I wish I thought of the word. I really do. I, unfortunately, received my PHD in this recently. What is weird, is that seeing it this last time, made me realize how much of my prior dating history was just a dry run of this last and final fucking disaster.
And while I could go on and on about him and all his deceitful and despicable behavior, it was me that tolerated it. It was me that allowed it to keep occurring and it is was me that kept signing up for another round.
Here is what I have realized...I like broken. Perhaps because I am broken. Perhaps because of my past, my history, my trauma, I have come to the erroneous conclusion that the only one who could possibly understand me is also similarly broken...
I think I have begun to realize that broken doesn’t need broken to understand, broken is not some leveling up point for a relationship, broken is just fucking broken. What matters most is what each of us does with our own brokenness. And what has become super unattractive to me, is a broken person languishing in all their untreated, unhealed and festering brokenness.
There is no shame in being broken. It happens. If you are living in this world, you are going to be hurt. You are gonna get some scars...mostly ones that you didn’t sign up for and ones that you had no control over. Perhaps the truest thing I have ever heard is that you spend the second half of your life getting over the first. I can verify the veracity of that statement. And also I am here to report that it is an amazing journey that you wouldn’t want to miss.
I didn’t realize it then, but when I hit bottom with all my brokenness at 25, I did not know (thankfully because I never would have stayed) how much work would be involved in saving myself from myself. I didn’t know. And thankfully it didn’t come all at once, it has been a slow growth process. And thankfully many of you have judged me harshly for all my lack of growth along the way. And I have used your judgment and maligning as a call to action. I have taken your inventories of me and internalized them, not because I wanted to, but because your behavior hurt me. Your gossip, criticism and character assassination hit me, hard. And I had to figure out what to do with all the hate.
So I took it in and I changed it into seeds for growth. Not because I wanted you to approve of me, or like me, or even stop gossiping about me. No. I did it because even though your motives sucked, there was some truth in what you said. So the best way to disarm your enemy is to take their weapon and make it your own...
What I learned, in this very painful process, is that I will apologize to no one for my fuck ups, my mistakes and my growth and attendant healing. I am fucking lucky to be here alive on this planet. I am fucking very lucky. So I will not apologize to you for surviving myself. I will, in fact, relish in my own come back story because it is fucking amazing. (I will make amends where my healing injures you, but I will not feel badly about myself because I know, truly, that I have been doing the very best that I can, always).
What I have learned, is that if you do not heal your childhood traumas, you will date them later. Your entire dating life will become a battleground for trauma to reinflict upon you the feelings of worthlessness and despair until you stop and heal. And for me, I could not get to this most basic but fundamental level without being completely destroyed in a manipulationship. I wish it were different, believe me. I fucking do. But it wasn’t and today I remain so incredibly grateful to him for all his lies, manipulations and bullshit. He forced me to heal myself. And today, I am so fucking grateful for all his craziness.
I also have absolutely no reason to engage with him or it anymore. He is broken, that is perhaps the understatement of the year. But he doesn’t want to heal. He just wants to keep breaking himself and other’s down. And I can see that was fucked up attractive to me for a long time. It was kind of like, taming a lion. Every time you walk into that cage, you know that fucker can take you out. But the thrill of being that close to danger that feels intimate and good, lights up a part of you that believes, quite wrongly, that you are somehow above all the forces of nature and nurture. Somehow you will survive this lion’s attack when it comes. You won’t. You can’t. The lion will always fucking win mostly because it was your own delusion about the lion that put you in harm’s way to begin with...and the only person that doesn’t see this is you. You keep walking into that fucking cage with a chair...and the most deliciously delusional state of mind.
Until you see it. And then you can’t unsee it. At least I hope I can’t unsee it. Taking off the relational blinders is amazing. It is painful at first because your vision is so trained on being limited and curtailed. But once you recover from the initial blast, you really do see the world quite differently. And you realize that your part in the manipulationship is that you signed up to be manipulated. You did that. Not him. Or her. You signed up. I signed up too. And the most free day I have ever had on this planet was when I realized that I was acting out wounds from decades ago in some fruitless endeavor to alter them.
I cannot fix what is broken with what is broken. I need help. 12 step help, therapeutic help, spiritual help. And that is truth. I also cannot heal by dating someone else who is broken and lights me up in all the codependent ways that my own brokenness instilled in me. No, that doesn’t fucking work either.
I have to stop forgiving the brokenness and start really looking at it, hard. And only then can I begin to see what is good for me and what is not. The kind of seeing that allows you to walk away from shit that used to ensnare you for weeks and months and years.
I didn’t date a liar because he was such a good liar...I dated a liar because I wanted to believe the lies. And that is the simple, brutal truth. And once I saw this, it was easy to leave and have no desire to ever fucking go back. The manipulationship ended the very moment I saw I was complicit in my own manipulation. I thought for a long time I needed to get him to stop. No, I just needed to leave. That is all. And once I left, it is like my whole fucking life leveled up. I got better. My life got better. All of my relationships also leveled up or just ended because I was no longer willing to play my role in being manipulated and lied to.
The liar can only lie to those who are willing to stick around and listen...It is a fucking amazing day when you realize the only reason you believe there is meaning there is because YOU gave it meaning! Our brains are wired for connection, but trauma rewires them for protection. This makes healthy relationships difficult for wounded people. Not impossible but difficult.
And the hardest part of relationshiping for me is dealing with me and what I like and what I want. Because there is this part of me that needs for the hurtful, damaged, wounded and befouled person to want to level up too. To want to do the work. And there has been this incessant need for me to be a part of that whole lion taming story for someone else. But I think, fuck I hope, I finally learned this last go round, that the only one who can tame the lion is you. It is your lifetime lion. We are each allotted one, and we can choose to train for the task, or we can drink, fuck, shop, eat (or not), drug or gamble our lives away instead of doing the work to train our own lion. And once we are satisfied with the result, to let the lion go. The purpose has been served and there is no reason to keep that beast locked up and caged. It is safe to release it back into the wild. And you are safe to go about living your life without the constant and unremitting threat that you will be the architect of your own undoing...
See, it was you all along. It was me all along. I didn’t want to see that for a very long time and because I didn’t want to see it...I repeated it endlessly. But now I know better so I can do better. So I am. Every mother fucking day of my life.
Again...still.
Fuck yeah!
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