September 9, 2022

You never forget the day you feel your heart breaks.

Now, I don’t want to get into all the gory details of it all, so here’s the TLDR: I met a boy. Love bombing. Abandonment. Gaslighting. Familial betrayal. More abandonment. Life forever changed.

Needless to say, I didn’t have it all quite figured out as I may have thought at that time in my life. I was constantly searching for a sense of belonging and someone to come into my life and make me feel special and seen and then everything would be okay.

That’s the trouble of it all, isn’t it? When you put your happiness and sense of fulfillment and belonging in the hands of other people, you’re setting yourself up for disappointment, hurt, and abandonment. I learned the hard way. But then again, I think we all learn the most effectively this way. I’ve come to find this to be just part of the human experience. Loss of love, in whatever way it happens to us, it jolts you out of the reality you once knew and forces a moment of confrontation. Confronting a new, distinct, and forever changed reality. Confronting everything that had been buried under the surface all this time once the structures that once were all come crashing down.

Are you willing to look at what’s left when the dust settles?

I had to be. When my world shattered, when my sense of self and identity in my family dissolved, I decided that I would never find myself where I was ever again. I would not allow it. The questions became clear to me. What do I need to know? What do I need to face and go through from my past to make sure that I never felt this way again. From my childhood and every monumental moment of identity formation that led me to this place. Anything that lead me to see myself the ways I did, and to have people in my life that thought it was okay to treat me the way they did... I will never be fooled like this again. This was completely unacceptable. I will be freed from this cycle. Unsubscribe. Thank you very much.

I came across many healing relationships over the next several years. Some for a short time, others for a lifetime (I’m convinced anyway). I invested so much of my time, energy, and resources into myself over the next few years. My growth has been exponential, but it definitely was not sudden. I would have appreciated it going much quicker at times and saved me some additional lessons along the way, but alas, that is not how the game is played. We go as fast as we can, and it takes as long as it takes. During this time, I learned what it means to be “in the goo.” We all experience times similar to the caterpillar during its transformative time to becoming a butterfly. It’s gross. It’s very uncomfortable, and it is necessary and beyond worth it.

For the sake of keeping this as short as I possibly can (believe me I really am trying), over the next several months after this heartbreak, I learned more about myself than I ever would have without it. So, if I ever came across this same boy today, I’d take a page from Ted Lasso and say, “Fuck you, and Thank you.”

I learned about abandonment wounds, and if you’ve made it this far, you can probably relate. I learned about healing from abandonment and how each and every one of us has this innate fear of being left all alone with our needs not met. This goes back to our very biological makeup for how we need each other to survive. I learned about the SWIRL of abandonment and how we go around and around in these different stages of grief as we move through the feelings of abandonment. I also learned that this time in one’s life is a beautiful opportunity for self-actualization, but if you told me that at the start of it, I wouldn’t have believed you because of how much pain I found myself to be in. Nonetheless, I found myself during this time making the active decision to never abandon myself again. Authenticity being one of my core values, I was finally in a place to step into living in alignment with my most authentic self.

During this time of immense personal work through my abandonment wounds and doing my own complex trauma work, believe it or not, being a complex trauma therapist became quite difficult. The compassion fatigue began to make the intricacies of holding space for others too challenging. I took a leave from therapy for nearly 8 months. For those first 3 of those months, I fought with the loss of identify with being a therapist. Ultimately, I really needed to know WHO I was, not just WHAT I was in a professional sense. I do identify as a healer, but there was so much more that needed to unfold for me to be a better healer.

Quick reminder if you missed this in my About Me page (or just got so excited to read this story that you came straight here), I am from Ohio. Born and raised there and lived there all my entire life. That was until I said that sentence out loud at the age of 28, and my whole body had this reaction like I’d just eaten a bug or something. So, in July of 2023, I moved to Glacier National Park in Montana and worked there for a season for the park. I got to wake up in the mountains and watch the night sky light up with so many stars and the Milky Way clear as day looking down at me. It was surreal. It was vastly different than Ohio. It was the space I needed to heal.

I met some of the most incredible people I have ever met in my life, who’ve stuck around with me still. I lost some old friends along the way, too. It was a beautiful and necessary transformation. This decision changed my life. It gave me the distance I needed to learn who I was without the stories of my past cluttering everyone’s minds around me, including my own. I felt my true self starting to come alive within me. She came out to play more the longer I was away. She was safe. And she was so damn fun (and still is, btw)!

At the end of the season, everyone I’d met was finding their next season of work in various states across the country. I was ready to go back to doing what I felt called to do, and I knew for a fact that was not going to be back in Ohio. I finally felt ready to move where I wanted to build and create a life for myself. A place that felt safe and had room for me to explore all the previously stifled parts of myself and embrace some new ones. A place that had always been healing for me came to mind and lit me up inside. I found a position in Denver, Colorado working for an agency with a wonderful therapy team that I was so excited to join. I made so many friends and felt right at home.

A new home for a new me.