Category Archives: Connection

Gratitude and Connection

Posted on by learning to live like water

Morning of a new day.  Today I will try to get farther along my path of healing.  Today I will focus on the gifts that I have in the present moment.  Gratitude.

Gratitude, true gratitude, is really how I was able to make the turn from devastated to healing.  I changed my point of view from what I didn’t have, to what I do.  From what didn’t work out, to what did.  I let go of the things that caused me pain, and chose to remember those things that brought me joy.

I had questions, unanswered.  I stopped asking them.  To what purpose would I get the answers?  There would be no joy in the answers, only confirmation of things I “know” without asking.  I let the questions go.

I am grateful, there is always a lesson.  There is always something we can learn from a difficult, even devastating, lesson.  We can always become better people.  We can raise our vibration a bit, we can see more of the big picture than we saw before.  We can ask for help, and find out it’s available.

Our humanness may still grieve, but our spirits will lead us out of it if we can listen to it.  Joy is in living, not in regretting, not in pain.  We have to open the door that was set ajar by the pain, and walk through.  Trust…vulnerability….love and belonging….creativity…inspiration.  Open to something new, that will fill our soul more than what we left behind.

Appreciate, and love those we leave behind.  Love is easier than hate, at least for me.  As I look back on my life, I don’t want to have spent much time hating anyone.  Momentary, perhaps, to get through the first initial shock of pain and betrayal, but it very quickly dissipates.  How could I hate someone I loved so much, moments before?  Can’t, in reality.  In the end, love is all there is.

I don’t hate my ex, I don’t hate S.  I love them both, I hope both find happiness and joy.  My ex…shows no sign of having learned any lesson.  S…idk.  I think he feels safe, right now, comfortable in what he knows. I don’t think it’s joy.  He can’t believe in love, and while I find it sad, it’s not something I can change, it’s not my journey.  I think that unconditional love is something you have to experience over time, you have to see that someone loves you no matter what you have done or do, over time, to believe it.  The kind of love I was blessed to be born into.  No matter how angry my parents would get at me for stupid stuff I did or said, they always loved me. That was the baseline.  It was never crossed. So, just because I can’t invite the chaos that S caused my heart back into my life, I will always love him, and if he needs me, I will be there.  As I am for my ex.  The difference between them, is my ex doesn’t accept that, he believes I want to hurt him.  S, I think, knows I will be there.

A seems to have found joy in his new home, and he has a girlfriend there, and I am so happy for him.  We still talk every day, every night he tells me “Good morning sweetie.”, every morning, a good morning.  Often a nice conversation during the day. There are times when he tells me he wishes he could just lay down next to me and hold me.  I feel the same about him at times.  But we are both moving forward in our lives, knowing that our friendship is not definable, and that we will always be special to each other.  We didn’t have a soul connection, but we have a very close connection anyway.  Our purpose in each other’s lives has been to help each other heal, I am sure.  So maybe it is a soul connection.  Who knows?

Jim, I can’t speak about yet.  I don’t know him well enough.  I think he would like to go deeper than he is, he sent me a good morning text as I write.  Sweet, it was nice.

I am blessed by the people in my life, the ones who have been and have moved on, and the ones who have stayed.  I’m grateful for them all.

Needing Connection

Posted on by learning to live like water

Abstract Tru Llove Hand Connection Wallpapers HD

I can’t write what I feel this morning.  Because he reads what I write, it would not be helpful to say it again, what he already knows.  Besides, the words escape me this morning, I can only feel, and know I can only sit with my feelings.

It’s another gorgeous New England autumn day again today.  Wish I could skip work, and go to a park at the ocean, or maybe the big fair that goes on every fall an hour from here.  Something, besides sit with my emotions.  I need to distract myself.  I am tired of working, and coming home, and going to bed, and repeating.  Even the weekend holds no promise of distraction, only time to change the work from employment to taking care of my house.  Feeling confined, and alone, tired of my solitary life.

Connection.  I need connection, on a deep sweet intimate level.  I suppose there’s a reason I feel alone today.  And I suppose I will figure it out. The universe may remedy it anyway.

Trying to stay in the moment.  It will all turn out ok…Everything will be ok in the end.

You Are Enough

Posted on by learning to live like water

enough

Thinking about connection this morning.  Brene Brown, in her TED talk on vulnerability says that after  you’ve been a social worker for 10 years, you know that the reason we are here is for connection.  It’s the basic premise of her work.  She goes on to say how her research (6 years of it) proves how so many negative emotions are outgrowths of the fear that something about us, or something we have done, will cause us to be not worthy of love and connection.

I think it starts with our family of origin.  I was blessed to be born into a family who never ever made me doubt for a minute or even a second, whether I was worthy of love and connection.  I took it for granted, that all children got this from their parents. It took a long marriage to someone whose parents were incapable of unconditional love, to understand the ramifications of that one seemingly small, but actually enormous and boundless thing, having or not having unconditional love. The shame that my ex experienced crept into every corner and facet of his life.  I truly believe that because he felt so unworthy of love and connection, that he believed that anyone who professed to love  him, like myself or our son, either wanted something from him or was just stupid.  And in the end, this is how he lived.  He treated me like I was stupid and sought to protect himself from me by excluding me from all things financial.  He was sure one day i would leave him….

A self fulfilling prophecy, I would say.  Of course I would eventually realize I was not part of any equation involving the two of us.  That apparently I was there to serve him, yet only to reap the benefits which he chose to give me,  which in the end were none, because I was, in his fearful mind, stupid and/or (alternatingly) out to take him.

Although, it was the abuse of my son that really moved me to get out of the marriage.  I realized at some point that if I didn’t get out, and offer my son a clear choice of love vs. fear, that I would lose him forever, and quite possibly condemn him to a very unhappy life.  I realized it when he was 9.  It took me until he was 14 to actually put together an exit plan.

All of that pain, though, every bit of it originated in my ex’s belief that since his parents could not unconditionally love him (Love for them had to be earned, and could quickly be taken away.  They thought it was motivation.) that he simply was not worthy of it.  When I realized this, my anger at him turned to sorrow for him.  I can’t imagine living a whole life, not ever believing you were worthy of love and connection.  Is there a more painful way to live?

Some people can  figure it out.  Some people can find a pathway to a creator that unconditionally loves us, or realize that we are all connected.  That there is a vast ocean of love, that we can all dip into.  Some people manage to figure out that the lessons they were taught were just wrong, and that the people that taught them  were flawed people doing the best they knew how.

Since I have been out of the marriage, I tried once or twice, when my ex opened the door, to show him a different way to see the world, and a way to rebuild a relationship with our son.  He has so far been unable to hear it, or see it.  I think some progress may have been made, that maybe he no longer believes me to be the cause of all his problems, although I don’t know this for a fact, and I do know that he doesn’t have any good answers to why he is in the dire straits he is in.

I have a friend, who had a similar childhood, who has tried to reconnect with a sibling now that their parents have both passed.  I wish this person much luck with this endeavor.  I hope it happens.  I also am real, and know it’s chances are slim. And my job, if I have one at all, is to make sure this person knows, no matter what the outcome that they are worthy of love and belonging.  That they are enough.  Just because they are, because they exist, and for no other reason.

You are enough.