Dear Cary,
At Christmas she left me, told me she had fallen out of love.
It has been half a year; I have dated, moved on, accepted that she is never coming back. I have taken other lovers, spent time with friends, done all the things you do to make peace with yourself, to accept that it is over and that she is never coming back.
She said she had fallen out of love; I later found out she had cheated and could not face up to me about it. I have no idea if I could accept that; I suspect that I couldn't but that is not the main issue. I dream about her, about the times we shared, how loved I had felt.
My life has not been a pleasant one: orphaned, adopted by a very dysfunctional family. I found something that meant the world to me and then it went away. I know logically that it is for the best, no such thing as a good breakup, if it was good, you wouldn't break up. I still find myself in tears when I run across her picture, or try to talk about the past with a friend. Five years of my life and it left a lot of tracks behind, it is not something I can avoid.
I was always under the impression that time healed all wounds, but I find myself with tears streaming down my face and I don't know that there is a solution to this.
I survived my parents dying. I survived being in the Army and having to fight in a conflict I did not believe in. I survived my best friend committing suicide, but I can't seem to heal past this.
When is it that this is supposed to stop? Is there something just broken inside of me?
Solo
Dear Solo,
When people say time heals all wounds, they rarely mention the recommended dose. They don't say, Time heals all wounds at a ratio of six months' grieving for the first year of a relationship, with the period for each subsequent year diminishing on a curve determined by past experience and other concurrent psychological factors including recent traumatic events. They just say time heals all wounds and leave it at that. Which can raise your expectations unnecessarily.
Whatever you're getting over always takes more time to get over than you think. First there's this period where you're willingly grieving; the incident is fresh in your mind and in the minds of others; people know you've been through something tough and they cut you some slack. You figure you need some time off. You take it. But at some point you think, OK, enough with that. I'm ready. I'm done. I'm cured. And then you try to get up and start living a normal life and it hits you again: There's another wave of grief, and then another wave and another, and you can't believe it. That's the second phase, which is all about accepting that it's not over until it's over.
You mention some other losses in your life that you feel you handled better than this one. You say you survived these other things, but you can't seem to beat this. Having survived these other things, it might seem that you ought to be able to beat this as well. But there's another way to look at it. It could be that you never actually beat those past events or rose above them, but simply survived them. So they are still hurting you. Perhaps this breakup is sort of the straw that broke the camel's back. If so, that's not a dangerous thing necessarily. It just means it's really time to come to grips with loss.
When you can no longer carry every burden like a man, when you can no longer soldier on, when you can no longer absorb every blow, then it's time to begin a new phase of life in which you acknowledge the loss. You stop being a soldier and become a philosopher. Instead of battling, you look for meaning. You look for the connections. With compassion, you examine your wounds to see exactly how they happened, what hit you, and from what direction; where were you standing and why were you there? Were you ordered to be there or had you just wandered into the jungle? Were you on a mission? Was someone trying to kill you or was it an accident?
This, I think, is the true healing phase. It's not time that's doing it. It's you. It takes time to get functional again. And then it takes even more time to fully interrogate yourself, to conduct your own incident investigation, to get at the truth.
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