This is a story of awakening.

Love which has an opposite, says Eckhart Tolle is not love, but entanglement.

Of course they were compatible, so long as they understood their roles. Hers was simply to adore and obey him. His was to monitor her to make sure standards didn’t slip and to reward or punish her accordingly.

Yet she was a free soul who had told him from the start it would never happen.

Obey? You are not a god.

Yet she made him one; such was the force of his expectations  and ability to spin gossamer chains and her own unseen need to abdicate all her personal responsibility. Deep down she knew. He was her little god. In truth she was used to handing her power over, in fact, she preferred to, and her words were only brittle bits of bravado. She had learned so young to believe she could grow in the shadows. Give them what they needed or they’d take it anyway.  Or worse punish her and reject her, then shame her for crying.

How she dreaded the rejection! The withdrawals, the confusion. I love you but you are difficult so I have to punish you. It’s really all your own fault. And no one came to teach her. The invisible programming ran deep and unseen, so she repeated the pattern over and over, holding on in quiet desperation, suffocating the very life out of what she treasured with her unconscious clinging.

He taught her that she didn’t have to think and she relaxed. He would explain it all. All she had to do was nod and rearrange her own flawed thinking.  Never need, never ask and most of all, never question.

And how she loved him, every inch of his complicated self. Every gesture.

Yet standards did slip. This and that hurts and disappoints me she would tell him, on those rare occasions where she she tried to speak truthfully.

I’m not responsible for your feelings, he’d tell her. If she argued the lecture would increase in length and volume and faster than lightning he’d grow cold and distant, withdraw his love until she learned that he was not to be questioned. He simply could not bear to be. It undid him in ways he could not survive. She knew this, yet made no allowances.

Your emotions are not logical he told her, the irony of his argument lost on both of them.

Like the only person who had ever suffered, his own wounds had shrunk him to an existence of survival. And he could not survive if he had to consider her needs and feelings. They were compatible. So long as she followed the unwritten rules of the function of her role.

I’m not a role! She begged for breath.

Not knowing how to stop this cycle, not even seeing the cycle, they healed and broke and healed again around each other, until he, no longer seeing his god like status in her eyes, suffocated by her need for him, grew angry and withdrew more, until finally, sick and tired of her incompetence at adoration, and desperate for air, cut her off and threw her away.

 

Deep inside her were other old wounds, not of his making. Finally alone with herself, broken beyond recognition, she searched for answers. Her search led her to see ancient wounds that had wormed right to her bones, through every cell.

She stayed there, eyes closed, clutching the beauty of her memories not yet ready to bear the grief she had slowed down but never stopped. Entangled beyond extraction.

‘You must make peace with yourself’ her doctor told her.

So what is it that is at war within me, she wondered, knowing that somehow he had been able to see into her heart, to that dark battlefield where she remained, fighting for something long gone.

And so it began.

 

~taraacie~

 

For help with working on untangling yourself within a relationship, this will be of interest to you.