Break ups and accumulating emotional baggage

Musings from a Feminine perspective

One of the gifts of getting a little older I’m finding, is being acutely aware of how destructive harbouring resentment and bitterness can be, both to ourselves and any future relationships.

Accumulating emotional baggage through being disappointed in our relationships creates brittleness around our hearts and lessens our ability to feel. It reduces our vitality and our ability to attune to the intelligence of our hearts.

And it keeps us and the world stuck in self-reinforcing loops and patterns, often bringing out the worst in us and our lovers, preventing healing and evolution.

Life is offering me a big opportunity to be aware of this, since my boyfriend and I parted ways. Right as our year long honeymoon period ended, he realised he couldn’t rise to the challenge of the next level of relating that was required, and so he decided to jump ship.

Ouch.

Since then, I’ve been aware that I’m making history right now and how I choose to focus on and frame what has happened, is forming the future me. And because I believe that facing bitterness and resentment is something that many can relate to, I want to share a little snapshot of this journey with you, and explore some ways of navigating breakups and lost loves….

Feel pain, when there is pain.

Even though I don’t want to go into the familiar feeling disappointment, right now I do.

Even though I don’t want this to contribute to my familiar feeling of abandonment, right now it is.

I also feel some embarrassment around having publicly raved about how happy I am in my relationship recently.

And some resignation around the hopelessness of ever being in a solid and sustainable partnership…

The most self-loving thing we can do during breakups is to allow the feelings that are there as best as we can.

And while our minds are very good at coming up with lots of unpleasant or painful thoughts, this is not the same thing as allowing the pain. We need to be able to separate the story from the feeling, doing our best to create time and space for feeling feelings and allowing the energy to move.

If we feel ‘stuck’ in something it’s often because we’re not feeling something all the way, right? I know it’s not always easy, but we can think of it as an ongoing practice and notice when we engage in numbing behaviours or a judgemental voice cuts us off from our heartache.

Often breakups are hard because they can touch pre-existing pain of abandonment or rejection that is much older and bigger than our current experience.

And yet as well as being shitty, break ups can also opportunities to meet ourselves in our ‘original’ heartbreak (which is what I call the first traumas around betrayal and mistrust we received as infants). This requires a lot of tenderness and listening towards our inner little ones, as we give ourselves the love and care we didn’t receive earlier on.

Two people being in a relationship who have not turned and run from their original heartbreak but have learned to tenderly befriend it, is a totally different ballgame from two people hoping to be ‘rescued’ by each other from having to feel it.

I think a functional and mature relationship is dependent on this.

Don’t settle for being a victim:

Even though I can witness my mind coming up with lots of stories that emphasise the narrative of being a victim of my relationship ending and indulging in my wound of being abandoned, I’m practicing noticing this and yet not focusing on it.

We probably all know what it is to give our power away by getting a little too comfy in the victim position (of course there are incidents in life where we need to honour our being a victim). But over-identifying as a victim means we don’t have to take responsibility for what’s ours.

The truth is that in my personal case, there were ways in which my boyfriend and I weren’t so compatible, and things that I struggled with that were actually deal-breakers but I tried not to pay attention to them, because other parts of our relationship were so lovely. The painful truth I can admit to myself now, is that there were also ways that I sacrificed my authenticity to keep the peace and to feed myself the illusion of being loved.

Ouch!

Even though our brains can keep coming up with thoughts around how we are a victim, being responsible is also about keep coming back to a more balanced view. Can we be grateful to life for being clear about what is our path and what isn’t? Can we be grateful for all the beautiful moments and learnings that happened? And can we connect to the sense of infinite possibilities of our future and a trust in what is and what’s to come?

People often publicly share their joy of coming together, but so few people share about the process of parting ways. I hope by sharing a little of my story, there might be some medicine in there for someone out there. Writing definitely helps me to keep climbing the ladder of the higher perspective, yet coming back to the reality that feeling difficult and uncomfortable feelings so they don’t accumulate and turn into a hardened and bitter heart, is some of the most powerful inner work we can do.