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THE PATH: A JOURNEY INTO THE LIGHT
THE BREACH
The Breach-Top Page
In 'The Breach,' I take a closer look into the history and dynamics of a relationship, in my early 20's, whose significance was a profound awakening to how childhood sexual abuse negatively impacted my ability to love myself and sustain healthy, romantic and love relationships.
PROLOGUE
'There's something wrong with her.”
I overheard my Boyfriend’s attempt to whisper to his Brother.
Grant it, my Boyfriend, had just received the news that I had slept with said Brother a few nights before. The day after that happened, my Boyfriend surprisingly declared his love for me (of course, without knowing about his Brother and me). His love was all I had hoped for. He even asked if I would marry him––he would do anything I wanted if I promised to let him come back. He had broken up with me recently and was now pleading to return to my heart and my life.
You must understand. I was head over heels in love with this man. He was my prince. When he said we should see other people, I was heartbroken. I would have done anything to hear him say, "I love you!" Now, when he finally said it, I had already slept with his Brother.
Though shocked to have overheard his thoughts about me, I could not argue with his assessment of my behavior.
I mean, I loved this man––but I slept with his Brother! Who does that?
CHAPTER 17
Things were done to me as a child in the name of Fear, and because of everyone's fears, these acts were ignored, buried, and, subsequently, never dealt with until it was almost too late. As a result of the damage this caused to my sense of self, I walked through my life a broken person, incapable of loving anyone. However, this did not stop me from 'falling in love' and readily declaring my love for another person.
As with my Boyfriend and all the relationships I engaged in, my love was a bartering chip that I would offer in exchange for their loving me. This Love for ourselves that has been denied us by Fear is what we are seeking out from others. Our need to be fulfilled and made whole by Love is real.
Although we are made whole by Love, we cannot be made whole by the love of another person. And, in the wounded or broken state we all suffer from by being born into a reality of Fear, we all need and, in our way, are searching to be healed, loved, and made whole again. What we are saying when we tell someone we love them, translated, what it means is, "I need you to love me."
We are often told that when we have difficult relationships with either one or both of our parents, we will usually seek out people in relationships who are like them, mainly if we are uncertain or in disbelief of their love for us. The irony of these subconscious choices is that in the likeness to the parent we seek to replace, they usually behave exactly as our parent did, which means our experience of their love will also retain that uncertainty or the feeling of outright denial. If we do end up in a relationship with them of some length, we will be reliving the same absent or unquestionable love we suffered as children.
When facing this realization and looking back on my past relationship with my Boyfriend and other men I've been with, I had to admit this was partially true. What I discovered and believe to be true for others is that while I drew men to me who shared certain character traits and behaviors like my father, I mostly wound up with men who were (in most ways) his opposite. You can see this pattern play out with my choice to stay with my Boyfriend's brother because he was different from my Boyfriend, who was the one I would consider a lot like my father.
However, the compelling thing for me in this is that growing up, what I most remember about my father was my fear of him. I never got to know him as a parent beyond the disciplinary duties he undertook with vim, vigor, and no remorse. It certainly wasn't a case of "this hurts me more than it hurts you." He seemed to relish his role as the supreme authority and punisher of all offenses under his roof (including my mother's). Although he would apologize to her afterward, mainly because she threatened to leave him, he never felt the need to improve things between him and his children.
After all, though many times we prayed my mother would, we couldn't escape him. He may not have wanted us when we were born, but since we were here now, we belonged to him. I didn't like my father, and I was never aware of feeling the need to be loved by him. He was like a stranger living under our roof who barked commands and threatened whippings and punishments if we did not obey him. It has always been challenging for me to understand why in the world I would ever want to even subconsciously seek out someone who even remotely resembled my father in any way.
The two things I can say about him in the plus category are that he was a hard worker (both my parents were) and that he didn't appear to have a sense of humor in his relationships with his children (not that I ever had the courage to test out). However, he was a hilarious man when he wanted to be. It was more than strange to, in one moment, fear someone and find yourself, in the next, rolling in laughter over some funny thing he said.
His forays into humor were spontaneous, unpredictable, and ascorbic in perspective. All of which added an edgy undertone to his delivery. We all instinctively knew that we could not presume that because he was making us laugh, it temporarily turned him into a kinder, more approachable person. His excellent humor could turn into bad form in a blink, and he would set upon us with his displeasure, anger, and rage. I can see now that what I had always thought of as laughter on my part was the almost hysterical release of stored-up tension. Also, it was a relished albeit temporary break from being singled out for some real or imagined misdeed; gratefully, when we were his audience, we all blended in.
Although my father was pointedly disliked and disapproved of by some of his peers, his few friends seemed to think the world of him. I often wondered in confusion as I watched him and his buddies drinking, sharing stories, and laughing it up, who was this person who was so pleasant and friendly, someone likable and easy to know? My father was almost a complete mystery to me, one I was sometimes curious about but never desired to know more than I already did. My only long-standing thought about my father was that on my 18th birthday, I would finally be free of him. That summed up my endgame with my father and the story of our relationship.
Staying true to my plan, on that very day, I moved out of my parent's home and never looked back. After that, I only saw my father when circumstances and family matters forced me into his company. But here's the rub. Because, being my father and the primary male influence in my life, all the feelings, ideas, and beliefs I had gathered from and internalized about him became the foundation for all my future relationships with men.
His behavior and description of the character and intentions of the entire male species, boys and men, made me surmise two things. If men were as fundamentally short-sighted and incapable of getting to know me as a person (my father never did), they were clueless and not too bright.
