Making Peace with Your Pain

Last night I lay on my bed crying for approximately 17 minutes. Talking out loud to God (or myself) I said "I'm supposed to be happy but I'm not". I have almost everything I wanted this time last year, yet I'm not happy. Why am I not happy? This made me feel worse... so I did what I normally do when I'm heavily consumed by my emotions (which as a Cancer, is typical) and I pulled out a sheet of paper and pen. As a writer, unfortunately, I only get my greatest hits of inspiration when overwhelming feelings flood me, but luckily for me, this is also when I'm most creative. So last night I took it to my journal and this is what I wrote...

"I feel really depressed right now. I feel isolated and lonely. I don’t mind being alone but I feel I have no one to talk to... I feel like my relationships are not reciprocated. I feel like I always care more about people than they care about me. I’m stressed because I’m running out of money and I don’t know what to do. I feel a lot of pressure to make a decision but everything is up in the air and it’s freaking me out because all I wanted my whole life is stability yet all I get is constant uncertainty. I feel unsteady. I want balance but I’m so ungrounded. I can’t predict my future and it scares the hell out of me. I’m so afraid. I just want clarity, something to look forward to. I want safety but I feel so unsafe in my body and my life. I don’t know who to turn to, and I don’t know the right thing to do. This whole thing with **** has sent me spiraling. My abandonment wound feels so triggered right now. I just wish he would text me. I can’t even text him because I blocked his number... well, I deleted it and I can’t find it because I erased it so I wouldn't reach out to him but now I regret it. Fuck! I know it’s for the best but I’m so activated, and it hurts, physically. I feel literal pain in my body, a tightness in my chest, a clenching in my stomach, an ache. I feel like I’m going through withdrawals like I’m detoxing from I don’t know what kind of drug he put me on. I have to keep reminding myself that it's for the best but it’s so hard to not message him. I don’t even know him, so why do I care? I just wanna hear from him, but it upsets me because I feel like he could not give two fucks about me, and he's just gonna forget about me. Like I'm a replaceable, meaningless, useless person. I just wanna be special to somebody. I just wanna mean something important to someone. I just want a person who cares about me as much as I care about them but it feels impossible. The hardest mission of my life is to get somebody to love me. I don’t know why I try so hard but I don’t want to beg anymore. I just want them to want me because they want to, not because I need to ask. It makes me feel so bad about myself. Like what I have to offer nobody wants. I feel so sad."

The good thing about last night was that I couldn't stew in my misery for long, because only several minutes later by the grace of God, I had therapy. I cried to my therapist about how I was feeling... small, invisible, insignificant. I told her about my situation, I expressed my frustrations. I explained how abandoned I was feeling by said person. She asked me to go deeper. "I can see this person ghosting you has activated your abandonment wound," she remarked. What can you do that will heal it, instead of calling him? Flustered, I snapped back "If I knew I would do it, wouldn't I?" That's the million-dollar question... how does one fix their most crippling wound? I sat and thought on it. "I don't know Chelsea, I feel triggered when people give me the silent treatment. My ex used to stonewall me all of the time. It makes me feel unseen, forgotten, unimportant. I hardly know this guy and I told myself I wouldn't get attached but I really like him. He just made me feel so... so..." Ahah... and there it was... with a lump in my throat, I confessed... "he made me feel so chosen". I burst into tears. Chosen. My ultimate wound, my shadow, my pain point. Unchosen, abandoned and I go way back, as far as I can remember. Feeling unwanted since birth has left an imprint on my heart (more like a scar) of feeling inadequate, inferior, and inherently unlovable. My whole life has felt like a fight to be chosen. And in that moment I recognized that it wasn't this guy that was upsetting me, it was what he represented, the illusion of, once again, not being good enough to be chosen. "With him, I felt chosen. He made me feel so special. And now that he's gone, I feel like I don't matter".

For me, this realization was big because I understood that my immediate, initial instinct was to run back to what brought me a false sense of comfort. The illusion of safety and familiarity in what I knew was destructive. It was like binge eating; something triggered me and so I turned to food. The overconsumption of food momentarily satiated me. I could no longer feel my emotional pain because I numbed myself by indulging. But once the binge was finished and the high wore off, I became immersed in regret, guilt, and self-disgust, and the cycle continued. In my gut, I knew what the right thing to do was but I've always wondered why the right thing to do is usually the hard thing. The situation was pressing on my wound; feeling devalued, discarded, and disposed of. In order to stop the agony, the simple thing would be to run back to this person and retract my boundary, even if I knew in my heart it wasn't good for me in the long run. I'd done this time and time again in my past relationships; going back to my ex after he broke up with me 4 times since the discomfort of being in a violent relationship was easier than the discomfort of grief. Then it would happen over and over again until 2 years of my life were "wasted" in a toxic relationship. This time, I knew I had to learn from my mistakes in order to correct the dysfunction and end the cycle of unhealthy love. Although I can not compare this man to my narcissistic ex, the underlying theme remains the same. The pattern is one of the anxious, avoidant dance.

"What can we do to heal your abandonment wound that doesn't involve contacting this guy?" "I have no idea" I replied. "I've done all the things; I've done yoga, meditated, journaled, worked out, took a walk outside, spoke to my friend, worked, and now I have this session with you. I've done everything I could think to do but my coping skills are running dry and I still feel the compulsive urge to Whatsapp him" I said, defeated. "Well, I think you are doing it. And I'm very proud of you" she answered. "Doing what? Clearly, my healthy mechanisms are not helping much"... "I know you feel uncomfortable but despite your pain, its been 4 days and you still haven't videoed him. You're doing the opposite of what your past self would've done. You're sitting in the discomfort. You're thinking about what's best for your future self even though everything in you wants the suffering to end, right now. It's huge."...

Thank God for therapy. Although I spent the last 4 days engulfed in my sorrow, today I woke up feeling more like myself again. I got out of bed without checking my phone for a text but rather, feeling empowered. The ability to be present with our pain allows us to not only grow stronger but it grants us the opportunity to use it as our greatest teacher. To learn about ourselves and our needs. To understand what the wounds from our past are representing. It's not about the other person and it never was. Before this guy, I couldn't remember the last time I felt chosen because I was always looking to other people to fulfill that for me. But now I see I always had the power to be chosen and I could do so by picking myself. The feeling of heartbreak and loss has always been really tough. Not only was I given up for adoption but my father died at a young age. So while it makes sense, it doesn't mean I am doomed to a life of avoiding grief, unless I allow that to be my narrative. My new reality is doing right by myself, even if it means losing some people in the process as long as along the way, I don't lose myself. Today I'm practicing leaning into the discomfort, not running away from it. I am going to take a break from social media to clear my head and concentrate on being with myself. I will see my circumstances (no matter how difficult) as a good thing because they are bringing me closer to the person I want to become. So, by the end of our session, I had figured out the answer to the question my therapist posed "How does one heal their abandonment wound?" And it starts by not abandoning ourselves.