Finding Love and Healing Within

Content Notice: This story contains references to Rape, Eating Disorders, and Abuse.

I have had a long history of trauma that began in childhood with emotional neglect and abuse, which led me to become an insecure, damaged teenager looking everywhere but inside to find meaning and peace. I am not thankful for the traumas and challenges I’ve had to overcome, but I am grateful for the lessons they taught me and the people they helped me find. My developing young brain focused on the negative comments that others haphazardly threw about, and I internalized this cynical view of humanity and myself. From a young age, I was told by certain people in my life that I was “bad,” which became a label that clouded my self-perception well into adulthood. I’ve tried every method of abusing myself from a range of eating disorders to self-harm, suicide attempts, substance abuse, and running away to a new city or country when things truly got tough. But my “favorite” unhealthy coping mechanism was toxic relationships.

Those of us who grew up in dysfunctional homes know the aching sense of emptiness and loneliness that comes with never truly knowing if you are loved. I remember trauma bonding with my best friend in high school over a phrase uttered conspiratorially late one night on the phone, “I’m not really sure what love is.” I was relieved to hear back, “Me, neither.” on the other end of the line. Meeting someone else who had grown up in a home full of more yelling and criticism than kindness and support, helped me realize that I wasn’t alone and that there were others out there just as clueless as me about what this whole “love” thing was. I hadn’t felt it consistently from family members. I certainly hadn’t felt it in any kind of romantic capacity. I thought maybe there were a few friends I loved, but even those relationships seemed to fall apart after an intense, but brief period of time. It felt comforting to know that I wasn’t the only one clueless about what love was, how to obtain it, and how to show it.

Finding someone else who felt as damaged as I did and was willing to talk about those same dark thoughts and feelings was comforting. In high school, we deepened our bond by making a pact to see how little we could eat during the day, then binged in the evening. We drank our pain away at college parties when we would visit one another. We validated and encouraged each other’s questionable romances and self-destructive behavior. We were two lost, young girls trying to figure it out together and neither of us had any tools for the self-compassion we so desperately needed.

We had adventures that felt exciting at the time, but now terrify me. I’m so glad that we both actually returned home safely from our summer backpacking through Europe because we each made more than one questionable decision that very well could have landed us in jail, robbed, or dead. I do not blame this friend for anything I chose to do—in fact, I feel terribly guilty that I encouraged her bad behavior so that I would have a companion with whom to self-destruct.

Unfortunately, my childhood traumas left me primed to be vulnerable to the abuse of others—submissive, insecure, desperately seeking connection with anyone and desiring to please others. Before I left college, I had been raped and was in a physically and emotionally abusive relationship, adding to my collection of traumas. I thought I had found love with my abusive partner. It looked quite similar to the “love” I’d seen between my parents growing up. I was certain that passionate couples argued, yelled, ran away from each other, threw each others’ belongings out the window, hurled things at one another, and said hurtful things because they loved each other so much. My partner and I trauma bonded over the things we had in common: an unstable sense of self, lack of self-love, and viewpoints uncommon in our little corner of the Midwest known as the “Buckle of the Bible Belt” because of the large number of churches in our small town. Our fiery intellectual debates translated into a fierce and intimate connection. There were tender moments where we glimpsed the good in each other. The apologies for hurt feelings and bruises were over the top. The romance that blossomed between periods of discord often overshadowed the anger toward ourselves, our families, and the world. Fear was the foundation of our relationship and our way of moving through life.

On the day of my wedding, I felt a knot in my stomach that wouldn’t go away until I drank an entire bottle of champagne while getting ready. The proposal with my grandma’s vintage ring, which had sparkled on my finger for years before this big day, beckoning me into the life of domesticity and family I had been craving since childhood, kept echoing in my head. It had felt so right at the beginning before the first punch was thrown, but then the first threat had been uttered. I wondered if all of those thinly veiled jokes about murdering me might have a ring of truth to them. Riding in the back of that limo toward my closest friends and family, who were waiting for a romantic show, I knew I was about to betray myself. I thought of the one friend who had sat me down a month earlier and begged me not to go through with this. Then I thought of my maid of honor, that same best friend from high school, who had been in an abusive relationship herself, who assured me that this is just how men are—selfish, macho, angry, and sometimes violent. My insecurities about how it would look to cancel the wedding at this late date and my suspicion that my maid of honor was right about men won, and I walked down that aisle drunk.

After almost six years of unrelenting and ever-escalating emotional and physical abuse, I finally found the courage to leave my most toxic relationship thanks to therapy and friends I met who had healed their traumas and understood what love can be. My relationship with that trauma-bonded BFF eventually ended over a night out where I drunkenly spilled a hurtful secret to one of her friends. I don’t blame her for ghosting me after a decade of friendship filled with partying, joint disordered eating, and mutual encouragement of bad decisions. I hope that she has found her path to healing and has started to build the sense of wholeness I found on my own path.

Since freshman year of college, I had been a sporadic yoga practitioner, noticing that the days and weeks when I practiced yoga regularly were the ones I felt the best. Just before making the decision to leave my abusive ex-husband, I started going to a weekly yoga and anxiety group therapy meeting. I had never talked to anyone about my anxiety before. I wasn’t sure if everyone else was just able to handle their incessant inner monologue better than me or if I should be in a psychiatric hospital. I felt sure that no one else had this never-ending stream of thoughts overpowering their every waking moment. Finally, I learned that this thing happening in my brain had a name—anxiety—and there were many other people who had the same experience, and there were specific things we could do to address this “anxiety” thing.

Over the years, I moved from regularly practicing yoga and meditation to becoming a certified trauma-informed yoga teacher, as well as a mindfulness and trauma researcher. Now, I know that to truly understand love, you have to start with yourself. Once I developed a healthy sense of self-compassion, I began seeing love all around me—in the communities I’ve joined or created, in strangers, and even in my own dysfunctional family. My problems, especially relational problems, didn’t disappear overnight and I’m still working to improve certain relationships by slowly building trust and opening channels of communication that were previously clogged. I stopped seeking out situations that echoed the drama and pain I experienced as love (or what I thought was love) when I was young. Instead, I started creating spaces of peace to manifest and share love.

I’m still on my journey, but with a regular mindfulness practice, a community of supportive and healthy friends and colleagues, as well as a sense of purpose, I finally understand how to love.