Perhaps it doesn’t matter. Undoubtedly they are intertwined.
But lately, I’ve been reflecting on whether my tears, my emotional release, are due to residual grief or feelings of vulnerability and rawness.
I heed the words of Brene Brown and bell hooks—I do believe that genuine relationships, teaching, friendships, relationships, must involve a healthy degree of vulnerability.
I believe the the risk of loving someone and allowing them to love you, requires trust, genuineness and vulnerability.
You give them the power to hurt you.
I believe this. In my heart. Through my bones. Into my soul. Through and through.
And yet, it doesn’t mean that it is always easy to do.
I knew that I would have to reckon with this again when I decided to open myself up again in a relationship.
I would have to share my story. The heavy journey. My family’s story.
I would have to be honest.
I would have to talk about the residual wounds all of this has left on my body and my mind. The PTSD effects that I still grapple with—the startle reflex, the trouble and lightness of my sleeping.
It’s only fair to them. And still, it’s a lot. I’m perceptive, intuitive, and an empath. I frequently worry and wonder about the effect that even telling a friend about my family’s suicides will have them.
How much more for someone who may want to sign up to be in a relationship with me?
But I also have to do so because I must acknowledge my story and what has shaped me. To own my story so no one can use it against me.
Because someone did. Viciously.
And I experienced the hurt and the embodied hurt and trauma that that created. The first hand trauma and the residual, after effects of trauma, of having something used against me that I could not change. That I didn’t choose for myself.
Now, I do trust my current partner. Entirely. He is emotionally mature and wise, endlessly supportive and incredibly insightful and amazing.
But it is still new. I care for him very much.
And still, my body and my mind remembers how my displays of vulnerability—that I believed in so strongly in, to being at the core of a healthy and honest relationship—were used against me. Within the year.
I trusted the wrong person and my insecurities, vulnerabilities, and limitations, both my own personal shortcomings but moreover, things that happened to me, were filled away and used against me. Subtly. Incrementally, over time. To obtain another new supply.
It all happened like erosion. Incrementally. So small that I didn’t even realize what was happening.
Narcissists are good. They are master manipulators.
I am not unintelligent. I am perceptive and intuitive. I was also traumatized and I didn’t realize what was happening and that I was being conditioned, programmed to gradually accept abuse and attempts to lower my self esteem and self worth.
Because those with NPD are shame-filled and feel badly about themselves, they will not accept accountability. Ever. So they will capitalize on your own limitations and use your love and self-actualization and accountability to hurt you, to manipulate you, and to hide behind your own work that you’re doing on yourself.
Ie—Our problems are your fault.
Now, I say this as someone who is not perfect. I had work to do on myself. I still do. I am doing it. And I self-loathed for a long time thinking I was why our relationship was not smooth. It was on me.
But I was also doing the work, even then. He was not. He would not work on himself.
And it was easier for him, I made it easier for him because I was knee-deep in getting mental health help. Accepting that I was in over my head.
And it is a cop-up but easier to make someone else believe that it is their fault.
It is especially easier when that person has had two suicides in their immediately family, is on their own mental health journey, and has lost 2 babies and her entire family in less than 5 years. And that person wants to get help.
And, of course, you are the narcissist who will avoid any work on yourself.
It all makes a lot of sense now. I get it.
It’s fucked up. But I understand it and my understanding it is important for me.
And yet, as with most impacting but stinging life lessons, I still experience knee-jerk reactions as I am now trusting another….
I sometimes hear an urging, pressing voice in my head—reminding me….
“Be careful, Danielle. Be careful, Be careful….”
Sometimes I go down a rabbit hole and chastise myself for what my doctoral office mate deemed my “marshmallow heart.”
Sometimes I want to scream at that part of myself, “armor up—protect yourself! Will you never learn?!?!!?”
And yet…I know those gut reactions and voices are there to protect me.
But that armor is a false one. It won’t protect me. Not entirely. Not the way I want it to. To a degree, perhaps, but I will still risk being hurt. Deeply.
If I want love and belonging and community, in a romantic relationship, friendship, to achieve my goals in life, I must embrace the rawness and the vulnerability and the fear that I could be very very hurt again.
The solace I take from this is that—
I still can love.
And that I have survived it before.
I don’t want to tempt fate or in any way elicit challenges from the universe to “hold my beer,” worse can come, (can’t it always?) but—
I have survived far worse than I ever thought possible, or could have even managed, to come out on the other side of more mentally healthy and functional. And happy.
I know I would survive heartbreak and being shattered and disappointed again.
But—it all comes down to this: The kicker. Why I have to move despite the rawness and wounds and vulnerability:
I still want to embrace the hope.
I want the hope for a better, happier future, and a healthy and loving relationship, community, family and life.
My mother did not have hope. She was bleak in her depression and trauma.
It hurt me and affected me as a kiddo. I understand from her story why this was the case, but—it wasn’t easy to live with a parent who was always waiting for the bottom to fall out or the other shoe to drop, the proverbial shit to hit the fan.
And I swore that I would never be like that. It felt like poison.
It hasn’t been easy. I was dark for many years. I dabbled in festering with the negative, bracing for the worst. Because it did get worse, again and again and again.
Much worse than I ever anticipated it could. With the deaths. The suicides. The losses. All the things.
But, I’m still standing. And moreover, I’m happier than I ever have been. I love my home, my campus and work, my friends and the community I am building. I care for and respect my partner and I am excited about his character and what we may build together.
I will focus on that.
And when something happens that presses on a wound that is tender from scar tissue, I will remember—
I have healed. I am healing. So, thank you for trying to protect me, dear reflexes, my complex and amazingly adaptable brain; I appreciate the effort.
But sometimes we need to just feel the fear, remember why it is there, but not to allow it to paralyze us from moving forward.
I refuse to allow my residual hurt and wounds to block my blessings.
I have worked too hard for that. To get stuck.
Even when sometimes I gape like a child, fearful in the dark, or a wide-eyed deer, caught in the head-light, where my somatic response feels a bit, momentarily, paralyzed….
I take a deep breath, I steady my wounded child, and notice my my bruised but still very big marshmallow heart that still has so much more to give and to receive…
And I press on. I take a step forward.