Betrayal, abuse, and generational healing

Recently I was sharing the story with a girlfriend and realized I had an immense amount of shame around it. This is not something I’ve ever written about publicly and so it felt like it was time to share this story. My prayer is that it resonates and health spring insight to others who’ve had similar experiences for the bigger role that challenge provides in generational healing.

❤️‍🩹

When I was 17, I cheated on a man I hadbeen dating for two months with my ex boyfriend. It was the first and the only time I've ever cheated on a partner. I had been deeply in love with my ex and when he left for the Marines I was devastated. When he came back on a weekend visit and my boyfriend serendipitouslu left for the weekend I couldn’t help myself but go to see him. I remember being in his presence and super alive, in love and enlivened. Then we started drinking with my friends and Next thing I remembered I woke up in bed naked with him the next morning with a pounding hangover.

It took me nearly 4 months to tell the man I was dating what had happened. When I did it unlocked a violent aggressive part of him. I felt like I deserved it because what I had done was so “wrong”.

Over the next six months I continued to work on repairing the relationship, “proving my goodness” by staying with him through all number of extreme encounters from him hacking my computer passwords and surveying all my messages to following me around town in his car to verbally name-calling etc. Things came to ahead and I finally broke it off after a big fight with extensive name calling and demeaning language.

But three months later there he was begging me back, claiming he had done his healing and forgiven me and I took him up on it. Within a few weeks we went to a Halloween party and he threatened to shoot someone who had been my lover in the past and literally went to the car and pulled out his gun. I stood in the way and blocked him with my body and he shoved me into a wall. In that moment I decided that was it. Physical abuse was where I would draw the line and I ended it. Got a restraining order the next day. And it was over.

Fast forward 10 years and there I am, 27 years old, enjoying the full height of my poly and open relating and I find a man who has very similar personality traits. Deep insecurity fear jealousy etc. and what do I do? I run straight toward him with open arms!

Within a few months of dating I had broken off all my other lover and made shifts to try to “make him feel safe.” He also used to call me names related to my desire at that time for openness freedom and multiple partners. some thing about it was familiar. Some thing inside me told me maybe I deserved it, that may be somewhere a part of me was wrong for how I had been behaving for the prior few years. Maybe I could prove him wrong by staying.

And sure enough the pattern repeat it again, before we had made it to one year during a big fight one day as I was talking about taking a vacation and he exploded and told me it was over and to get out. It got physical and it culminated in him shoving me backward into a glass door.

Again I drew the line. But this time I also stood for the way I wanted to be communicated with. I stood for the communication and the type of tone and the affection that I needed that I wasn’t receiving and despite his biggest apologies and promises never to physically hurt me again I knew it wasn’t right. it was a platform to take the next leap. I had to stay in my center.

I called my mom to digest the experience with her and what unfolded was a litany of experiences of abuse involving my mother, my grandmother, and even my great grandmother and their partners/husbands. Even life threatening violence.

The eerie detail that really woke me up was that my grandmother had also been pushed backward through a glass door by my grandfather 😳 I felt I was in a parallel reality living that script out.

But she hadn’t had the ability or the courage to stand up, to leave, to communicate her truth. But now I did and I do.

In that moment I saw that I was rewriting the pattern for my whole maternal line. Up until that point I couldn’t understand why I had this draw towards unhelpful abusive negative toned relationship.

And honestly has not reappeared. The spell was broken. And I continue to learn other lessons now.❤️‍🩹