How To Lose the Love of Your Life

I had my first boyfriend at 42. Prior to that I had only attracted men who were emotionally unavailable, and I had thrown myself at them until I had become so broken by their rejection that I thought something must be fundamentally wrong with me. And there was.

But Kind Man was generous, loving, wanted to impress, and really, really loved me. We were engaged and we fit into each other’s families, bodies and lives like we were made for each other and that not only scared me; it terrified me. I resisted his interest at first, but I reminded myself that I was no longer going to accept any more emotionally unavailable men; that I deserved better. I started to let myself experience what it was to be loved.

They say relationships bring out your inner traumas and I had no idea how bad mine were – look, we all have traumas – and mine were subtle and ongoing over many years, but it wasn’t a single traumatic moment. They were well-intentioned criticisms and judgments aimed to make me the best person I could be, but what they did was shrink my inner child to be so introverted, so broken and so scared of PEOPLE that I became somewhat of a social reject. Apart from my children and Kind Man, nobody on Earth really knows me. Why? Because I won’t, and can’t, let them in.

When I went to my psychologist (everyone on Earth needs one), we discovered I had what’s called emotional deprivation schema, this means “it can feel like an emptiness or void that is actually real – it’s the emptiness of unfulfilled emotional needs. It develops very early on in childhoods where the mother (or whoever was the main care-giver) was not emotionally in-tune with your needs.” In response, I subconsciously built up strategies to cope with feeling alone – independence, self-sufficiency, avoidance of intimate relationships and people in general, never staying anywhere long enough to be known, and a whole raft of strategies to cope with depression.

Kind Man started to break down those walls I had built and for myself, but my subconscious fear response was “Danger”, I didn’t know what being loved felt like and so kind words and actions that weren’t attached with criticism felt unsafe. He saw me. Really saw me and his kindness and generosity were not what I associated with love and therefore I pushed him away.

But there’s only so much pushing away that one man can take, even one with a heart as big as his, and I broke it. I broke him. I broke us. It wasn’t intentional, it was a subconscious response to generations of traumatised people. It was my subconscious trying to protect my inner child, but what I wish I had known was that I am not a child anymore and I can protect myself.

So, if you DON’T want to lose the person who loves you:

1. Deal with your childhood trauma – I thought I had. I really did. But I had no idea how deep the trauma seeped into every aspect of my life – my self-identity, my ability to function as a healthy adult in the world, my social connections, my career, my health, my sense of belonging and my ability to treat others respectfully. Relationships (and situations) can trigger this unhealed trauma and we often blame the other person, but unless we take responsibility for our own unhealed and unloved parts of ourselves, we cannot fully love or be loved.

That’s it. There’s only one thing we can do to maintain a happy, healthy relationship. To break down the walls that we created for ourselves as children. And in the words of the beautiful India Arie:

“Child it’s time, to break the shell. Life’s going to hurt, but it’s meant to be felt. You can not touch the sky, from inside yourself. You can not fly, until you break the shell.”

I cannot take back the damage I’ve done to Kind Man and I hope that some day he will forgive me, but Kind Man has given me the most magnificent gift – the gift of healing all those parts of me that felt unloved. He has taught me about devotional love. And without him, my life is not as rich, but now he can be part of my tapestry and will always be a cherished part of my story.

Alyssa

© Alyssa Curtayne 2021