Detaching with Love...

I have attempted to practice this for a long time now.  A long, long time.  I have had marginal success.  I have been very good at detaching with anger.  Except you can’t really do that.  If you are angry, you are NOT detached.  Anger is the thread that binds you to what you are attempting to detach from, forever.  The only real way to detach is with love.  And also, I think, resolving all the issues you have around all the reasons you have come to the place where you need to detach in the first place.

Loving people is sometimes hard.  It requires a commitment and depth from you that alters the way you live, the way you feel and the way you are in the world.  Love, however, true and real, sometimes is twisted and misshapen by addiction (yours or the other persons), fear, longing, pain, unresolved shit from your past, or theirs.  

I am learning, painfully and slowly that you cannot make someone respect you.  Or treat you well.  People who are motivated will come up with a million reasons as to why their behavior is ok and yours is not, even though, factually, they were in the wrong.  I take a daily inventory, and I am not saying that I am always completely correct in my inventory of myself and my behavior, but I will give myself credit for doing it, every single day of my life.  I check in and see if I am really living by the spiritual principles I say that I am.  And I don’t think a day goes by that I can’t see room for improvement.

I have a long history of keeping people in my life who don’t treat me very well.  Friends, employers, and most especially men.  Fuck, have I gotten that wrong over and over and over again.  The worse people treated me the more I tried to show them how “worthy” I was of better treatment.  It was like attempting to convince another person who doesn’t speak your language of pretty much anything.  There is just no receptor in them to understand or even hear what you are saying.  Somehow along the way I thought if someone was treating me badly, I could just explain why I felt that way and then they would hear me and they would change, or stop, or care, or whatever.  And some people do and will.  Some people will hear you and listen to what you are saying and take it to heart.  These are the people you work through it with, these are the relationships deepened by the conflict or rupture.

And then there are those others, who for reasons that are really none of my business, will not.

I have been working on this detaching with love thing for a long time.  And I haven’t had a lot of success. My own issues got in the way.  It wasn’t the love piece that got me.  I had the love, but I had angry more so I remained attached always to that which I was trying to detach from...

Today, I feel more able to maybe really do this whole detach with love thing.  I am not angry.  I am hurt.  And for me those harder emotions of sad, mad and injured all kind of get mixed together and I get overwhelmed and then I just want to run, and I usually do. Anything to NOT feel any of that!  And so nothing ever really gets resolved. Nothing.  I just get mad, act out, then feel remorse for acting out and my relationships continue as they have always been.  I am the most dysfunctional person in my relationships.  Again, still...

But I have hope.  I feel the most able I have ever been to sit with the hurt and pain and loss.  I don’t have to run from it or try to make it go away.  I can just be here with it. Allow it to overwhelm me at times.  Know that I will have some bad moments and perhaps even a few bad days but I will be ok.  I will survive.  I can feel hurt AND move on. I can be mad AND move on.  I can be afraid AND move on.  I can do hard things.

Today, I am very grateful for the anger and panic and dread to have subsided.  I am grateful for the willingness to ask for help and then allow those I asked for help to help me.  I am grateful to have two programs that can shore me up, provide a ballast for my sea of dysfunction.  Today, I feel the most ready to detach with love that I have ever felt.  I see that I cannot really change the situations of my life with other people, unless they too want to change the dynamic.  And I believe they do.  I am not sure how much we see the change in the same way, but I know that I absolutely do not want to stand in the way of anyone’s growth, and this includes my own.

So I am going to do my best to release it all today.  The hurt, pain and hard feelings.  I am going to go for the love. And I am going to just accept the current situations in my life as being exactly as they are supposed to be.  These things are happening because they are, and also, probably because I need another lesson in the relationship department.  Again, still...

I am not perfect.  Far from it.  But I do love a lot.  And I do care.  And I want good things for those I love.  And sometimes ensuring those good things come to those we love can only happen when we willingly step aside and get out of the way.

So I am going to do my best to be out of the way today.  To detach with all the love I feel for so many in my life.  Allow each of them the dignity of risk, and agency and control over their own journey.  I am going to do my best to not take their behavior personally, even if it is meant to be personal.  I am going to do the best I can to rise above my baser feelings and instincts and move toward the love that never dies, but perhaps, could have better boundaries.

Again, still...