Real Repair

Real repair is messy. It's vulnerable. When you've let someone into the deepest reaches of your soul and they hurt you in that place, the repair needed is not just between you, but inside yourself, and between you and the broader world of humanity. Sometimes it even requires a repair between you and your previous concept of God, the universe, the world and your place in it.

Betrayal is not just the big recognizable moments, just like relational damage is not just done in the kinds of physical altercations that leave marks. Betrayal is also experienced when our idea of a person is shaken because they say something or show us a side of them that we hadn't seen before. Now we feel fragile, vulnerable, maybe even wrecked a bit (or a lot). Who we thought they were, who we thought we were to them, what we had constructed in our minds as the realm of possible interactions and how we thought things would go given a set of circumstances has now been totally altered.

Betrayal sometimes is just surprise. Surprise that something happened that we weren't expecting, that didn't fit within our view of what was possible.

I remember that feeling shortly after my very first time experiencing an all natural childbirth. My body went into shock. My mind was in shock. My heart, emotions, and energy body even were reeling. I remember I kept thinking "I didn't know it was possible for something to hurt that much". I felt shaken a good long time after that. Not because it kept hurting, but because of what that level of pain and its implications were.

The repair process required a new understanding and relationship to my body, to my identity, to the experience of pain and my mental and spiritual constructs of what it meant to be a human being in this world and go through things that were unexpectedly and exquisitely painful.

Relational pain can be even more shocking. When our deepest desire is to open, to let someone, our chosen person, into our sacred space - the place where we dream, we take all our armor off, we allow ourselves to be truly seen... Especially when it's a place no one has ever been before. Doubly and triply so when it's a place others have trod before and intentionally harmed or wounded us there and we are brave enough to risk it again... It requires us to remold and reorient to a new reality.

And that's where repair starts - with the redefining of a new reality, one where the possibility and certainty of being hurt like we are feeling now is present, and one where that kind of pain is not only likely again but maybe even pain more profound.

Repair starts within. It starts with redefining our expectations, our reasons for risking, our beliefs about risk and rupture and the pain those generate. And it requires the beginning of coming to a place where we can both let go of control over the process and timing, and choose consciously what we are willing to risk and why - what we are willing to feel and for what end result. It requires us to decide who we are. Not to listen to or agree with someone else about our identity, but to consciously choose who we are. Are we a person who takes the risk and chooses to trust themselves to navigate whatever might happen? Are we a person who will wade into deep waters because we refuse to stay safe and protected on the shore? Or do we want to play it small and keep ourselves from ever feeling too much? What kind of person are we going to be in relationship to pain?

Repair requires determination. It requires curiosity. It demands all our energy and attention, because true repair will rewire us from the inside out. It will not only require new patterns of relating, sharing, thinking, and interacting with the other person, but also within ourselves. New narratives will be created when true repair is earned. New ways of viewing our internal and external landscapes. And we will see the other person differently too. Less idealistically, yes, but also more realistically - and we will have earned a deeper capacity to hold the full weight and version of them with compassion.

And in so doing, we will fall more deeply, soulfully, joyfully in love with exactly who they are, and exaclty who we are, in this very moment. Fully. Presently. Deliciously.

That's a soul-safe place. It's not a perfect place. It's not a flawless place. It's certainly not a pain-free place. It's a fully human and held and dignified place of truly seeing and being fully seen, and still being able to declar that you are both worthy of being seen and loved right now.

And that actually gives you the wings you always wanted to fly into the greater heights you never dreamed possible.

Not before the conflict, not before the pain. After the pain, in the messy afterbirth and the reckoning postpartum of it - that's the repair place. That's where we forge our wings, together.