I no longer knew who I was. I was whomever he needed or wanted me to be. I became an expert on camouflaging. For many women who have to start over, this seems almost impossible; because they may feel as though they no longer have an identity. He was their "identity". I never knew how to set healthy boundaries. All I knew was how to tolerate pain. Eventually pain becomes so comfortable that if you don't experience it, apart of you feels like you are not living. In reality, I was dying internally. How many times have you sacrifice parts of you in the name of love, to the point where it hurts. You feel like the only way that you could ever feel alive again...is by the same person who created the pain in the first place. When a women loves a man...sometimes she accepts things she shouldn't in the name of love. Accepting disrespect, dishonesty, disloyalty and physical, emotional and verbal abuse. I've accepted all the above. This is NEVER okay. When someone loves you, they respect you. Moreover, I began associating love with pain. I became fearful of commitment. I was afraid to get hurt again, so I would only try to give parts of myself; naively believing that this time I would be in control; avoiding pain. Nevertheless, I was deepening those wounds; making them impossible to fully heal.
When you don't give yourself space to heal by jumping from one relationship/person to the next; what your doing is not allowing your wounds to heal. More than likely, you enter into the same type of relationships that continue to deepen that pain. I was famous for that; the same thing that creates pain, is the same thing we turn too in order to heal us. It's called a temporary relief. It does not remove the brokenness, only puts a bandaid over it. I would jump from one relationship to the next so that I wouldn't have to face the true person that maintained the pain... myself.
Queens you have to allow yourself to heal. Healing may mean being alone for a while; so that you can figure out how to rearrange the broken pieces and put them back together. It means learning how to love yourself first before you can accept love. It means identifying what your needs are and providing them to yourself so that you are not afraid to tell another person what you need from them. The journey starts with you! Self love is an important part of any healthy relationship.
Are you able to relate? If so comment below!
