By the time I turned 50 I knew I could honestly say I didn’t want anything to do with LOVE. My heart had been broken enough times that it didn’t feel like it was possible to ever put it back together and if I was being honest with myself, I just couldn’t be bothered. The fear of it being broken again by even the smallest of loss was too frightening and overwhelming to imagine. The possibility of unleashing all the pain I had let fester for all of those years was too great a void to fill in. So, I did the next best thing most people do when trying to avoid pain, stayed numb and kept a controlled distance from anything that resembled love, romance, or affection.
I remember the first time my heart broke as though it was yesterday. 5 years old and my mum told me that my best friend in the whole world, Sebastian, was found floating down the creek across the road, someone had poisoned him. Sebastian was my black Labrador who never left my side from the time I was born. Mum still has the super 8 movies of him watching over me on my baby blanket. When your only 5 years old you don’t know anything about love – you don’t think about it, you don’t choose it, you just do it. You love your mum, you love your dad and your love your pets and your siblings (sometimes) and ice cream (all the time). At such a beautiful innocent age when your heart is open to loving things because they make you feel good, you truly feel joy and love fearlessly and fully without any reservations. When mum told me Sebastian was gone and wouldn’t’ be coming home I didn’t understand, ‘what does that mean not coming home?’
That first moment when a child tries to comprehend this idea that someone has gone and isn’t coming back it just seems hard to make sense of, but why? And where did they go? Why can’t we go too?
How could they possibly not want to come back, because we love them and they love me, don’t they?
So many questions that are just too hard to answer. Especially for a 5-year-old who just lost their best friend.
Crying for many days on my bed until my eyes would burst and holding my chest where the pain started to kick in – that’s where the first little break happened.
By the time I was 7 my parents divorced. These days divorce is so normal its almost expected. Nobody flinches at the idea of it and kids can talk about it more freely amongst their peers because most other kids have experienced it too. Back in the early 70’s though, divorce was not a known word -in fact a single mum raising kids was shameful and it certainly wasn’t spoken about. My dad meant the world to me, even though he was a terrible dad and an even worse husband to my mum – he was my hero. I didn’t care – I mean at 7 years old what am I comparing him too. I just loved him because he was my dad. Like I said when we first come into this world our concept of love is something we just do. We don’t hold back we love fully and completely. We don’t have conditions we just say yes.
So my second heartbreak was a major crack and I believe the origin point for many more to come.
Why did he just leave? He didn’t say goodbye. What did I do wrong? Maybe he just doesn’t love me anymore?
Things really didn’t get much better for me as life went on. My string of terrible relationships continued, each time my heart being thrown around like a hot potato as I desperately tried to find my self-worth in other people. It seemed that from an early age I had concluded that I wasn’t worthy of love. People who I love, friends who I get close to, leave me and therefore I must not be lovable. Now looking back with a healed heart, I can see that the story I was telling myself by this stage of my life, was that people abandon me which means I mustn’t be worth sticking around for. This lens I viewed the world through was a constant chase for validation and value. Whilst many destructive thought patterns are subconscious, it’s from here that we begin to make our decisions from, so until I healed this gaping wound in my heart centre I would never allow myself to experience true love which includes, first and foremost, self-love.
I should make it clear not all of my relationships were destructive. Maybe a better way to describe them was co-dependent or self-serving. Co-dependency is the kind of relationship that means you are both getting something out of it for yourself rather than for the other person. Suggesting you are in the relationship as a self-serving energy sounds quite awful, but you aren’t consciously doing this. You aren’t knowingly going into a relationship with the idea that you only want to serve yourself – it’s quite the opposite.
An example of this would be a ‘’shadow rescuer and the victim’’ relationship. This is when you feel the need to rescue the other person, helping them with their drama or their health or ongoing situation and by this constant rescuing of their victim state you are being validated and feeling worthy. It’s not as though you don’t genuinely want to help the other person, of course this is still coming from a place within you that cares – you have the rescuer archetype, but when it’s in shadow form it gets messed up by your desperate need to feel wanted and loved. The more your victim gets themselves into trouble and has issues that deteriorate, the more worthy you feel by saving them. Even if it’s driving you mad. The victim is also in shadow form and will be constantly looking for you to help them as this also makes them feel worthy and validated that someone is there to rescue them. Never feeling empowered enough to get themselves out of this situation or find their own way out.
Why does this become toxic? The victim will never be able to help themselves because they are just as accustomed to you rescuing them as you are saving them. You are both serving each other’s need to make each other feel worthy because of the big gaping hole in your heart centres that came from a place where you felt unworthy more than once before.
The funny thing about love is that our first experience of it is the way we were loved from our parents or whoever it was that raised us in those early years between 0-7yrs old. These years are the most definitive when it comes to creating patterns and beliefs about who we are and how we feel about emotions. Love is an experience that can be different for everyone based on how they are shown love and how they witnessed love playing out amongst their family or lack thereof. We put terms and conditions on love based on how it was given to us or withheld in those early days and then we create beliefs and biases based on our emotional experiences and avoidance of pain that we continue to have with other people throughout our lives.
By the time I was 47 I had been through 2 divorces already and whilst the last divorce was so called amicable, I found myself nursing the remnants of my heart in the bottom of my wine glass. He was my best friend of more than 10 years and he had just fallen “out of love’’ with me, we hadn’t had sex in well over a year and when it was brought up as an issue, he just didn’t know what to say and didn’t seem willing to do anything about it with me. We tried to remain friends but watching him go off and find love and happiness with women half my age before the papers were even signed was devastating so we parted ways for good.
