I had an experience earlier this year that utterly and completely changed my life in ways that I can’t honestly find words in the English language to convey here.
After having been in a relationship with someone on and off for almost two years and progressively growing closer to one another, talking about living and traveling together, sunset picnics, cooking lessons, he literally and suddenly vanished out of my life.
Poof!
A total and complete discard and disappearance without a word or a trace literally out of the clear blue.
At the time, it devastated me. Not so much because I truly care about this man but more so because it triggered my deepest and most unhealed childhood traumas of abandonment.
It would have been so easy for me to be angry and honestly, I was for some time. It baffled me as to how anyone who claimed to have cared so much about me and wanted to create a future with me, would just all of the sudden, vanish without any communication whatsoever. The lack of care, empathy, concern or even acknowledgement of how much that hurt me on his part literally incapacitated me. It made no sense to me.
But the more I looked back on this kind, gentle, sweet, strong and loving man, the more I remembered the deep discussions we had shared about our childhood and adult traumas. And for him, these unresolved traumas ran so much deeper than my own. And while I’ve spent over three decades of my life contending with and healing my deeper wounds, this beautiful soul had not yet even begun to embark on his own healing journey.
So instead of anger, my love and compassion for him grew even stronger than it had ever been before. I understood on the deepest level possible how those traumas had informed his capacity to create and maintain a healthy and loving connection with me and likely, with anyone before me. And without healing, these same unresolved traumas would infect every single one of his intimate relationships with any woman in his future.
His discard was not a rejection of me but rather a reflection of his inner and unresolved traumas that he wasn’t either yet willing or capable of addressing. And while his discard, ghosting and lack of communication hurt me deeply, I could understand its origins.
This understanding was the only thing that kept me from being angry, from allowing anger and animosity toward him and the pain he caused me to take me over and pull me under. Instead, I was able to bring compassion and understanding to his basic humanity and acceptance of where he is at this time in his own healing journey.
None of us trudge down the healing path in a straight line. Nothing about transformation is linear. Nothing. If we start the journey and have some sort of end goal in mind, it won’t be long before life will show us that, even as much as we think we are or want to be, we simply are not in charge of the journey or its outcome. And that, in and of itself, is perhaps one of the bigger lessons of any healing journey - that there’s nothing in life that we truly have any control over.
Sure, we can set an intention about what we hope to accomplish throughout our travels, but in the end, healing takes its own path. Our job as journeyers is simply to stay on the path no matter what comes up along the way.
And, this very painful and difficult lesson reminded me once again that all of us are doing the very best that we can according to where we are in this very moment in time.