To make my point, I used to say to my girlfriends whenever the subject of men came up, "Well, I have yet to meet one who's as smart as me." I know why I chose to sum up their shortcomings in that way. It wasn't an intellectual difference I was referring to. It was more their apparent inability to see beyond their egos (again, my father's was enormous) to share anything meaningful about themselves or what was happening with them.
I found this to be such a severe handicap that the other thing I used to pipe up about was, "If it wasn't for my girlfriends, I could not get through spending time with a man." Girlfriends were my jam, my everything. The richness of their inner experience of life and the vast terrain of feelings that they navigated and expressed in such a colorful array was the food that sustained my heart and soul throughout my life. Men, however, could only serve one purpose in my life: to love me and thus provide me with (or, so I fully believed) the missing Love I had sought, well, all of my life.
I found this to be such a severe handicap that the other thing I used to pipe up about was, "If it wasn't for my girlfriends, I could not get through spending time with a man." Girlfriends were my jam, my everything. The richness of their inner experience of life and the vast terrain of feelings that they navigated and expressed in such a colorful array was the food that sustained my heart and soul throughout my life. Men, however, could only serve one purpose in my life: to love me and thus provide me with (or, so I fully believed) the missing Love I had sought, well, all of my life.
Now, stay with me. This next part is about to get quite interesting. If you were wondering why I took the time to write all these things about my father, trust me, there was a method to my madness. I needed to give you the backstory of the actual reality of my relationship with my father–and his with me.
One night, after working on this book, I woke up in the morning with many feelings ruminating around about my Boyfriend and how I had dealt with our relationship. I knew better than to harbor regrets, and still, I allowed myself to become emotional, which was not a good idea. (I'll explain why in just a bit).
My heart felt heavy in my chest, which felt blocked as if requiring some release. Emotions were building inside like steam in a pressure cooker but without a release valve. Suddenly, this energy shot up from my chest to my throat, causing me to open my mouth––not to exhale or decompress but to let something else in––this intense need to experience my father's love for me. It was as if this need designed the entire journey of writing this book and sharing the story about my relationship with my Boyfriend to guide me to this arching moment. With my mouth perched open and prepared to receive, I sat ready to ingest—mind you, not my father's Love, but the need for it–something I never felt or was consciously aware of even wanting before.
Because of the very stringent and focused work I do on myself regularly, the personal team that comprises my being (sub and conscious mind, body, heart, soul, male/female aspects, spirit) was suddenly on high alert. Something that we did not recognize or collectively agree to was about to enter into our energetic field. It was a packaged and potent emotional component that, without conscious intervention, could easily slip in and insert itself into our inner network without our consent. From there, it blends in and becomes a new feeling and a state of mind we would try to engage with to measure the voracity of its truth.
Unfortunately, if by this time it turns out not to be accurate and not a good fit for us on all counts, we have to set about working to let it go and any reality or experiences it had begun to create. We would then have to cleanse and clean up all traces of its presence and reset the team's communication network so everyone knows we are back to only our vetted and verified data exchange.
So, what was the big fuss about? First, the presentation of my need for my father's Love was neither self-generated nor offered up as truth from Love. It didn't come from me or Team Melana because, as with Love, we don't do business that way––forcing my mouth to suspiciously open as if someone or something was telling me I needed to swallow a thing I never remember wanting. Something I explicitly recalled never having any desire for. The only other place this toxic yet clever gem could have come from would be Fear.
There I was, angsting over my Boyfriend and my inability to open up my heart to him, conjuring up memories of my fractured relationship with my father and the role it played in the shutting down of my heart. What a perfect detour to set in motion, to steer me off of my actual course of healing the damage within me (no matter where the influence came from) that caused me to behave as I did with my Boyfriend and every other man after him, including his brother.
Following the trail of my need for my father's Love would have set me off on an entirely different course. One of the things that I realize now is that this happened before I wrote the chapter about self-love. If I had followed my emotions down the path of needing my father's Love, I never would have written anything about self-love. I would have said the true answer to healing your relationship with your partner would be acknowledging your need for your father's or mother's Love. Mind you, this only sets you up for having the need. Nothing in the packaging intimates or implies that anyone will ever fulfill the need you have set in place.
To complicate matters more, my father passed away many years ago. If I had chosen to go down that path, believing that I needed my father's Love to heal or to resolve my issues with men, his death would essentially have left me high and dry without a recourse for healing myself. And, while we're on the subject, what about other people whose parent(s) are deceased or with whom they have lost contact? Or those who never knew their parents? Or, those who have parents who refuse to forgive them or oblige their need to be loved? Please understand this: Love is available for all beings, which ensures that loving the self means that everyone, no matter their family or life situation, can be healed and made entirely whole in Love.
In short, we don't require another person to make this happen. The only thing you need to love and be loved outside of yourself is Love. The five aspects of Love, honor, integrity, respect, realness, and truth are the foundation for self-love and the love we give others. You learn how to love someone else by first loving yourself. That is the Love you will give in your relationships. Not our injured need for Love––which can only be fulfilled by our love for ourselves––that we have been offering up and receiving from each other thus far.
When contemplating the act of loving the self, the first thing we must acknowledge is that we do not love ourselves. If we try to muddle over that fact with a 'sometimes, I do,' or 'some parts of me I do' or 'when I'm having a good day, I do,' we miss both the point and the opportunity to be 'real' with ourselves–which is one of the five aspects. The point of loving the self is to completely accept and embrace all of who we are without exceptions and conditions. It's loving who we are, not how we are. We are our authentic selves, a being of Love; how we are is how we respond, as ourselves, to the people, situations, and experiences we encounter in our lives. Although aspects of the self can evolve through healing, growth, and change, our Love-sourced root wiring is fixed and unchangeable, as is our Love for ourselves. Thus, no matter how we express ourselves, we will always be beings of Love.
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