Having gotten out of a toxic relationship, I can attest to the layers and layers and layers of healing that are ongoing

It is Scorpio season and as such themes of toxicity feel very present for me.

Having gotten out of a toxic relationship I can attest to the layers and layers and layers of healing that are ongoing.

I am going to use the courage of Scorpio season and my own Leo rising energy to share personally, with the hope that you will steal your courage and do the same fearless moral inventory for yourself.

I always endeavor when sharing more personally, not to name, blame and shame others who are characters in my story, and in truth even the villains in my story represent an internal villain part within me.

Saying that, I have a story and it is not always possible to share without it touching others.

For me, there have been two primary toxic relationships that I needed, but very much did not want to shed.

I can see with the benefit of hindsight that I had been preparing for both for many years, but if you had asked me then, I would have told you that both, which happened within about 6 weeks of each other, had shocked and surprised me.

I am coming up to the anniversary of the end of the first, this November and the end of 2024 will mark the 3-year anniversary of the ending of the second toxic relationship too.

Now the reason for my sharing is that three years on, I have gotten so far into my healing process (with, no doubt so far to go), I have a perspective I could not previously see.

The whole thing was a huge ego death.

When I let go of the relationship with my dad, the ‘good daughter’, ‘good girl’, died. 

Just 6 ish weeks later when I snapped and ended my marriage the ‘good wife’, ‘happy family’ died.

Just to be clear, it was a lot easier (not easy) to let go of the toxic father daughter relationship than it was the toxic marriage.

That snapping moment turned out to be only the beginning of the end and so much purging and grieving and finally seeing all of the truths, that I had done a good job of hiding, even from myself.

And that is what I want to talk about.

Fool me once, shame on you, fool me a million times…

Shame, shame and more shame as I see what a fool I have been.

Then gentle compassion as I look at my modeling and understand my deeply ingrained pleaser part of my personality. My aversion to conflict, my fear of not being valuable in my relationships if I am not doing enough, and then completely overdoing to make sure my not enoughness would not be noticed.

So much energy expended in trying to tend to everyone else’s needs so that I could be too busy and too exhausted to listen to my own.

I can see how I got there, but I needed to be honest, and I still do with where I was complicit.

Without that brutal honesty with myself, through this intense shadow work I will never have agency of my own life.

And so, I continue the trudge through the quagmire of toxic sludge and work to clean up all the residual sludge and creating toxic waste pipes for the continual toxicity that is still flowing to be channeled away from me and my kids.

To do that I have to look at all of the roles I play in my own story, and recognize that I am a player in other people’s stories too.

Some of the roles I love and would prefer to focus on.

The kicker is, that there needs to be an honest self-accounting of the roles I don’t love as well.

Not to get stuck there, not to self-flagellate with all of that shame and guilt!

The reason is that in order to squeeze the puss from the boil you need to know what and where it is, then clean it out.

This is the perfect season to do just that.

Where do I turn away?

My ego is so much happier with praise, compliments, love and open heartedness.

I am so happy to identify with the parts of me I am good at and value in myself.

These are places I love to invest time, energy and my very big, kind heart.

The roles of mother, sister, friend, healer, coach, astrologer for example not without challenge but worth it, mostly leaving me feeling like a ‘good’ person.

All of this has taken work, to not only find value in myself if I am succeeding to my own ridiculously high standard within these roles, because the back end of that is a shit show to be sure.

I am enough even when these happy place roles are not going ‘perfectly’.

So, what about the roles I don’t like to own?

The ones where I can use toxic positivity (yup that is a thing) to avoid like the plague…

I hate to be a victim, but it is all too easy to paint myself as the victim of my marriage.

I can go on for hours about trauma and the PTSD associated with it, and I have.

And I also don’t want to minimize any of this, there certainly is a victim part of me and she deserves a voice.

We all have one.

So rather than always looking on the bright side (aka toxic positivity)

I let myself drop into all the feelings

and all the trauma and all the experiences, that I had done a fine job of hiding under the Persian carpet, in the cellar, the attic, the broom closet and any little spot I could find.

I went full victim, and oh how I hated those feelings.

I cried and raged and cried some more

(still have a victim so the work is ongoing).

Over time I started to remember things that I had strategically forgotten by super gluing my rose-colored glasses to my head.

Of course, if I was the victim there needed to be a perpetrator so the deeper I went, and the more I re-membered, the more demonized my perpetrator became.

Aagh, I hate this, I hate to see the worst in people I am far more comfortable seeing the good…so is he a monster, or is he the purest most wonderful part of him that I have been stubbornly clinging to in my mind for almost two decades? Who is he really?

Well, if I am a mass of contradictions and complexities, then surely, he is too.

Maybe it is time I stop trying to understand and over support him and I start putting that energy into me.

Thank goodness after giving my victim so much attention, she got bored.

I was relieved until I realized this was pushing me to an archetypal part of me, I liked even less…

The Villain

Marvelous, I am in full acceptance of being a recovering BIG TIME PLEASER.

A pleaser, by definition tries very, very, very hard to always and I do mean always, and at all times, and with all people, animals, and the planet do the ‘right thing’, so nobody is uncomfortable or unhappy, EVER.

Now when I see it written down, I know it is ridiculous and very juvenile and idealistic.

It would be impossible to never step on toes, say no, or avoid any conflict EVER.

One could try to avoid relationship all together and live alone on an island, but I for one would end up in a huge internal conflict within the hour.

With that said, you can imagine how I feel about facing my inner villain.

I mean that bitch has been villainizing me for years, but the idea of letting her out to hurt other people!

No, that is just not who I am.

I do not want to be a game player, a strategist of war.

I am not good at keeping my cards close to my chest.

Yet for a time in the beginning my children saw me as the villain, my father and my ex I am fairly certain still do see me that way.

It took me so long, trying to stay all ‘nice’ and ‘good’ and ‘compassionate’ that even 18 months after I first snapped, I resisted being the perpetrator of the end of the marriage and lived in the shameful fool, hoping he would change.

That I would be enough for him to change.

Slowing but thankfully not stopping my own change.

I feel the sickly sweet, yellow shame stretching its fingers towards me at the memory.

I have had to accept the role villain as a necessity and have really had to reframe a lot of things.

I have had to activate my inner warrior and, I have had to go to battle to fight for survival.

There is a quote I came across today that says it beautifully;

‘Until the lions produce their own historian, the story of the hunt will glorify only the hunter.’

Chinua Achebe

And so, depending on who’s story you hear

History or Herstory,

will depend on how you are seen and what roles you are cast in.

I choose to be the author of My story.

How I am seen from the outside is FAR LESS important than how I am able to integrate, and accept all the parts of me on the inside.

That is the legacy I want to leave.

On my epithet,

She was a lot, she was colorful, she was exactly who she was,

she made no excuses, she burned bright, she loved loud.

I am working on it.