“The wound is where the light enters you.” ~Rumi
I want to share an experience I went through that hurt like hell but helped me so much in the long run.
The experience was being “cheated” even though the woman wasn’t my girlfriend. Still, I was very clingy and it felt awful.
So let me start with the backstory.
I met Diana at the end of 2021 through mutual friends. I found her cute and a little scary, which seems to attract me. That’s just my savior complex coming out, which is another story for another day.
At some point we met after a Christmas party and we started seeing each other regularly. I began to develop stronger feelings for Diana than I expected, although I tried to keep my cool and not cause embarrassment in the group.
At some point, things started to take a turn for the worse between us, culminating in Diana basically going home before me with another guy.
Needless to say I was devastated.
My friend who introduced me to Diana was there and asked me “Are you starting to feel?” I was so angry that he tried to embarrass me so I wouldn’t feel what I was feeling. I said, “Yes, I am” and immediately left.
On the way home, I screamed in my car and even slapped my steering wheel, which I had never done before. I was so triggered and angry. A tornado of emotions raced through my chest—anger, sadness, worthlessness, despair.
The next day I woke up and left the house to get a smoothie. I didn’t want to be alone going through this.
At first I didn’t feel too bad, but I knew that sooner or later the wave would hit me. I started reading books about relationships that I had read before. Books like Fear of Intimacy by Robert Firestone and Facing Love Addiction by Pia Mellody. Luckily I had these books to reference.
Over the next two weeks, I cried several times on the way to work or on the way home from errands. I even stopped a few times to cry my eyes out and whine alone in my car before driving on.
Over the next few months, I worked to process the grief and pain. Occasionally, I would dive deep and recall childhood abandonment, the true source of pain. I would get a reminder that my mother wasn’t there for me…
While I was growing up, my mother worked all the time to support our family. And we had such a large family that one-on-one conversations were practically non-existent.
This meant I felt lost, abandoned and overlooked countless times.
Being deeply hurt by Diana gave me an opportunity to go straight to the source of the pain, to my original abandonment experiences. Daily meditation and journaling helped ease the pain.
It went slowly for a while. I even stopped writing for a few weeks because I was overwhelmed with emotion. But eventually I felt like myself again.
The first two months were tough, the next two were a little better, and after six months I was finally out of the weeds. But more than that, I feel better than before meeting Diana.
I feel my base level of security and happiness is higher. I think of it this way, my abandonment experiences were heavy rocks that weighed down my soul. Not carrying them around feels so much easier.
I must have spent over 100 hours meditating to release these emotions and I’ve learned a few things in the process…
1. Present pain is compounded by past pain. If you want to be free, heal the original wound.
2. We seek the familiar in relationships, even at the expense of our security and happiness. And what we are familiar with is the love we received from our parents. If we want better relationships, we must heal our past or we will endlessly repeat what we know.
3. We get what we need to heal in relationships. And I like that. While things can suck in the short term, you will find that life has your best interests at heart. Now that this episode is over I’m glad life gave me the experience I needed to heal.
Now it’s time for a counter-intuitive step that helped me close this chapter in my life.
I used to think, “It hurts so much to be left by Diana like that and I wouldn’t want to experience it again, but I’m glad I was able to learn and grow from it.”
But this thought shows that there is more work for me. To complete this experience, I had to open myself up to going through it again (but trusting that life isn’t so cruel).
It’s not what you would think would help, but when you run away from an experience, you’re still controlled by it.
And if your goal is real freedom, you have to open yourself to it. Of course, I will continue to be cautious, just not afraid.
As I opened myself up to experiencing the same hurt and pain, I became freer. I have shed the armor I wore and I know that life can be trusted to have my back.
I would rather live with an open heart and get hurt than live closed. This is the way of freedom.
“You have to break your heart before it opens.” ~Rumi
About Brandon Grill
Brandon Grill is a mental health copywriter. In his free time, he enjoys blogging about topics such as meditation, yoga, spirituality, and more. Reach him at NatureBrandon@gmail.com
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