How do you break the cycle? As a survivor and byproduct of a man that just did not know how to love, my only exposure to relationships were abusive, toxic power struggles. And to be quite honest, I don’t know the first thing about how to build healthy relationships. From my early childhood, I saw the potential for a bright, hopeful future and made a promise to never ever allow myself to get sucked into the vicious cycle of abuse. Only problem was that I didn’t quite know how to. But I knew I needed to start with myself.
In 2015, right as I was entering into my final year of college, the man that abused me for 22 whole years silently moved out of our home, while I waited quietly at a hotel across the street. I thought that this would be it. Life was going to get better. And it was going to get better as soon as I walked through the door of my newly emptied home. But it wasn’t better. And it wasn’t going to get better. At least not yet. I quickly found myself on my bedroom floor, sobbing & nursing my wounds, looking to make amends with my past, confront my future, and restore hope and dignity to a woman whose ego was beaten for 22 consecutive years. And while my first instinct was to attempt in every possible way to desperately scrub every memory that was seared into my brain, I later discovered that it wasn’t about erasing the memories. I was once told that "we don't seek the painful experiences that hew our identities, but we seek our identities in the wake of our painful experiences." I was awakened to the idea that adversity breeds the power to oppose it. And there is so much power in choosing to break the vicious cycle of abuse that has been so deeply ingrained within your identity and how you process and interact with the world around you.
Over the past couple of years, I took the time to dig deep and unearth the hurts and traumas that ultimately became my inescapable truths. As survivors, we bury them so deep in fear that if our partners were to ever discover them, we just simply cannot be loved. So we reject them, bury them, and do our best to escape them. And one of the most difficult parts of learning to love and fearlessly extend that love to others is convincing yourself that you are worthy of it too. Because on some deep level, when we experience bits of intimacy, there’s a sinking feeling in your gut and these incessant thoughts of, ‘I’m not good enough.’ Or ‘I’m just too much.’ So we keep it to ourselves and revert back to the cycle of stifling how we feel - neglecting to care for the parts of us that need the most love. So over the past few years, I had to learn to make room for how I feel and reclaim those neglected parts of my identity to allow myself to be present and show up more fully in all of my relationships.
As I’ve gone through the motions of actively healing the parts of myself that need the most love, I’ve found that one of the most terrifying parts of the process is that the feeling of longing for closeness and fear of closeness can exist in the same space simultaneously. So it becomes a vicious game of internal tug of war where every single day, we have to make the active decision to receive love, make the choice to trust, be vulnerable, and allow our partners into our world. Intimacy is a terrifying thing. So often, we stifle parts of ourselves in order to maintain this illusion of closeness, to bridge the gap, and make it seem as though we are more similar to the person we are trying to connect with. But it’s okay to be distinctly different. So often intimacy is coupled with fear - fear of being seen or being rejected or abandoned. Whether we consciously or unconsciously rewrite our truths to accomodate for others, we rob ourselves of real closeness— of being seen, known, and loved as we are. So we have to make the active decision each and every day to be open and stay open.
For 20+ years, I often disappointed myself by holding onto expectations and expecting love from someone who didn’t even love himself. So I had to go back to where it all started and get rid of this emotional dependence & feeling of needing someone to behave a certain way in order for me to feel good. I had to learn to stop assigning expectations to people that do not have the capacity to love and stop gravitating towards toxic relationships because they felt familiar, and to some degree, felt safer. But familiarity does nothing for our growth.
Throughout this entire process, I discovered a heightened sense of self-awareness. Some days, I have no difficulty communicating and working my way through my issues. But some days, it feels like I’m back where I started and I can’t seem to communicate how I’m feeling and why I’m feeling that way. So there’s a feeling of guilt & disgust. You have a heightened sense of self and understanding of how you react to things and how you can adjust your reactions to things. You think to yourself that you ‘know better’ and that we’re ‘past that.’ But now you’re back at square one, in a familiar place of instability and raw reactive emotion. So often you get in your own head. But I’ve learned that there is a huge difference between knowing better and thinking and relating differently to the world around you and actually doing it. Some days you’ll feel terrible, you’ll lash out, you won’t communicate, and you’ll push people away. So many of our coping mechanisms and reactions to things exist because we needed them to maintain our safety or dignity. Sometimes we needed them in order to survive. And it’s so easy to carry them into other aspects of your life. But your partner is not responsible for your mood or for your healing. So often, this process of growth begins with letting go and forgiving yourself for being callous, reactive, combative, or whoever you needed to be at a certain time, in a certain place.
If there’s anything I’ve learned over the past year or so, it is to know that I am enough, and to love myself enough. If you’re in the process of healing and learning to fearlessly extend your love to others, hold yourself with compassion - it’s a process that takes practice. You do not need to change yourself in order to be loved. Because learning to love starts with learning to love yourself.