Relational Trauma...

I have said this before...but it bears saying it again, my romantic relationships are a true indicator of my healing.  It isn’t pretty or all that interesting, but it is accurate.  The timeline of my dating history favors a stark revelation of the trauma healed and unhealed.

As much as I would like this to be different, my romantic relationships, hell even my friendships, clearly show the level of healing of my childhood trauma.  And I guess, the best thing I can say about all of that is that it has gotten better, and then worse and then better, but overall, there is an upward trajectory.

For me romantic relationships have revealed all the healing that I need to do and also, the healing I have done.  I wish this were different but it just isn’t.  I have needed every single bad man choice I have made to heal myself to the point I am now.  And now, while I know I am not "all better" and completely healed, I do feel at peace with the level of healing I have worked hard to get to today.  I feel relatively free of my past mistakes and delusions and more able to accept someone decent, good and present.

While I am free to make better choices, I am also free to be a better version of myself, thereby causing the usual downward spiral to move in a more upward fashion.  Today, I am not attracted to the shitshows, the rehab projects or the men that are totally uninterested in doing the work on themselves.  I do not want that kind of guy anywhere near my life.  And I have sufficiently healed to a place of not being attracted to any of that anymore.  And in so doing, I have cleaned up the debris of my past traumas and their didactic choices for someone better, more evolved and more healed to show up.

I marvel at how much my romantic relationships, all of my relationships really, mirror the amount of healing I have done of childhood shit from a million years ago.  So strange that all that happened still has tendrils and a vice like grip on a time and place and version of myself that is almost unrecognizable to the person that survived all of that.

When people talk to me about their romantic endeavors and their relative failure, I have gotten pretty good at seeing the trauma that is influencing, curating and causing their current romantic meltdowns.  It is surreal.  And I can so relate to not being able to see it at all.  For so long, we just see that we aren’t getting what we want or need but are totally flummoxed about why.  And don’t even get me started on how we all tend to marry ourselves off to people who can’t or won’t EVER be able to give us what we need, and most of the time, even want.  It is ludicrous.  Yet, we do it all the time and think that somehow satisfaction is just around the other corner...

I would say that I wish I knew all of this earlier...but then I would have also missed the fun side of all my dysfunction.  I mean, as much as I do not want to repeat it, there was a great deal of fun that was had...self destructive though it may have been.  And that is why I think a lot of people do not choose to heal their trauma.  They are still getting something positive out of it and so the desire for change always loses out to the desire to keep playing that particular losing game that is so amazing at making you feel like the big win is in the next roll of the dice.

We repeat behaviors that provide us something:  love, feeling, worth, value, reinforcement of long held beliefs, an inkling that this time it will be different.  It is so seductive that some of us waste our entire lives on the endeavor.  Always believing that the true change will come if we can just make this person, this relationship right itself and finally be the nirvana we were searching for.

I know I say this a lot, but the nirvana can never be found in another.  It can only be found in yourself and then shared with another who has also done the work to heal themselves to a point that they too have discovered their own inner peace and worth and then is willing to share it with you.  Do not settle for anything less.  The shitshow seems like fun but you know how it ends:  pitiful, incomprehensible demoralization...

Again, still...