Shattered: But You Told Me You Loved Me

When you stay with someone who is emotionally unavailable simply because you are afraid to be alone, it can lead to deep pain, and it can also lead to deep self-love.

Hanging Onto Scraps

You might ask why you stayed, clinging and loving until the bitter end when you got the tiniest of breadcrumbs, the measliest of scraps, were ghosted, lied to, and led on. You might think yourself pathetic for having so little self-respect, self-love, or self-esteem that you continually allowed someone to make you feel like you don’t matter, that you barely exist, and that your relevance in their life meant close to nothing. You might beat yourself up endlessly for allowing them to take advantage, to use you, and to take you for granted—over and over again—for years on end. And when all is said and done, all the questions you have go unanswered or excuses are made; there is no real closure. What about when they told me they loved me? Even though they could barely show it, “They SAID it,” you think to yourself as you scratch your head in confusion. Was that a lie too? So, when all the name-calling, bullying, and shaming you will undoubtedly do to yourself is complete, you can turn to yourself and ask, “If I truly love myself and believe I deserve good things, then WHY did I allow this treatment?” “What is it about me that allowed me to hang in there for so long when there was almost nothing coming back my way?”

However, these questions are not intended to berate yourself for being some kind of needy, desperate loser for doing this. Not at all! This is the time to get curious instead of judgmental. Think about it. This can (and very often does in this day and age) happen to anyone and there are always good reasons and positive intentions for why we do anything. Yes, even something like this has a positive intention, believe it or not. If hanging onto someone who could not love you the way you deserved somehow gave you a feeling of belonging, love, or safety, even if in the smallest of ways, then some part or parts of you believed even this was somehow a positive thing. And, drum roll please, this all comes from our childhood wounding and trauma, ladies and gents.

Being Nice to Get Love

Once upon a time, I thought I was a nice person. I thought I was moderately attractive, fairly smart, down-to-earth, approachable, and happy-go-lucky. I would get angry when we’d fight. I would stand up for myself, too. I got the joke and could hang with the sports and politics talk okay, even if they weren’t my things. At one point, I was told by my previous love that my being nice was not enough. In other words, and in my mind, he was telling me that I was not enough. He did not love me simply because he did not love me. The love he had felt was gone and he was leaving me there to rot. And that was a devastating blow. After all, I had been groomed in my young life to be nice and that by being nice and trying hard to please and be good, look good, and more or less EARN love, I would surely be considered worthy enough to be loved. And that was simply not true. In truth, he did not love me because he did not love me. Period. Maybe it was because of me and maybe it was because of him. But either way, he was gone and he took his love for me with him for good. Don’t worry, however. This turned out for the very best and I learned and grew and healed, so this is not a sad story. But it is a story about the reasons WHY we stay with people who do not show, by their actions, that they care about us.

So, I was dumped. I was lost. I just wanted someone to love me again. I wanted to be a part of a couple again. I wanted to feel like I was important and cared about again. So, I tried hard again. I tried to be lovable and good and pleasing. I hadn’t yet learned to love myself so I wanted someone else to do that for me. It’s common to do this. It’s normal. But normal isn’t always healthy. I was not taught how to fill my own cup and be okay alone and so I was actually terrified to know myself and be all by myself. Besides, that seemed super boring and I wanted a companion to do things with, to cuddle with, and to call my own. That seemed less boring and more fun to me. So, I did that. That didn’t work for me and then it went on like that for a while. I kept delaying the inevitable: I had to learn to be independent and then interdependent instead of dependent and codependent in order to really enjoy myself and be okay alone.

When we try so hard to make someone who does not have the eyes to see us, who does not have the interest in us, who comes and goes as they please, and who only gives us tiny pieces of their time when they want to give it be our crutch or love us and do it FOR us, we miss the entire point. We might find ourselves moody and resentful toward the person for “not doing enough” for us and we might start a fight with them, ignore them, or break up with them for not caring enough to “make us happy.” There in lies the problem. No one is supposed to make anyone else happy. That is an inside job that only we can do for ourselves. It’s a recipe for disaster when we expect someone to be our be all and end all. And that isn’t fair to them anyway. Would it be fair to you to have to continually “make” someone else happy? How exhausting!

As I now reflect on that past break up, I realize that my person had told me there was no way he could “make me happy” and he was totally right. I was offended at the time and quite ashamed that he saw me like that. I also did not understand what he meant. I mean, I was a very NICE person after all! I was kind and happy with others. However, I was not an inherently happy person. I faked it really well on the outside for friends and strangers alike. I was a pleaser by nurture (and maybe a bit by nature as well) and everyone else saw me as nice and polite and happy. As a kid, I was never really shown or taught how to love myself or even like myself. I was very lonely on the inside. I didn’t know who I was. I didn’t know how to BE with myself and enjoy my own company. I was busy taking care of everyone else in my life so that I would not be cast out and rejected for being “selfish.” So, in my intimate relationship with my partner, I was miserable. I was expecting him to make me happy, secure, and to fill me up with self-worth. That was not his job. He eventually had no choice but to leave the relationship. I can’t speak for him, but I can imagine that he may not have felt worthy in a way because there was no way for him to do the one thing he wanted to do for me: to make me happy. Life is sad when we are reminded of the ways in which we hurt the people we love the most simply because we don’t know how to love ourselves enough to love our people. Hurt people do hurt people after all. And I am no exception to this rule. Although I have become quite self-aware and healed my own subconscious toxic patterns and limiting beliefs since that time in my life, I have hurt the people I love on more than one occasion. Even as a “nice” person, I was not nice to myself and that bled onto the ones I loved the most.

