Healing Hurts More Than the Initial Injury
But you must survive it
The loss of a love and the pain of a broken relationship is an overload of projection.
— Joseph Campbell
That’s all it is.
Remember your first love? Remember those heavenly blissful days? Remember how dreamlike it was? The mere sight of that person made your life complete and fulfilled. Your life was this wonderful dream that “This is it”: this relationship is the fulfillment of my fantasy and I can’t imagine life otherwise.
In those days, you thought you knew everything there is to know about love and life. If you were a boy then she was your Aphrodite, and if you were a girl, he was your Eros.
The shattering of projections
Both of you completely dissolved into the other. No argument can quell this feeling of total projection, of everything in the other one. The girl wore the anima projection of the boy and the boy wore the animus projection of the girl.
Oh, how wonderful those days were! Living in fantasy land while projecting our inner gods and goddesses onto our partner. We forget that the other person is just a mere human being and not a celestial one. The enormous pressure of the projection becomes unbearable to the other person. And so, the heavenly days plummets into hell. The invincible barrier of projected love gets shattered. And you are left picking up pieces of your broken heart.
When a relationship breaks off, it takes a person a little while to settle and find a new commitment. It’s after the break-off, when there is no new commitment and life has been divested of all of its potentials, that this painful reaction takes place.
— Joseph Campbell
For some people, this is a dangerous period. Living inside your head and in those wonderful memories. Life seems like a tragic play. Love turns into hatred. And we succumb to grief and loneliness. Nothing is worth living for anymore.
But time soothes everything.
The psyche knows how to heal, but it hurts. The healing hurts more than the initial injury. If you can survive it, and you must, you’ll be stronger.
You will find a larger base to ground your existence. Every commitment is a narrowing, and when that commitment fails, you have to get back to a larger base and have the strength to hold to it.
Amor fati — the love of your fate.
Nietzsche said that in order to survive in this hellish world, we must take up the motto of “Amor fati” i.e. to love one’s fate.
No matter what happens to you, no matter what your fate is, you must say: “This is what I need.”
It may look like a wreck but go at it as though it were an opportunity, a challenge. If you bring love to that moment — not discouragement — you will find the strength is there.
What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger
— Nietzsche
The disasters you survive, the hardships you overcome, will only make you stronger and will move you one step closer to the person you were always meant to be.
What a privilege! Isn’t it?
This is when the spontaneity of your own nature will have a chance to flow. You will gradually come to know yourself. You will see what an incredible person you always have been, but was buried underneath all those unconscious projections and societal norms.
In retrospect, you will see that the moments which seemed to be great failures followed by wreckage were the incidents that shaped the life you have now. You will be thankful for those hellish days, for they only made you stronger and wiser. Nothing can happen to you that is not positive. Even though it looks and feels at the moment like a negative crisis, it is not.
The crisis throws you back, and when you are required to exhibit strength, it comes. The dark night of the soul precedes all revelation.
When you find yourself in darkness and everything seems lost, then comes the new life and all that is needed.
