Letter to a Friend

"...Take all myself."
- Juliet, Romeo and Juliet, William Shakespeare

The person I called didn’t pick up, so I began to talk, then cry into the person’s voice mail.  Mid-sob, I found myself observing myself.  One more time, I was leaving a voice mail about how hurt I was from how badly this person had treated me.

The stories are endless and endlessly inexplicable about the abused returning to their abusers, the broken-hearted with broken promises returning to their breakers.  "Leave!" friends and family say.  "Where's your will power?" they implore.  Why, why do people return to the people who aren’t good to them?

For me, my psychological need for my heart breaker to value me is so ancient and so deep that I have felt, at times, willing to give my life for proof of this person’s regard.  Add to this need my fear of annihilation from the breaker’s rage if I were to end contact, my breaker-instilled-self-doubt-my-fault-self-belief that if I were just a better person, the breaker would treat me better, and my vision of the bleakness of life from cutting off ever having any chance to finally win this person’s regard, and that’s a formula for immobility.

Those who return to their abusers have unmet emotional needs attached to the abuser, deep resistance to “making” the person feel some way when they take a stand or walk away - rage, guilt, shame, grief among them - and a belief that they would be broken beyond repair from the loss of the person from their lives.

Even after much professional and spiritual guidance, even after earning a degree in counseling myself, I continue to feel as if I have my mind and my body, but the breaker owns and holds my heart outside and away from me.  I engage with the breaker to at least stay close to this hostage, my own heart.

And with a captive heart, how can I truly be heartfelt with those who love me and with those whom I love?

Into the phone, I stopped sobbing.  I told the phone person I had called that I had just realized that, one more time, over and over again, I was using the phone person and this method in secret, at a distance, from the breaker.  I wasn’t processing feelings productively toward solutions.  I was releasing them in hiding so I could return appearing unperturbed to the breaker.  And then I hung up.

I once asked a therapist friend, “When do people change?”  She answered, “When they’re in enough pain.”

I’m close.

I’ve sought but been unable to find the source of the quote I remember from my studies but here’s my paraphrase of a passage from Freud:  “Consciousness is everything.”

I can take action, or choose not to take action, only about that of which I am conscious.

During the voice mail, I became conscious that I had become pathetic.  I might as well have had a black eye and bruises around my neck, saying into the phone through broken teeth, “Yes, but…”

The abused lose their senses of clarity, faith, hope, and power.  Over time, thinking what to do, believing it’s okay to do it, believing it will work on some level, and believing one has the power to take action on what to do approach impossibility.

And yet.

My breaker doesn’t hold my heart hostage.  I’ve given it over in hopes the breaker would cherish it.

I have become conscious that the breaker will never cherish me.  Ever.  The reasons why are, ultimately, irrelevant.  What I long for with the most elemental parts of me?  It is not to be.

Well.  Then.

The mechanics of extrication of are just that, mechanics.  The what and how and when are mine to decide, no one else’s.  I have been taught and have consciously acquired self-soothing skills over the past decade.  I will need all of them.  Certainly I will feel relieved at times, but romanticizing the end of a breaker of a relationship demeans the process. This will be, at times, excruciating.  My unmet needs and longings can lead me to demoralizing visions of foul, tragic catastrophe.  I have learned to stop these thoughts as soon as I detect them.  To save myself from despair, I will have to do this.  Over and over again.

I turn 51 in a month.  The years of 49 and 50 seemed exciting milestones and I relished them as trajectories towards heights of insights through reflection and contemplation.  On the downward slope of the curve I see 51.  I can do triathlons, eat local vegetables, and meditate with a cat on my lap all I want.  Life will never cherish me enough to keep me.

Well.  Okay then.  Okay, fine, then.  I’m getting my heart back.  When I go, it will be all of me.

Comments

[jackie]

Anne - i have to differ with the therapist. People don't change when their pain reaches a certain threshold. The impetus for change comes when the suffering is too great. And there is a difference between pain and suffering. You won't stop your suffering until you are ready to face your pain. Fear of pain forces us to stay where we are and suffer.

[Anne Giles Clelland]

Sounds like definitions of the words “pain” and “suffering” might be helpful to our conversation. I love the American Heritage which defines pain as “an unpleasant sensation occurring as a consequence of injury, disease, or emotional disorder. Interestingly enough, the second definition is “suffering.”

The best definition I’ve heard of “suffering” is this: “Wishing things were different.”

I wonder if we reach a point when we’ve suffered enough – wished things were different enough – to be open to making them different.

In any case, whether pain or suffering is the catalyst, neither of those motivators is on the joyful side of the spectrum of human emotion.

I heard a great speaker on that topic a few years ago who said, “We don’t change when everything’s going well. We don’t say, ‘Hey, I’m on a roll. I think I’ll have a spiritual awakening.’”

Thanks for your comment, Jackie.