I tried to find strength in my solitude but it really just turned into depression. There was a mountain of debt that I was left with and the business we had together was gone so the idea of starting over and creating a new identity without him felt impossible. It had been about 12 months and I hadn’t made an ounce of progress. I was drinking way too much wine and going round in circles not getting anywhere, living the life of a hermit, watching sappy movies and crying over puppy videos. Then just as I thought the universe couldn’t throw anymore curve balls at me, an old flame from 20 years ago messaged me, “Hey”, it took me a minute, just staring at this text on my phone, but my heart skipped a beat and my face lit up. Now as much as I talk about love and how important it is to master it, I need to let you know that I was terrible at it. I was never the kind to go goofy over anyone and the word romance made me want to throw up. I kept people at a distance, and I really made people work at staying in my inner circle so when I say my heart skipped a beat over someone, this person was super special, and he knew it.
Every now and then you hear of stories about a special experience with someone who you just knew from a million lifetimes ago and the stars aligned when you finally met. Well, this was that guy. 20 years ago, when we first met, we literally stood staring at each other and smiling to the point where it was only uncomfortable for the people around us. Something happened on a soul contract level and now, looking back, I know what that was. Funny thing is I also know we were never meant to be together either but for the 20 years that we knew each other it was my favourite fantasy that one day we would live happily ever after.
Over the 20 years we caught up often and attempted to make things work but he lived in another country and we both had successful careers and family ties that made it impossible for either of us to make that commitment to move. We recognised our feelings but never admitted them to each other as a way of staying safe every time it didn’t work out the way we hoped. Obviously once I was married, we lost touch and we both went on to continue our lives but that moment when he messaged me, everything changed.
The whirlwind had started, and it felt like my life raft had been thrown to me. Saving me from this pathetic example of a life I was attempting to live here in Australia. The divorcee whose husband abandoned her for younger more beautiful women (at least that’s the story I was telling myself). We talked and messaged nonstop for the next 6 months catching up on everything we had missed over our last 20 years. We promised each other that the changes we had made would make the difference this time around and reminisced about the first time we met like it was yesterday. Laughing and crying over memories and looking forward to the things we could now do in a promising future of happiness. Finally, we were going to be together just as the stars had planned for us.
It was my last Christmas here in Australia, we had made the decision that it was time for me to head to the United States and begin the life we had dreamed of over 20 years ago. We were older and wiser and knew that we could finally handle anything that life was going to throw at us and really have the best years of our lives together. My bags were packed and it was my last night with my family before I set foot on the plane. After a long video call before he fell asleep we were both beaming with excitement and our smiles were too big to fit into the screen.
This was really happening and the next time I would see him was when he picked me up from the airport.
That night he died in his sleep.
The plane ride was torturous and empty. Even though it was full, it was like I was the only person there. I couldn’t see anything through the constant flow of tears streaming down my face and I couldn’t even breath without holding my chest. This was it; this was the reason that we were never meant to be together. He was the one that was tasked the toughest job of all, to destroy my heart so that there was no way back but to rebuild from scratch.
Of course, I still searched for him at the airport desperately looking through the sea of people for that face and that smile hoping it was all a sick joke. Instead, I saw his Aunt who was waving for me with half a smile, we stood hugging and crying for what seemed like an eternity and the only things she could say was how sorry she was.
This was a pain I couldn’t even describe; it wasn’t just a love lost it was the loss of hope and new beginnings and that damn life raft that was supposed to change everything. The next 3 months were not pretty and in fact the lessons I learned about grief I will treasure for the rest of my life. It’s a roller coaster of emotions that don’t always have words, but it certainly does carry meaning.
Because I was no longer about to be married to an American, I had to head home, so I ventured back to Australia where my mum nursed me back to being a reasonably functioning adult, but my heart was gone for good.
The space where my heart used to live was now empty. No vessel, no cup to refill just an empty chasm or an abyss that was void of anything. I avoided anything that looked like love and certainly didn’t want to experience life from a place of joy. My response to this experience was to shut off anything that could create connection because that could only bring the possibility of more pain and I was already living on the edge.
Over three years have now passed since I came home, and I can honestly say it was a sacred gift to have lived through this experience. I truly believe with all my knowing that HE was meant to break me into a thousand pieces. Nobody else would have been able to – he was the only one who I let in and the only one who I felt vulnerable with to break through all that barbed wire I had wrapped around my heart for all those years protecting me from what I thought was pain. What I didn’t realise was that I was actually ‘’protecting’’ myself from all the love that was being given to me over the years and all the love I should have been giving to myself to keep me nourished and strong and worthy, instead I was turning my heart to ice.
Opening my heart to the concept of self-love, was the key to turning my life around. It wasn’t just other peoples love I was rejecting it was the love I so desperately needed from myself that was hurting me the most. My self-destructive ways didn’t allow me to see how worthy I really am to take care of myself to owning love for myself or letting love in and truly being happy.
Without my own understanding of self-love, I would never have survived to write this story.
The next chapter to this story is the Medicine story and how I came to become whole again after this experience. I healed the dark abyss in my heart centre. Its an amazing story that has given my soul a purpose to simply share these experiences with you in the hope that you can truly understand the magic and medicine of loving yourself first before anything or anyone else. Our concept of love and self-love is so warped in today’s world and so shallow that it’s the very reason so many of us who struggled with despair, depression and grief get lost and stuck in a very dark world with no hope at all.
My wound is now sacred to me, and it is with great gratitude that I appreciate all of those who have been a part of these stories in my life until now and the role they played to help me heal.
So much love to all x Charlie
Chapter published in Changemakers 2020
