Is it better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all I asked myself?
I’m not sure there are many more things as emotionally painful as a breakup, especially if it’s sudden and it wasn’t your idea.
I’ve experienced this a few times in my life and each time has presented me with its own unique flavour of unbearableness. At the time it has always felt to a greater or lesser degree as if my whole world had come crashing down. Everything I currently believed about life and myself and how it all works came into question. In an instant, all my hopes and dreams for the future, gone. Taken away by just the few words of another. How could this be?
I remember the first time it happened in my mid 20’s I fell apart. Consumed by my misery stories from the past of unworthiness, rejection, self-pity, what I could have done better or differently, and my seeming inability to sustain a relationship, mixed with stories of the future about my obvious un-lovableness, and assuredness that I’d now be alone forever.
At some points, I became unsure if it was even him I wanted back or whether I’d have just done anything to rid myself of this pain.
In the absence of the ability to get him back, I tried unashamedly a couple of times, I got busy trying other stuff for relief. Jack Daniels, bending the ear of anyone who’d listen, reinvention of myself with weight loss, new fitness regimes, doing stuff I enjoyed, doing stuff I didn’t, getting back on the dating scene after what seemed like a respectable period of mourning. I had a list of ‘get back on the pony’ strategies.
If I could distract my mind for long enough periods of time whilst ‘self-improving’ in preparation for the next part of my life to begin, or to attract and keep the next person in it, things could seem bearable and it would fee like I was moving on...
What seemed to cause the most misery whilst masquerading as something that might make me feel better was the flip-flopping of my thoughts back and forth between how much I loved him and how much I hated him. How could these two things both be true? This made me suspicious and I began to wonder if perhaps neither of them were ultimately true.
Then after a time bingo! Someone new would come along. Phew! Loved again and we could all relax for a while.
Whether or not this one was ‘The One’ didn't matter for now because I was back in the safety of feeling loved and wanted and the centre of someone’s attention and affection. Back in the space of love and future possibility.
The only thing that felt a little precarious about this was, what if they took it away again, like last time? How could I prevent all that from happening again? I didn’t let it bother me too much for now though because I was experiencing relief. There were plenty of fun ‘new relationship’ things to do so my strategy was, let’s live in the moment and hope for the best. Not a bad strategy but who was I fooling?
So what’s going on when we’re in love, or at the least when we feel as if we are? And what is it that’s so devastating when it’s taken away from us either by circumstances outside our control or when we ourselves have just come to realise that the price we are paying in return for that feeling is just too high? It can be as painful to be the leaver as it is to be left.
Could it be that what we are experiencing when we are in love is not the other person but a feeling in us that they connect us to? If we ARE already Love as they say, then perhaps this person is simply helping us connect with that which we already are.
This small but not insignificant perspective shift began to help me unravel and loosen some of the cyclical thinking and behaviour surrounding relationships that kept finding me back where I’d started. Which was either single or disillusioned in the relationship I was in.
It’s inevitable that at some point in our lives, we will experience the loss of someone. It could be a breakup or even death. What seems true in both cases is that someone we were connected with, through Love is no longer in our world and the devastation of this loss can feel very real and cause us to experience unwanted feelings and behave in ways that feel unlike ourselves. It can feel as if we have become somebody else. It can leave us feeling disconnected vulnerable and wondering if we’ll ever be the same again.
So what can we do when it all feels so painful that it’s pretty hard to bear? We might be able to strong it out, I always did, but how can we not just survive a break up but find ourselves ultimately thriving through a break up?
Don’t get me wrong, I get that you may well be feeling like survival is all you’ve got right now and I hear ya, but the invitation is for the possibility of experiencing all of it and at the same time discovering a deeper part in yourself from which this pain is not just something to be endured but also that somewhere under there, it's your healer.
This might all sound like a bunch of crap right now but I am here to tell you that when I began to see that the point of my life was for my living, my learning and experiencing fully, even the sh*t bits, things began to take on a new form. A lifetime of tension and anxiety beginning to gently fall away in the acceptance that, painful stuff happens and it doesn’t have to have the catastrophic meaning we often give it.
As I began to recycle my sadness and self-pity into curiosity and self-investigation I seemed to stop wanting to just ‘get out of it’ or ‘away from it’ and instead just stay a little longer and see what might really be there.
From this perspective, this part of life I’d always imagined I’d needed to work so hard to create and control began to reveal itself to me in a way which felt like all this seeming struggle might be useful to me instead of just something that was ruining my life .
What I’ve found over time is that every time I work through something testing in my life with curiosity and enquiry, often with the assistance of a neutral trusted other, rather than with resistance and reactions designed to rid myself of my pain-causing problem, it’s true that It’s not always been the most fun I’ve had at the time but I come out the other side emphatically changed and deeply healed. And it’s a lot more interesting and potentially fun than the other kind of wallowing I used to do that got me nowhere.
Instead of coming out the other side, which we will, scarred, closed hearted, fearful and protective, all of which just make us begin the search for relief again, what if it was possible to use this experience to begin the journey back to place of Love that is ourselves and from this place go out into the world and find someone to share that with.
I love the implications of this quote from Rupert Spira. It doesn’t mean we don’t need anyone or anything it means that in this realisation we are now free to experience everyone and everything fearlessly.
As we begin to enquire deeper into ourselves we discover under the layers of everything that feels like it’s lost love or needs to find love, that there is something that’s always here, it doesn’t come and go and it never changes despite what and who is coming and going. It is the power and peace of our being and it’s all our own. It is Love.
So perhaps the answer can be 'yes' it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.
Maxine Kemp is a transformative life coach based in East Suffolk UK who is dedicated to simplifying and demystifying the journey to greater peace well-being and empowerment.
"It’s not supposed to be that difficult."
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