The Torture That Teaches the Truth

Add caption

Pain can be … well, a pain. But it can also be a catalyst for change, fulfillment and happiness.

Should I stay or should I go?

For many of us in unhappy relationships – be they friendships, romances, partnerships, employment – this can be an agonizing decision, to say the very least. At that crucial crossroads in my own partnership/relationship, when friends would ask me if I was OK, I’d say, “Everything hurts.” I was referring, of course, to the body aches, migraines, joint pain, pressure and exhaustion that come with the territory of any stressful situation. But here a year later, I am starting to realize not only how frighteningly accurate that statement was, but how far down deep the pain actually went.

That pain, I realize now, was the catalyst for change. I realize now how I had decided to use that pain.

The litmus test was: I knew it was time to go when the pain of staying outweighed the pain of leaving. I knew there would be pain in leaving. The lyrics to my favorite song (at the time) said, “The path to Heaven runs through miles of clouded hell.” And it was hell.

What I Was Never Going to Get

Where exactly was the pain of staying? There were things that I needed and wanted in order to have a happy, fulfilling relationship that he was not giving me, even when I asked for them. He continued to second guess my feelings, ignore what I’d asked for, and instead provide a cheap substitute. He’d do the bare minimum that might come close to what I was asking, and believe it should be good enough.

Now, he did do a great many things to keep our relationship healthy. I must concede the … inconvenient … truth in that. There were a lot of good and positive things about the relationship. But. I was also missing some key and crucial elements I felt I needed to be happy.

Notice, I didn’t say “make me happy.” More on that in a bit.

There were some very important aspects of the kind of relationship I wanted and the kind of relationship I gradually found myself in. Among others, these were the critical success factors absent from our partnership:

• Fair give and take
• The feeling of financial security
• Deeper appreciation, not just verbally but demonstratively
• A voiced and respected opinion about everything. Everything.

I’m not talking about petty little annoyances and irritating personal habits. We all have those. You work through them. You learn to live with them.

But these … these were deal-breakers.

He was no longer the person I’d fallen in love with. He had changed.  To be fair, I had changed, too. We all change; all relationships change. People learn to love and grow with one another. But he had strayed so far away from the core of what I’d grown to love, and what I’d learned to trust, there was no way to make it right again. The man I knew was slowing disappearing before my very eyes.

I tried to explain what had changed and felt I made it very clear. Time and again. I asked for some help in fixing the problems. Time. And. Again. To do that would require that he stop doing what he was doing, and start doing something different. I needed him to develop some healthier habits, which would require more change. Well, he wasn’t interested in that kind of changing.

[Actually, once I started the business of breaking up, he suddenly became very interested in working it out. But by then it was too late.]

And I knew I couldn’t change him.

[Reminds me of that old joke: How many therapists does it take to change a light bulb? One – but the light bulb has to really want to change.]

The Pain Within My Power

So I had to think and I had to decide:  “What can I do independently of him changing that will provide me what I need to be happy and healthy?” He had made it perfectly clear, time and again, that it didn’t matter what I needed, wanted, and asked for. He wasn’t going to do it. He had been crystal clear.

It was up to me. But what could I do? Over what did I have complete and utter control?

When stated that way, the answer was simple: I had to take care of me. I had to make some serious life-altering changes, no matter how painful. I even knew, I even realized at the time, this was probably one of the most difficult (if not THE most difficult), painful decisions I ever, ever would have to make. But I also knew I had to do it. To stay in that relationship, with him not doing a single thing or making a single effort to try to provide what I needed and wanted, was for me slow death. Agonizing and tortuous.

He had to go; I had to take care of myself.

Taking Care of Yourself Doesn’t Make You’re a Bad Person

He called me selfish, he called me cruel. He called me a lot of other things I don’t need to repeat here. He said I didn’t care about him, that I didn’t care where he went or what happened to him. True or not, it was how he saw it. The truth was, he was unwilling to face his own pain. For him, it would be easier to continue to live with that pain. My pain.

It’s a lie to stay in a situation where the other person thinks you’re happy, if you’re not happy and you do nothing to communicate your pain to your partner. That’s what I had been doing for so long, almost three years in fact. I’d lived with that lie because I couldn’t face the pain that breaking up would inevitably bring. The house, the car, the pets … what was going to happen to them? How could I ever find the strength to do what I knew I had to do?

What I had to do was to forget all that and focus on me. My needs, my wants, and my happiness. Deep down, when it all came to the end of the fairy tale, no one in this world cared about me (or should) as much as I did (and still do). It was my turn to be taken care of.

Is that being selfish? Is that being cruel?

No. Not at all.

What I had to get him to realize is that this decision to end our relationship wasn’t a ruling against him. It was rather a decision for me. For many years I had been there: supporting him, paying his expenses, covering his health insurance, making his car payments and purchasing the insurance. I had made the sacrifices, given in, helped him get his way. Supported even the stupid choices he was making. In a way, I was responsible for his ignorance of the true pain of the situation, because I wasn’t insistent enough, all along the way, that he think about me as much as I thought about him.

Now it was my turn to think about me. If that was being selfish, if that was being cruel and unfair in his eyes, then so be it. I’d let him think that. I knew I wasn’t.

I knew I was being human.

Lessons Learned

What about you? How happy do you want to be?

No matter your answer, it’s important you realize that no one – no one – is going to do that for you. No one can make your happy. Your response to your situation is entirely up to you. If it’s a painful situation, you have basically two choices: do nothing and live with the pain (some would call that denial); or, do something to change the situation.

Maybe you need to take care of you now.

You are the one who cares most about your happiness. You are the one who can (and should) make sure you get what you want and need to be happy. You are the person in the world who cares most about you.

No one else can make you happy. No one else can really make you feel anything, if you don’t want to.

But that’s the topic for another time.