After You Hurt Me

I don’t know why, but it always happens this way.

I fall in love with a man. I make some kind of commitment to him. And he hurts me. For some of them, it took a few days. For some, it took a year.

But they don’t just hurt my feelings. I’m an adult. I’m not a fucking fainting daisy. They let me down in big ways-shaming, blaming, complete with emotionally immature words and actions.

Making me feel inadequate about something as intimate as sex, talking to me like a child, asking me to make accommodations for things that I should never have put up with.

And when it happens, something shifts inside me. Something turns off, shuts down. A door closes. A space that was once inhabited by them, now isn’t.

It becomes now a place of emptiness; a place I need to learn to fill alone. Little by little, in my marriage, my entire heart was hurt. It took quite a while. I gave him thousands of chances. And he failed every time. And each time I held out hope (for almost three decades), that hope was extinguished and a door closed.

What exactly is happening in those moments and how do I reverse the damage?

As I told my former boyfriend after we had met with this issue, “The harm has been done. I’d like to see what we can do about it.” I really wanted to figure it out. I thought it was something I could actually figure out. You see, I am not purely emotional. I am a logical, rational, and analytical being. Problems were meant to be solved, not avoided. But…this is simply not one to solve, sadly.

Not revealing anything too personal, there was a mighty breach of trust. We went to a therapist to see what that process might yield. There was no way of knowing how things would end.

I loved him. He loved me, I am sure of it. But, that is not the only required characteristic of a successful relationship. Everyone knows that, especially if they are above the age of 14.

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We were compatible in many ways. But that was the case with my ex as well. No matter how compatible, no matter how much I loved him, there was a place in my heart that was now unsafe to allow him to enter.

Is it impossible to heal from this? Is it possible to stay with the same man or must I/we continue to try the next “one” to see if he will do the same? Damn.

Short rant: and…what do men think is going to happen when they breach our trust, body-shame us, watch other women as they walk by, and yell at us, always finding some way we are to blame for it?

What do they think will happen to our hearts? Do they really think we are rubber bands that will go back into the same shape, over and over and over?

Resilience is a buzzword right now, not unlike narcissism. I wonder why that is? Do all of the narcs think we should forever be resilient? There must be a correlation of some sort.

Those of us who have endured and survived abuse have been resilient. Is there no end to our resilience? When is it okay to stop calling on this amazing trait? When is it okay to say ENOUGH and be done?

There will forever be ways to use beautiful concepts-like resilience-to shame us. Have you ever considered that?

To an abused woman, who has been living with PTSD her entire adult life, the word resilience immediately brings feelings of inadequacy. There was a point where my body just said NO MORE. I didn’t choose to stop being resilient.

My pancreas stopped working well, my gall bladder checked out. My stomach hurt all of the time, my back and rib cage were on fire, it seemed, and my 24/7 headaches would flair into migraines on ALL DAYS off work. My brain began to fritz in a big way, my eyes ceased tracking, my heartrate was constantly over 100 bpm, and here I was…feeling guilty about not showing up at 100%.

There was no one to pick up the pieces. No person was there to hold me and make it all better or offer honest and authentic solutions. It was me. And my kids. And my commitments to them and their father.

And it was literally killing me.

Resilience, in that moment…what did it mean? I couldn’t just let the water roll off me “like a duck’s back”. I couldn’t roll with it at all. And I could do nothing more about it.

I ran every day. I did yoga, prayed, and meditated every day. I took supplements and watched my food intake. I took great care of myself, in reality. And even then, I was not “resilient” in the midst of the storm.

Yeah, I kept it all together on the outside. Did my mother even know about it? Did my sisters or my friends? All but one knew NOTHING.

There was nothing to tell them. It was too complex to begin the conversation. Too many years of information to explain. I hardly had the words and I was fucking tired!

So, in short-form, forgive me for not forgiving you for hurting me. Forgive me for wanting to be loved without the pain. Forgive me for asking for unadulterated acceptance and intensely intimate connection. Forgive me for everything I ever dreamed I wanted, know now that I need, and couldn’t find with you.

Hurt me and we are done. My body knows the truth about you, long before my head knows how to process it all.

The pain speaks volumes and I will never again stop reading.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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