Healing Your Wounds...

We all know they are ours to heal...but a lot of us act as if our healing should be someone else’s responsibility.  Certainly we blame others for causing the wound in the first place.  But regardless of how justly or unjustly we receive the wound, it becomes ours and what we do with it matters a great deal.

We can attempt to drink it or drug it away.  We can try to eat, drink, shop or fuck the wound out of existence, usually only causing more wounds and trauma to ourselves and others.  Healing takes time and effort and often, I find, gets lost to our feeble attempts to live our lives with wounds that are left to languish or fester, growing ever worse day after day.

Pain is usually the motivation for healing.  We seek healing because the pain we feel in our unhealed state leaves us with these horrible excruciating wounds that we find we must heal, lest they kill us.  But sometimes, even life threatening pain is not sufficient to bring about the motivation for healing...

I propose yet another reason to handle your shit.  And this one comes from my own very real, painful and fairly recent experience:  If you don’t heal your wounds, someone will come along and exploit those wounds, weaponizing them against you, leaving you more wounded and destroyed than you were before...

I know, seems like, who the fuck would do that?  The answer, in today’s world, lots of people who are not able or willing to heal themselves so they become these narcissistic wrecking balls that destroy and maim all those who attempt to love them.

I do my best to be honest here, even when I do not want to be.  I do not love parading around my shortcomings and defects, struggles and traumas for all to see...but I feel like part of the reason I have been granted so much healing in my life, is exactly because I do not hold this shit back.  It isn’t always pretty but it is real.

Brace for more of my daily oversharing...

I had wounds that men caused.  Early in life, before I really ever got started.  Additionally, I had Daddy issues and was constantly attempting to prove myself worthy and good enough.  I quite desperately wanted the approval and love from men who were distant, avoidant and cold.  From my teens until about 2 years ago, I failed to love and honor the good men I was sent, opting instead for the ones that reinforced the pattern, all in the hope, the very desperate hope I would somehow break the cycle while repeating the cycle.

And it finally did, but before I got to that breaking point, I spent a lot of time failing to appreciate the good men who adored me or loved me and instead sought to chase the ones who acted like I was nothing or gave very little.  It was like this puzzle that I could not solve but also couldn’t walk away from.  I was so sure on some sort of cosmic level that if I could just make it work out one time, I would be forever healed and would finally have the love and approval I sought.

I guess that happened and didn’t happen...certainly not the way I thought it would.  I can see now that I was blind to the wound and how it made all of my choices and decision regarding love and sex.  I couldn’t, or more honestly wouldn’t, own that which was mine to own, so I arrogantly moved about my life as if the lie was a truth and I was evolving and doing quite well.  In truth, I was not, I was just reliving the same bullshit over and over again and calling it something other than reinforcing the pattern.  Just because you call it something else, doesn’t make it so, as it turns out.

And because I refused to acknowledge and address my own wound, I set myself up to be preyed upon by men who could see the wound and were more than willing to exploit it for their own benefit.  Luckily for me, I didn’t meet very many men who were that kind of person.  Mostly and more often, meeting men that I just couldn’t let get close enough to even try to see what I was all about.

And I was so busy outsourcing my growth and healing to others that I had not a clue what was going on.  And so I repeated the cycle over and over again, mostly with me being baffled and unaware.

But then he came along.  Looking back now I can see that he saw me from that very first night.  The hungry looks in the parking lot were not desire but rather the dawning of the knowledge of opportunity.  He saw the wound, and he knew exactly what to do and how to act to draw me in closer and then keep me there while his efforts were minimal and lacking.  I refused to see or acknowledge my own wound, so he was free to exploit it to his gain and fortune.  And he did, for the next year and a half. And I let him.

It was an on again, off again thing.  He would let me down and I would get upset and end it with him.  Touching the wound but then refusing to address it as mine to heal.  And then he would come back around with the barest and most pathetic apology ever, and I would accept it because I was so used to nothing that his nothing felt like something.  And the something it was, was just me re-entering the revolving door of my dating and sexual history.

I don’t know how many times I ended it with him.  Five or six for sure.  Great tirades of disappointment and hurt and anger and fear all wrapped in this desperate plea for love, approval and transparency.  But he did not have those things to give to anyone.  I see that now.  I am not sure he has the capacity.  And I know he lacks the motivation.  He runs game.  That is all he has ever done and I am quite sure, that is likely all he will ever do.  I remain grateful that what he does or doesn’t do now no longer affects me in any way having gained sufficient distance, clarity and boundaries where he is concerned.

