A Healthy Love After Abuse
When I first left my last relationship I thought I would never date again let alone now be engaged to someone I can say without a single doubt in my mind is the love of my life. I was so scared to let my guards down, to open up my heart and anxious that someone wouldn’t have the patience to love me while I was learning how to be loved. So many times I have been triggered since being in this relationship, in ways I didn’t see coming sometimes, in ways I thought I wouldn’t be. I still carry shame for the damage that I allowed another person to do to me. For believing that is what I deserved from someone. For thinking that lowly of myself. Shame that I strayed so far from my values just to try and make another person happy. Suffocating myself and giving until I was this person I didn’t even recognise.
The woman I was a year ago feels like someone I used to know a long time ago. A hazy dream of a movie I once watched. Maybe this detachment is normal as a way to move on from the abuse. Maybe it’s showing how much I have healed to get to the point where the word healthy doesn’t feel foreign to me anymore. The woman I was is someone I want to wrap my arms around and remind her that real men do not treat women like that and that while your heart is beautiful in the love it wants to give, that this isn’t love. That relationship wasn’t in any respect love. I thought it was at the time. I truly did think I…
