Finding Healing, Joy, and Love Through Hard Times

How we experience love in real life is not typically the fairy-tale we imagine it will be. In fact, it often takes hold despite our fantasies. Real Love Ready was born from the idea that real love has the most potential when we practice being in a good relationship with ourselves, breaking unhealthy patterns and learning new ways of communicating. 

As a culture — especially in the western “wellness” world — we are sold this idea that we must “love ourselves” before anyone can ever love us. But, this is one piece of advice that we aren’t prescribing to. Each of us is worthy of love and we do not have to be fully healed versions of ourselves in order to be loved. The one thing we do need to do though, is open ourselves up to healing so that we can love fully and accept love in return. 

We are highlighting a Real Love Ready community story about finding paths to healing, joy, and love through hard times. Here is a love letter from Rowan to his love, Jo.

Content Warning: This letter has mentions of abuse and violence. Please only continue to read at your own comfort.

Dear Jo,

My life before I met you was not one we write love letters about. I came from a very rough childhood, where at times I felt I was living inside a prison instead of a home. When we met, I was leading a dual existence: on the one hand, I felt freer than I ever had, living on my own for the first time in a new city with new friends, and new places to explore. I was starting a new chapter, one with the potential for me to actually be in the driver’s seat. On the other hand, even though I had physically moved away from my past, it clung to me in the present. It overshadowed attempts to dream of more loving futures. Despite my newfound confidence and freedom, I hadn’t yet learned to take care of myself, to nurture what needed to heal inside of me, and worst of all I still carried the feeling that I didn’t deserve to be loved.

I tried to build a home, but my apartment became a reflection of me: cleaning and caring for it only for guests or when people would see it, but not for myself. What was meant to be a home became a sealed container, hiding a life of trauma and abuse. 

This is when I met you, my love — at a pivotal intersection in my life.

In that first summer of courtship that duality reared its head and threatened the love we were exploring. We had a wondrous romance and a deep connection that we were building, and yet, I was absolutely terrified of getting into a serious relationship with you. I believed myself to be “damaged goods”, and that shame nearly engulfed me. I attempted to self-sabotage our blooming love, thinking that just because I came from a toxic upbringing that I was doomed to replicate it with you. I couldn’t yet separate what was done to me from who I was (and am) at my core. There was a conflation between the person I could be and the ghosts that haunted me.

And despite this tension, I didn’t want to give up on us — give up on you. You were (and continue to be) the strongest, most determined, and loving person that I have ever met. You taught me a level of courage and perseverance that I look up to every single day. And despite the growing pains, there was a harmony we found in each other – a weaving of mutual respect, the most tender and whimsical love, and an almost unbounded joy that we cultivated. Before you filled my heart with it, I did not believe love could do what we have done with it. In it. Through it. But, as in any story, there were challenges we had to face. 

My father, the man responsible for so much of my pain, died less than a year into our relationship. His death tore a hole right through me. Pandora’s jar exploded, and everything I’d packed away resurfaced. Memories of the infrequent and beautiful moments of life with him returned. But, with those memories also came the rage, hurt, and resentment. These memories overwhelmed me suddenly and with great force. A riptide that threatened to swallow me whole.

I felt the pull to default to self-sabotage in the pain, shame, and fear of vulnerability that had always been my coping mechanism. And, I didn’t want you to see it, Jo. My instinct was to protect you from who I thought I was: an echo of my father, my trauma, and, deep down, an apoplectic feeling of rage that, in the end, I could never have beauty in my life with the pain I carried so deeply. This was the pattern I learned from my upbringing, after all, and one that I had repeated my whole life. Simply put, if I was as monstrous as I had experienced my father to be, I would need to push everyone whom I cared about away, both for their own safety and for my own conscience. 

But with you, a new thing happened: through and with the pain, we reached levels of vulnerability with each other so deep that, like ancient wells, seemed to have no bottom. 

For the first time, I felt safe enough to lean into the vulnerability and pain of showing you who I really was, and ultimately who I was afraid I would become. And in this vulnerability — as uncomfortable and terrifying as it was — I opened myself up in new and powerful ways. To deeper layers of love. To trust, both in myself and in the process and in you.

I learned that grief could be powerful, and moving through it was healing. In the aftermath of my Dad’s death sprouted the seeds of who I could become and with your wisdom I learned how to nurture them.

We built new ways of communicating with each other, practiced expressing our needs, and determining what our desires for a more loving, fulfilling life could be.  

And then, I realized, most profoundly, that we were building a home together. I finally felt like I belonged. That I was belonged-to. I was someone who had never felt a sense of home before, except maybe in my earliest memories, and finding it in the love that you and I shared has helped me heal wounds that I thought would never close. I was learning to move from surviving to thriving. 

Although we continue to experience loss in our lives, we have learned to cultivate this joyous well of love that is our lifeline. We have woven magic together in the home that we built in each other.

This is the primary heartbeat of our relationship: a deeply vulnerable place of care and empowerment.  I opened myself up to you, Jo, like a flower opening up to the warmth of the sun.  To learn to trust someone, as intensely as I do with you, was something unimaginable beforehand.   It is through this shared space of love, vulnerability and safety that I have been able to heal. 

Love, 

Rowan

“If you grew up in a family system with someone who struggled to emotionally regulate themselves, you may have learned to manage their emotional experience by withholding your own.” Vienna Pharaon

For those of you wanting guidance understanding and overcoming wounds from your family of origin we recommend listening to Break Family Patterns to Change Your Life with Vienna Pharaon on our podcast Let’s Talk Love.