am living this amazing, and often fucking hard, life I have.
My marriage failed because of the mutual wounds. This last relationship failed because of the mutual wounds. And my conclusion is that all my relationships will fail until and unless I change sufficiently to select a different type of partner. One that is actually willing to own their own shit AND do the hard work to continue to work on it for the rest of their lives. It is heady stuff to think that healing is a one and done. But it isn’t. And what I believe now with all that I am is that which remains unconscious can never be healed and will call ALL the shots. No exceptions. Forever.
So if I want something different, someone different, I have to be different. I have to do my work. And the prize for doing that work isn’t the magical other. It is a good relationship with myself. The magical other no longer needed or even perhaps desired to make me complete. I am complete in my own right and that is perhaps the best, albeit fleeting feeling, I have ever had the privilege to hold, even for a minute.
Healing is a process. A life long process that requires commitment, work, grit and a fierce determination to never stop. Perseverance doesn’t even really come close to describing the commitment required. Because perserverance doesn’t really account for having to survive your own delusion that is well supported in our culture and society, everywhere you fucking look. Perhaps pertinacity is the best word, but even it fails to describe the emotional commitment, the hard driving zealous supplication to owning all that roils beneath your surface, and the absolute bravery and courage it takes to allow all that shit to surface and then deal with it.
Again, still.
Forever a hardship and a gift.
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