I can see now my behavior was akin to a sheep wandering a field and allowing a wolf to grow ever closer, believing to her own demise that the wolf’s interest was in something other than consumption.  You can slap any label on predation you like, it doesn’t change what it is just because you call it something else.

So at the end of all of this strife and bullshit, I found myself unable to accept or reckon my own behavior.  I mean, fuck his and him, but I could not not see my part in all of this.  I could not see how my ego, arrogance and unwillingness to heal myself put me in a position to be preyed upon in the first place.*

I acquired in this whole relational debacle the ability to see it was my own dysfunction and illness that allowed the whole shitshow to unfold.  Mine.  Not his.  It was me and my refusal to heal that which was mine that placed me in a position to be hurt in the first place.  And if I didn’t want anything like that to happen again, and I did/do not, I had to do a lot of heavy lifting on the Erin side of the equation.

And what started as seeking relief from the pain, became a journey toward wholeness and evolution.  It didn’t take long for me to see that my motivation to continue to face the demons of my past were to prevent me from inviting similar demons into my present.  I had to have my own back in ways that I have completely and utterly failed to do for most of my lifetime.  And unless and until I healed that which wounded me, I would forever select men like that...and I did not and would not want anyone like him, ever again.

It has been a good two years unpacking all of this. It has been hard but a journey of love and tolerance.  A lot of forgiveness has sprung up for me, for him, for how the whole sorted mess got going and how much my own ego and arrogance played a role in that. I thought “a man broke me, a man has to heal me...”  And I have never been more wrong about something in my life!  Men did what they do.  I was the one that took their actions and inactions and made them what they were in my own life.  I refused to heal that which was mine so I remained vulnerable to being wounded again and again.

And maybe I still am, but I don’t think so.  I feel about this healing much like I do my sobriety.  Sure, I could drink again, but I really don’t want to because I do daily the things that keep me from being in an emotional low spot that would allow me to think that a drink would solve anything at all.  Men have never been the solution or the problem.  As with most issues in my life, I have been my greatest downfall, always.

Today, I wake with the knowledge that whatever I allow into my life, will color, alter and change the way I think and feel about pretty much everything.  I see my issues and no longer require them to sit quietly in the dark while I cause myself and others more damage by my refusal to own that which is mine to own.  Instead, today, I invite all the broken, misguided, hurt, wounded, festering parts of me out into the sunlight and refuse to allow them to lurk in the shadowy corners of my psyche.  Nope, no more of that shit please.  Today, I know where I am broken and I know why I am broken and I seek to heal it daily.  This is just mine. You have yours.  But this is mine and I do not need you to heal me.  God and I are doing a pretty fantastic job over here, thank you.  

And because I do not need you to heal me or really give me anything I do not already possess, I am free to engage with you in a way and manner that I have never before known.  There are no more hurdles for you to leap, no rules you need to learn or abide by, there are no issues you are meant to resolve at all.  If you are in my life, you are good, just like you are. And you can stay so long as you demonstrate to me that you see and are willing to work on your own stuff.  I do not wish to be in charge of your healing or evolution any more than I want you to be in charge of mine.

And what I am finding in this new way of existing is a freedom and grace I never knew existed.  I don’t need you to give me anything, I already found it all within me and through God’s grace.  I will always have something to heal and work on and that is good because I like being busy and active.  And there is a lot of fodder in the inner wreckage to keep me busy for eons.

I seek to heal myself a little more each day and now, after that last fucktastic display of poor judgment, I have a new motivation that I lacked before...and that is that if I do not heal, I will use.  And if I do not heal, some other unhealed person will exploit my pain and loss and sadness and wounds and make everything in me and my life worse.

And, as it turns out, that is a pretty good combination motivator to keep going in my current forward direction...

Again, still...

*Please note I am not victim blaming here, myself or others, I am, instead, taking back power I willing gave away to someone who abused it and used it against me.  I had the power, I just didn’t even know it when I ceded it to him.  There are innocents in these types of situations...and I was one at one point in time, but my experience from that first time, set me up for a lot more other times because of my own ignorance and refusal to heal.