Before Ian died I’d always felt I had the capacity to solve any problem that might arise. I was given from birth an amazing skill set for solving problems spiritually and solved most of my problems this way.
After Ian’s death my world view collapsed and I felt irretrievably broken. This completely rearranged my reference points and I felt lost and clueless for a number of years. I also did not understand that emotional trauma brings a whole new raft of people into our lives, including people who want to keep us broken. Like the client of author Geneen Roth (Women Food and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything), who unconsciously ate excessively so that she would not threaten her mother, discovered :
“She was so depressed and if I was just myself, that was too much for her. I needed to shut down the bigness - I needed to be as broken as she was - otherwise she’d reject me…”
The aim of relationships is that we heal through relationship with another. The people in our lives, but especially our beloved, reflect back to us the parts of us that need healing. As Nancy Levin poetically says:
“i surrender and assign
the loving of my body
to you
until i am ready to love it again.”
Levin pinpoints the temptation our relationships offer: we want others to love us when we can’t love ourselves. The aim, however, is to have love, be love, and love ourselves thoroughly, regardless of who is, or is not, in our lives.
But when we are broken, when we cannot love ourselves, when we struggle to just stay upright and moving forward, we cling to people who seem to love us. But brokenness, need and despair are red flags to a certain energy - those who feel good when others feel bad, who feel whole when others have been emotionally dismembered. These people seem to be our friends, seem to be our staunch support, and our path home. But all things are not as they seem.
As the sage narrator in Paulo Coelho’s “Manuscript Found in Accra” wisely and profoundly counsels us:
“Avoid at all costs those who are only by your side in moments of sadness to offer consoling words. What they are actually saying to themselves is: ‘I am stronger. I am wiser. I would not have taken this step.’…The enemy is not the person standing before you, sword in hand. It is the person standing next to you with a dagger concealed behind his back.”
