Untangling The War & Moving Forward From Betrayal
The way we untangle ourselves from each other is an achingly beautiful process.
Turning the porch light off and locking the door of the home that we’ve built out of someone can ignite something dark inside of us; the worst part of ourselves often rears its ugly head and snap its jaws at the devastating, heart-wrenching, overwhelming pain of lost love. There is so much tenderness that seeps out of our fingertips during the process of uncoupling. We are at our most vulnerable, often tossed into the dizzyingly empty space of our heartbreak without warning and definitely without a safety net.
Whether you are the leaver or the left, the cold shock of aloneness can put so much pressure on your chest that you may feel as though you will break from the sheer weight of it all.
Drenched in raw emotion and violently shaken awake from a comfortable rhythm, heartbreak turns you upside down and rips every flaw, mistake, and doubtful thought you have out into the sunlight. You are torn away from yourself, caught in a fierce rivalry between the love you held in your previous life and the one you’re faced with now.
Uncoupling means digging into the depths of your emotional ties with your past love and separating what is yours and what is theirs. What belongs to you? Which ideas, beliefs, core values, stories, and memories are yours? What can you call your own, if anything anymore? If you’ve been together long enough, it can be too difficult to untangle what has been woven together — almost unimaginable.
Every step is heavy and full of complicated exhaustion. It’s easiest to hate the people who hurt us — to desperately backpedal in an attempt to distance ourselves from the betrayal and the rejection. There is a twisted freedom in despising the person who broke your heart or the person whose heart you broke. You shit-talk and bad mouth, twisting good memories into awful ones; you contemptuously rip the photos in half.
You declare war on their memory and handcuff their betrayal to your side, marching scornfully into the next relationship, and the next, and the next, always dragging along the deep-rooted enmity alongside you, bitterly wondering why your attempts at love always fall apart.
THEY FALL APART BECAUSE THE OPPOSITE OF LOVE IS NOT HATE.
IT’S DETACHMENT.
Hate is just as strong of a bond as deep love is. A negative connection is still a connection, and can often run much deeper than the love you previously shared did. As you drag your hurt behind you, it is no wonder that new relationships, even familial and platonic ones, can be full of cruelty and anger. To stop loving someone who stopped loving you, in any capacity, is unimaginably hard. To stop loving someone who stopped loving you through grace, compassion, and kindness is even more difficult.
BUT IT IS SO INCREDIBLY ESSENTIAL.
If the goal is to live a more wholehearted life, full of laughter and love untainted with past emotional baggage that does not belong to the relationships you find yourself in, you have to let go of that darkness that urges you to loath your lost love. You have to let them go, with kindness and warmth. If heartbreak is a gift, then this is the best one you could’ve asked for.
This is an opportunity to wade through the muck and scrape out every dirty, dusty, filthy corner of your heart to scrub it clean; to pay attention to your body and what you need from the world around you. This is a chance to let your love go with a sweet farewell, bidding your resentment goodbye with a deep hug and appreciation for your heartbreaker. It is going to be full of grief. It will hurt, probably excruciatingly so. But you will emerge from the darkness. You will.
It will require forgiveness, true forgiveness. It will mean indifference. Indifference does not, however, mean lack of compassion — it means you give your heartbreak your biggest blessing and start slowly walking your way towards healing. You will lose the connection that you crave the most, yes, but you will gain a deeper connection to yourself.
If you can move forward from betrayal with mercy and understanding for the ones who hurt you, then you can enter into new relationships with a reinvigorated sense of care, kindheartedness, and respect. You will not shy away from love, forever closed off to the possibility of loving another again.
Instead, you will find love where you thought was only sadness. You will find a home in someone new, but only after creating a home within yourself first. You will have the kind of love that makes your heart dizzy with belonging — the long-term kind of love. The comfortable, safe, wonderfully fun kind of love. The kind where you just want to laugh at how achingly sweet your life tastes, in a way that you never could have understood had you not been brought to your knees with grief before finding it.
This life is bursting with stunningly sweet soul-connections that it is absolutely doing yourself a disservice to shut off your heart to the possibility of loving again — because you can, and you will.