So, back to the point at hand…After going around on this merry-go-round many times, finding new partners, or marrying and divorcing again and again in order to find “the one” who will fill our voids and “make us feel good enough,” we might want to consider starting the very deep and painful process of looking at why WE stay in situations where someone cannot love us enough or the “right” way. Maybe the person is just a jerk. Maybe they don’t know how to love or they lack empathy. Maybe they are a narcissist, a sociopath, or a psychopath even. Maybe they are avoidant or have disorganized attachment style. Maybe they are emotionally handicapped. Maybe they know they can use us and so they do. Whatever the reason, that person is that person and will do whatever they need to do to satisfy their own wounds, fill their own voids, and find a way to get the love, attention, and supply they crave until they are ready to change, heal, and grow. There ain’t nothin’ you can do to change that person, help them grow up, or make them love you if they can’t or won’t. Just stop trying to fix people and focus on fixing yourself. That is the bottom line in all of life. Do you! People will be more likely to heal and change when we are not so fixated on saving them. Give them space.

“We teach people how to treat us” is a famous quote by Dr. Phil McGraw that is very fitting and quite true. If we are willing to stay there and continually allow abuse, poor treatment, or disrespect, then it’s on us. “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me” is another great quote to keep in mind. Sure, the person acting that way is not very considerate nor empathetic. They clearly have a lot of their own neediness and don’t seem to really care about the pain they are inflicting on the person sticking around for it. And so, by virtue of the fact that if you aren’t saying no and walking away it is assumed you are okay with the bad behavior, it does become a you problem and not a them problem. This is not to suggest that you DESERVE the poor treatment. No, you absolutely do not! Also, I will again stress the importance of being curious rather than judgmental or shaming toward yourself if you have stayed around taking crap from crappy people for far too long. I think we have all been there at one time or another.

Deep Voids

People who use us for love and attention are trying to fill deep voids that went unfilled as children; this is also why we stay and cling to unhealthy people. We hope that they will finally fill our voids, too. They often remind us of the parent or caregiver who neglected us emotionally or who abused us in some way. We think on a subconscious level that we will get the love from someone who energetically feels like the parent who rejected or abandoned us. And what we find out is that this person, too, will reject or abandon us—or we will feel like they are. And, ultimately, as time goes on and we are more and more involved with this person, we will get triggered into the same fear, pain, and shame we experienced when we were young and that parent or caregiver neglected, rejected, or abandoned us. So, this is exactly why we cling to unavailable people. We want the love, attention, affection, adoration, or acceptance that we did not get from a primary caregiver when we were young. We want to finally “get it right” with that parent or caregiver.

Hopefully you can see that this is a very normal pattern to follow. It makes sense to our bodies and subconscious minds to try to be loved by someone who feels like the people who first loved us—even if they did it in unhealthy or abusive ways. We don’t actually know we are doing this until we do. When we start to notice our patterns and see how people all seem the same as our parent in a way or that we can’t seem to ever make a relationship work, we start the process of healing. We start to become self-aware. That is the first step, baby! Please be gentle with yourself, too. This awareness can take years or even lifetimes to figure out. Once we get it, however, we can heal it for good, which is the amazing part of going through the very, very painful process of loving people who cannot love us in return. The sunny side is that there is a gift for us in the lesson. The blessin’ is in the lesson or something like that, right?

Choosing You and Stepping Into Your Empowerment

The answer, as always, is to love yourself. The issue with something like this is that there might be a very deeply entrenched fear of being alone with yourself, of being lonely, of never having anyone to love us, or any number of fears. And people are not taught to take care of these fears, lean into them, and to come out the other side transformed into something new, free, and filled with peace and joy. Instead, we are taught to avoid and run from fear, to look externally for love from others who cannot fill our voids, and to form codependent instead of interdependent relationships where there will be inevitable resentment, passive aggressivity, hatred, or even abuse if each person is unhealed and using the other one to “make them happy” until death do they part.

When we finally decide that we truly deserve to be fully seen, understood, and loved by someone, even if it is only us doing this for ourselves, and that we will be totally fine all alone if no one ever loves us for who we are, then we are set free. Freedom is what you get to on the other side of fear and it’s the best feeling ever. Stepping into your empowerment and choosing to do what is best for you and walking away from anyone who cannot love you as you want and should be loved, is the way to true joy and happiness. It is inner peace and all the yummy things that we want. No one can love you better than you can love yourself and as soon as you do, you will not be able to tolerate anything less than the love you give to you. It becomes painful to your body to be in the presence of someone who does not love themselves and who then cannot love you. You will be drawn toward being alone or finding the actual people who can love you. Mark my words on this!

And guess what? This opens the door to you really attracting the pure love and the true tribe your soul wants to be with in life. So, work on the reasons why you stay with toxic people, lean into your fears—move through the fear and pain—and be your authentic, free, amazing self. This is also a reminder that loving yourself is not selfish. Recall my mistake with my past love. If I had loved and even liked myself and I was truly, deeply happy in my own skin at that time, we might have stayed together forever. Perhaps not, still, but loving myself surely would have allowed him to possibly feel happier in our relationship (again I cannot speak for him on this), which could have been a better situation than what ended up happening to us. As you can see by this example, loving myself would NOT have been selfish. It would have extended more love to my guy. More love toward self leads to more love toward others and this is always a good thing.

Let me know how I can help you break free from toxic patterns and come home to your true self!