—
I’m 43. I’ve been married once and had various boyfriends. I’ve given birth to and raised two amazing children. The love I feel for my sons has helped me understand the enormous capacity of my heart to accept others and commit to love, way more than any of the romantic relationships I’ve had.
Through this new understanding, I’m looking back at my life. I can see the bright stars of romantic love that fizzled out or were lost. I remember the two boys during my high school years that I loved, three people throughout my 5.5 years in college, and three more in the 21 years since then.
I married one of the latter when I was 30. He hurt me in ways he has never admitted to and may never understand. One of the men I dated after the divorce was a brief shooting star, and was not good for me at all, but God I loved him. I thought my most recent boyfriend was the love of my life but turned out to be my biggest love lesson so far. I can’t help but wonder, is this all there is?
Some of us spend so much time craving all-accepting, existential love, and the rest of the time running from it.
From what I know of the human body — -of the brain, in particular — -we lay track (neuropathways) in our brains in three ways: through repetition, through trauma, and through elation/bonding. From these tracks, we glean our perception of life and people. We form habits, expectations, and reactions based on these three types of laid track.
I read a book once called The Mystery of Pain. One chapter talked about how people with chronic pain feel it for decades after the actual injury has healed. It explained that when a person experienced the original injury/trauma, their body grew new, extra nerves in that area, creating what is essentially a hyper-sensitive alarm system built to send messages to the brain. It’s truly a survival tactic intended to protect the wounded area, which is more vulnerable than other areas of the body. Because nerves don’t just go away once they’re formed, however, the ‘alarm’ nerves are in there for the rest of your life, no longer needed, but still working. They’re hyper-sensitized to the environment in order to protect the (no longer) damaged area. Even though the injury has healed, the nerves are still there doing their job: feeling every touch and movement in an attempt to alarm the body of danger to the ‘weak’ area. I can’t help but wonder if a broken heart is the same. Our brains seem to want to protect us from experiencing more emotional trauma in the same way that they want to protect us from experiencing more physical trauma. The brain seems to view both traumas as a threat to our well-being and ability to thrive.
Looking for the underlying cause
I had a painful childhood sprinkled with loss, longing, and loneliness. It taught me to fear connection. It taught me that the people who love me the most don’t actually want to hear me or see me, that they’re too wrapped up in their own dysfunction to notice my humanity. And guess what kind of romantic relationships I have reached for throughout life? The kind that strengthened the lessons I learned as a kid: that I’m alone. That the people who love me cannot see me, or understand me. Many of the men I’ve dated did what they wanted, without consideration of my humanity, and went a step farther than my family did, by blaming me for having a reaction to their actions. Even while my brain protects me from the hurt of my childhood, it also draws me to situations that continue the type of hurt I felt growing up. That’s the crux, isn’t it? We hurt. We learn from the hurt. We go toward the hurt again. Is this the brain’s attempt to keep us from being vulnerable, the way we were when we were children? If we continue to go toward romantic situations that are bad for us, we will keep our walls up. If we keep our walls up, will we stay safe?
In 2007, when I married my boyfriend of three years, I felt safe. By the time I came out of the marriage almost five years later I felt invisible, unattractive, and like I was ‘too much’. I also miraculously came out of the marriage with hopes for true love, mutual recognition and passion that burned so bright it could melt a hole in my chest. So even though I had not healed from the pain of that relationship, I sought exactly what was missing from it: intensity, passion, and recognition. I was drawn to the other end of the spectrum. It turns out that both ends of the spectrum were not good for me. Now, almost nine years after the divorce, I can’t even remember what hope for love feels like. I can’t remember what it feels like to fall in love, or to have faith in it. I’ve become bitter, guarded, and in some ways ok with being single for the rest of my life.
How has this happened? Is it the effect of the trauma of being gaslighted for over two and a half years in my most recent relationship? Is it the covert emotional abuse from my marriage? Is it that I’ve lost faith in myself to discern healthy love from an unhealthy situation and a good man? Have I grown nerves that anticipate a new kind of heartbreak? Layers and layers of broken trust, unhealed, laid out as warning signs in my brain, in my heart?
I’ve fallen in love many times in my life.
I’d like to again, someday. And I’d like to stay there.
For now, I’m taking time to look back on all of it. The recent abuse I went through was a real eye-opener. It helped me realize why I never healed from the pain of my marriage. It helped me also realize that I’ve been experiencing the same treatment throughout my life. In my childhood, my family treated me with the same lack of acceptance as almost all of the people I’ve loved romantically in my adult life. This is important information and helps me get to the root of why I’ve failed in so many relationships. In a way, I’m grateful that I’ve had these challenging experiences because now I have the opportunity to heal my childhood and, therefore, heal my heart.
I’m hoping that amid the forest of my past relationships, I will find myself. All of the mistakes, the hopes, the falling and getting up again, all have to add up to something. I know they do. In some warm, glowing part of my heart, I still hope to find the love of my life. I’m willing to lean on my faith and work on myself until I’m vibrating at a level that magnetizes me toward mutual love, respect, and fulfillment.
I know that love can call your deepest self out from hiding. Sometimes love arrives in lessons that hurt, but they show you your truth, they show you where you’re limited. Even when I have a hard time remembering, I believe that love often also arrives as a healing balm for a tired soul that desperately wants to believe again. My intuitive heart knows this. It’s only a task now of following the walls of this labyrinth until I come to a new version of home.
—
Previously published on Medium.
—
***
If you believe in the work we are doing here at The Good Men Project and want to join our calls on a regular basis, please join us as a Premium Member, today.
All Premium Members get to view The Good Men Project with NO ADS.
Need more info? A complete list of benefits is here.
Talk to you soon.
—
Photo credit: miro.medium.com