Divorced. What my marriage taught me about love.
“Love is the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth... Love is as love does. Love is an act of will — namely, both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love.”
Divorce sucks. The body experiences it as death. Death of your hopes and dreams; death of who I thought I was; death of the illusion of who I thought my ex was and what I wanted them to be. The traumatic experience of divorce is complex, causing the kind of grief that grabs hold and drags you through a very long and dark night of the soul. For me, however, it also guided me into a morning of unexpected joy, awakening my heart and filling me with gratitude and hope. As I reflected on my own relationship experiences, I could see clearly reflected the patterns, pain, and trauma of many thousands of relationships before mine, and it became clear to me what it will take to move beyond these core hurts. I now know and feel what is possible for humanity.
We all are worthy beings who entered this world full of love and wholeness. (Yes, every single one of us!) But soon enough, we meet the conditions of life that cause trauma, suffering and we fill with fear. Trauma is the loss of relationship. To ourselves, our bodies, families, others, and the world around us. It creates fragmentation and separation within us that happens over time. We become disconnected from our confidence, safety, and sense of self. This shows up in how we treat ourselves and those around us. We soon feel alone, broken, and unworthy, as we learn to survive in the constructs of white supremacy, capitalism, and patriarchy. Survival in these systems causes stress, and together with the effects of historical/intergenerational trauma, it causes us to lose the ability to meet the emotional, physical, and spiritual needs of the next generation. This cycle of attachment trauma diminishes a person's sense of self, power, and ability to give and receive love.
Just imagine the kind of collective trauma two bodies might bring together. One body carries the legacies of chattel slavery in North America, Indigenous blood, Jim Crow, Civil Rights Movement, Vietnam War, daughter of parents born in the 1940’s, and being middle-class. This body joins with another carrying the legacies of chattel slavery in South America (residing in a place where they walk every day on the sweat, blood, and tears reflected in cobblestones of what their enslaved ancestors built, as they pass by the slave auction their city has turned into a tourist market), Portuguese blood, the product of interracial relationship where much of the country is indoctrinated with Blanqueamiento (systematic whitening to “improve” the race in Brazil), and living the realities of the poor and marginalized in a developing country. Both bodies were raised by primary caregivers whose nervous systems experienced chronic stress due to their living conditions, where parents enduring the stress of such life forces are often more reactive and parenting from their unresolved traumas – leading to intergenerational cycles. To be able to co-regulate, one must have been given the tools and skills from their primary caregiver to self-regulate. In other words, one is only able to sit with and love another person as much as they have learned to sit with and love themselves. Trauma often creates shame and fear in the body. Fear is the opposite of love. This experience of disconnection and fear activates the body’s fight-flight-freeze/more survival system, pumping stress hormones into the body. A body’s nervous system experiencing perceived and real ongoing threats leads to prolonged toxic stress exposure. This causes increased rates of mental health and chronic health issues in Black/brown bodies.
As a mechanism to keep us safe, our mind develops defense mechanisms to help us cope with our environments. If you grew up learning “love” was confusing, scary, and absent, your ego questions if you are deserving of love and believes love isn’t safe, creating anxiety. Deep down, we hold the wisdom of knowing how to love each other because love is our purest and truest life source. Going through and facing our trauma to heal our wounds is the only way to return to love. We are constantly flooded with images, news stories reminding us of the immense lovelessness existing in the world, priming our traumas to interact with one another due to amplified fear.
So much of trauma is relational and the answer to our healing is love. Love not in just the romantic sense, but love reflected and embodied in every dimension of life and society. In Road Less Traveled, M. Scott Peck defines love as “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” Every relationship moment that is based in this kind of authentic love gradually erodes the shackles of trauma programmed to believe love is something else. There will always be relational struggles, strife, and break-ups/divorce in our lives, but there doesn’t have to be abuse, exploitation, and harm. We have the capacity as a society to raise mature, secure individuals with emotional resilience and to cultivate a culture of love and healthy relationships, starting with the parent-child relationship. We can do this. We must do this. Our health and well-being depends on it.
My journey brought me back to the wisdom of Paul in Corinth, and so inspired by 1 Corinthians 13:4-8, I will share what my marriage taught me about love. I share this because I wish someone would have shared this with me. I share this in hopes we all break free from the things that keep us separated from one another, because we need each other to survive.
Love
Love doesn't fear, love is understanding
Love isn’t reactive, love is mindful
Love doesn’t deplete, love replenishes
Love doesn’t diminish, love empowers
Love doesn’t keep score, love liberates
Love doesn’t rush, love takes time & practice
Love doesn’t harm, love is justice
Love doesn’t shame, love is gentle & vulnerability
Love isn’t deceitful, love is honest
Love doesn’t agitate, love soothes
Love isn’t betrayal, love is faithful
Love doesn’t abandon, love is true presence
Love isn’t contempt, love appreciates
Love ruptures, but love repairs
And true love never dies.
May we find the courage to look deeply within our being to break free from the mental chains that hold us in bondage. We heal when we feel. Release the pain. Release the shame. Release the blame. Let the trauma go and let love in.
Trauma Release Meditation
by: Londrelle
Inhale. Exhale. Just breathe.
Envision yourself sitting on
The shores of a vast oceanWatch the waves as they roll towards you
See how easily they fade away
Watch the clouds as the drift towards you
See how beautifully they fade away
As you breathe, feel how easily the air fills your lungs
Feel how gently it fades awayAs you peacefully sit by the shore mentally
Grab the notebook and pen from your bag
Open the notebook to a blank page
And mentally begin to write.
List all of the things that are the source of your pain and agonyWrite of the things that have brought you hurt
Write of the things that have brought you shame
Write of the things that have brought you pain
Release the pain onto the pagesAllow peace to rise and replace it
Release the pain onto the pages
Allow peace to rise and replace it
Do you need guidance and support as you explore your journey to wholeness? I invite you to consider therapy. A great place to get started is a free consultation to see what kind of services are available and whether the therapist is a good fit. Contact me today to schedule a free phone consultation; I look forward to connecting!