First full Substack post! I’ve imported my list from my most recent newsletter host so I can enjoy the air around here.
…While Robert would have been totally justified to leave during the height of my hatred, he didn’t, and I’m grateful.
Also recognize that I’m coming at this from one side, which I think is likely very different from what the other party witnessed, but what other side do I have in full?
I went to see a movie at Robert’s house shortly after we started chatting more regularly over two years ago, and it was soon apparent that we could be something more.
Soon we were inseparable, spending every night together at someone’s place or the other.
Soon we were planning to get married. Quickly. There was so much love then.
And then I started to get angry. A slower drip at first. A disagreement on the phone that turned into me screaming at him to leave me alone. We had very different opinions about how to resolve anything.
Soon I was hateful and resentful, which presented itself in a nearly constant stream of thoughts about it, all directly squarely at him and how he wasn’t meeting my needs.
Well, ok, then why didn’t I leave?
I “tried.” And then we’d have a breakthrough.
I discovered parts work and was able to wrest my attention painfully from what he was doing wrong onto what my endless reactions meant.
I learned a lot about how to peel the layers back, how to figure out what the f I really needed and give myself more of what my mind was incessantly screaming for, and how important that was for this and all of my future relationships (romantic and otherwise).
Really that will be important for the rest of my life.
Thank you, anger.
My first Internal Family Systems/IFS coach was a feminine lady named Callie who I didn’t resonate with for long, but had this initial breakthrough with. With Robert sitting beside me on the couch and the thoughts inside my head SCREAMING at him for not giving me what I wanted, I quietly walked to the bathroom, found the part of me that felt like if I didn’t get attention I would die, and gave it to the part from the quiet place that simultaneously always exists in me and you.
Wish I had known how to do that before I ever screamed at him.
I was still angry, but I had a path forward, eventually discovering deeper paths into shamanism and the ability to have conversations with all sorts of pieces of my self, which helped me help other people have conversations with different pieces of themselves. It feels a little like being an operator or a mall info desk that connects people to the right place to solve their issues and productively move forward with their problems.
Eventually, I didn’t hate this person that I loved any more.
But we never did figure out how to agree on enough things, and I think the most important part of that was disagreeing on how to recover from arguments.
I’m about to move to San Diego and I want to start every friendship out there with a conversation about how we want to handle the disagreements that will inevitably arise in any meaningful relationship. How will we repair? What’s their strategy? What do they want to try? Are they willing to try my strategies or even better ones we come across?
Can we agree on positive assumptions to assuage the tender pieces of our insides still waiting for a home to rest in?
Similar to having discussions about death, I think it’s great to have conversations about the inevitable stuff we don’t really want to deal with and would quite rather pretend will never arise.
Maybe we will never argue. But I bet one of us is going to be pissed. Or feel misunderstood. And I don’t want the reason we don’t discuss it to be a fear of an argument if they bring it up.
One of my most vital memories is of owning my feelings to a guy I had a crush on while he listened to me steadily.
The rapid dissolution of my discomfort would never have happened if I had been blaming him for my feelings or he had been blaming me, run away, or tightened up in the face of mine.
Considering that’s pretty advanced stuff to sit steadily with someone who’s describing how they feel about you, I couldn’t recommend third-party help more for unwinding what it is that’s going on for you.
I’m rarely mad at Robert now. Perhaps a moment will flare up here and there at some idea of lost potential.
But since I decided to end things my resentments all drained off. Now I’m just sad, and excited for the future.
Slowly removing myself from the house that we moved into.
Robert is a truly brilliant person with fascinating ideas who has different ideals for partnership than I do.
I’ll probably always find him gorgeous, though one fascinating thing I observed from parts work is how a person that I love and find gorgeous can look so ugly when I’m enveloped in a wound, and go right back once the wound is attended to accurately.
I’m glad I didn’t leave when I hated him.
The classic trope of “wherever you go, there YOU are” and how you’ll still be the same person in a new environment only applies if I don’t attend to my own reactions as at least somewhat my responsibility. Kind of like my children but in my own head.
If I allow the things that bother me to effectively turn my soil, new things can grow out of it.
Sticking with this analogy, if I tried to just avoid or cover it up (say through avoidance or pharmaceuticals) I would just be burying the issue deeper. The way I feel is never the problem. It’s a guidepost to learn.
Don’t leave a job you hate until you know why *you* hate it.
Don’t leave a relationship until you sit with the parts of you that want to stay as much as you do the parts that want to leave.
What are the reactions trying to tell me?
Where are they actually happening inside or around me?
How am I actually experiencing them with my senses?
What is it?
After I find out what they actually want, can I give them to myself or is this something that I hold as a standard in this relationship to something outside of me? Can I give myself what I want in my internal imagination or by doing something?
I’m simultaneously so held and so lonely, so trusting and so skeptical, and these conflicts will need to be resolved with decision making at some point. Starting with a massive move to San Diego in a car I hope keeps running til I get there.
I wish there were a way to express my love bigger to Robert.
For now, I’m going back to removing pieces from this house.
As much as I hate it, there is peace in this place, beneath the reactions still.