We Teach What We Need

Over the past 15 years, I’ve helped so many men and women through difficult phases of their relationships.

And now it’s my turn.

It has taken me many months to be able to sit down and write about my own experience from a place of honesty and vulnerability. Here I am, at 63, recreating my life. And I want to share with you the ups and downs, the ease and the pain, the things I thought I knew and the things I am learning all over again.

The men and women who have allowed me the honor of supporting them through their own transitions have become part of my story.

Because it is becoming very clear to me that, all these years, I have been teaching the very things that I now need to practice myself.

We were together for over 25 years.

Wow.

That hits hard.

When did I know it should end?

Probably 24 years ago, when my fourth grader wrote a paper for school about a tyrant and used his stepfather as an example.

Or maybe 22 years ago, when I was pregnant with my daughter and told my husband he would never meet the baby.

Or maybe it was one of the many times throughout the years when I convinced myself that I was being strong. That I was loving him unconditionally. That accepting someone exactly as they are was what love was supposed to look like.

Even when my gut was screaming at me to get out.

Even when I called my doctor for anti-anxiety medication because I needed something to help me walk into the house after work without shaking.

There were so many moments when some part of me knew.

And yet, I stayed.

As of today, we have been divorced six months and one week.

It feels like five minutes.

We tried to be friends. We spent weekends together. We had dinners. We were intimate.

It was like a drug.

I see now that what I wanted was familiarity.

But what I needed was safety.

There are only so many times you can use words to explain yourself and beg someone to hear you.

There is only so much you can give without being seen.

For so long, I felt invisible, living in the shadow of his needs as if mine didn't exist.

I described it to him as having the rug pulled out from underneath me, over and over again.

Then it happened one last time.

And I was done.

I blocked him from calling, texting and emailing me.

It was what I needed to do, and I finally did it.

I thought it would make me feel powerful. In control.

Instead, it helped me begin to heal.

One of the things I teach is that a decision takes a moment.

We love to make lists of pros and cons. We analyze every possible outcome. We consider how our decisions will affect everyone around us.

And sometimes, underneath all that thinking, we are simply trying to find a way to control the uncontrollable.

The most powerful thing we can do is make a decision and then follow through with it.

Integrity is doing what you say you are going to do.

I said I was done, and blocking communication was the means I took to make sure I stayed in my own integrity.

This promise was not to him.

It was to me.

And as we know, micro-quitting on ourselves is so easy.

We tell ourselves we'll start tomorrow.

We'll set the boundary next time.

We'll speak up when the timing is better.

We'll choose ourselves when everyone else is okay.

This time, my commitment to my own peace had to be my priority.

Do I feel peaceful?

Not yet.

Twenty-five years of repeated behavior is hard to change.

I have days of peace and ease and days of extreme aggravation. Days when I feel like I am jumping out of my skin.

And this is another thing I teach:

Sit with it all.

A fully lived life includes all of the feelings and all of the bodily sensations.

I am learning to fully engage with my body when I feel at ease and when I feel overwhelmed with sadness and anger.

Instead of immediately trying to fix the feeling or make it go away, I try to become curious about it.

What am I afraid of?

What am I hoping for?

What is this feeling trying to tell me?

I don't always have an answer.

But I am learning that I don't necessarily need one.

Sometimes I just need to stay present with myself.

Perhaps the most difficult part of this healing process has been the self-blame.

It is so easy to put all of the blame on my ex.

But every relationship takes two people.

Mostly, I blame myself for staying so long when I knew I should leave.

And then I remember something important.

I don't want to be someone who leaves easily or gives up on people.

My life is dedicated to the belief that people can change and grow.

I still believe that.

I also know how hard it is to change ourselves, even when we desperately want to.

And expecting someone else to change simply because we want them to?

That's not love.

That's not reality.

I was in love with the potential of who he could be and what our lives together could be.

That is part of the healing I am focusing on now.

Because I don't want to spend the rest of my life mourning someone else's potential.

I want to focus on the potential of who I can be.

Starting with who I am right now.

In this moment.

Breakups are never easy.

And divorce is certainly not easy.

But endings have a way of revealing things about ourselves that we may not have been willing—or ready—to see before.

They can show us what we have tolerated.

What we have ignored.

What we have been afraid of.

And, perhaps most importantly, what we really want.

Reinventing my future with a blank slate in front of me is sometimes exciting and sometimes terrifying.

There are days when I can't wait to see what comes next.

And there are days when I have absolutely no idea what comes next.

I'm learning that both can be true.

Maybe that's what I mean when I say we teach what we need.

For years, I've encouraged people to trust themselves.

To listen to their bodies.

To make the decision.

To stop abandoning themselves.

To sit with the discomfort.

To choose peace.

To believe that they can create a life they love, even when they can't yet see what that life looks like.

Now I am learning to do the same.

I don't have to know exactly how to do it.

I just have to believe that I can.

And maybe that's enough for today.

Maybe that's enough for any of us who are standing at the beginning of something new, with no idea what comes next.

We don't have to have the whole plan.

We just have to take the next step.

And believe that we can.

If you want to take the next step in your own journey, and arent’s sure where to place your feet, I’m here to walk beside you.