Together We Rise: Towards Wholeness through Separation.
Our attachment wounds determine why we choose the partners we do, how we’ll behave, and what we’ll tolerate. If you are among the 50% that grew up with a secure attachment, you are fortunate. You have inherited a form of generational wealth not often talked about. Indeed, your brain was wired to look for “green flags.” Because of the trauma I experienced, red flags felt familiar. For those with an insecure attachment, love can be a battlefield. My work has been learning to put down my swords and put up boundaries. Over the last nine months, as I have healed emotionally, I’ve discovered a crucial piece of my puzzle: childhood abandonment wounds caused me to become codependent. It’s made me decide to walk away from my marriage.
I now realize that I developed an anxious attachment style in childhood, desperately craving connection, but also fearing rejection and abandonment. It most likely started with developing failure to thrive after five months in the NICU and continued through thirty surgeries in childhood, culminating with the death of my dad just after my seventeenth birthday. Mix in the mental health issues in the household, and I can see now that chaos, or the threat of it, was my constant companion. As adolescence arrived, this carried over into my romantic relationships. I would rush in, completely lose myself, and then just as quickly, create conflict in an effort to retrieve my sense of self. It was a push, pull cycle. This caused me to sabotage relationships with all green flags. My subconscious mind craved chaos and conflict. So when I met my husband, I was drawn to him like a moth to a flame. “You don’t have to do this,” my mother had said, just before my brother walked me down the aisle. But each step down that aisle felt fated. There were lessons to learn and patterns to repeat.
When we first got married, I was just as combative as he was, swords up all the time. I was easily triggered, quick to anger, and as one of my brothers said at our wedding, “Had a really nasty temper.” A few months into our marriage, he had an explosive episode. I took him to Chapel Hill for a diagnosis: Intermittent Explosive Disorder. Not wanting to accept the diagnosis, the acronym of which is IED, the human version of a ticking time bomb, I took him to the Mayo clinic. The diagnosis was Bipolar 2. It was then that I realized that diagnosis was a subjective craft, influenced not by statistical manuals as much as by the perspective of the professional. Meds were prescribed, and they helped somewhat, so we soldiered on. Looking back now as a clinician, I would diagnose my husband with high functioning autism with a Pathological Demand Avoidance Profile or PDA. Individuals with PDA are triggered into fight, flight, or freeze when demands are made of them. Children with PDA are often misdiagnosed as having Oppositional Defiance Disorder. The key difference between the two is that an individual with PDA has an activated threat response when a demand is placed on them, It is not that they don’t want to comply with the demand. It’s that they can’t. They’re sympathetic nervous system has hijacked them into believing that they are in danger, and their nervous system responds accordingly, usually with rage or fight mode
Looking back now as a clinician, I also may have also met the criteria for a mental health diagnosis: high functioning borderline personality disorder. It is often seen in individuals with a significant amount of trauma. Swinging between fear of abandonment and engulfment and explosive rage are hallmark traits of BPD, which explains why, after rushing into relationships because of my anxious attachment, I then sabotaged them once intimacy began to be established. When I met my husband, all my previous romantic relationships had ended at the fourteen-month mark. I married him fourteen months in, hoping for the best. My journey of healing has involved learning to sit with my emotions, building my reflective capacity so that I can understand why I think, feel, and act the way that I do, understanding that people are multifaceted, neither all good nor all bad, and learning to take accountability when I create a rupture in a relationship in order to make a repair. Most of all, it’s involved me learning to regulate the rage and understand my triggers. When I am triggered, I am learning to shift my focus from focusing on the other person’s behavior to focusing on what is being triggered in me. I still set boundaries when I need to, but I realize that we have no control over others. I have come to see that life is our mirror. When we are triggered by someone, we are being given the opportunity to see what remains unhealed.
The more I heal, the more I understand the anger and what it is communicating. The more I understand the message, the less the messenger needs to show up. If someone is angry, know that anger is masking pain. When it comes to anger, being willing to see it as a messenger and look beneath it is the key that unlocks healing. In spiritual circles, my husband and I had what is known as a karmic partnership. A karmic partner is one who is working on the same lessons as you. They are your mirror. Think of it as a theme. Ours was all about anger. Now that the lessons have been learned, our karmic contract is coming to a close.
When we carry the weight of someone else’s dysfunction, trying to fix them, heal them, and put up with behavior that we shouldn't, we do so to our own detriment. Not only that, but we actually enable the other person, and this prevents them from doing the work of healing. That is the essence of codependency: it keeps both parties in chains. I am setting my husband free in hopes that we will break this generational cycle. I fully acknowledge my role and responsibility in this relationship. I had just as much to heal as he did, if not more. But here’s the key difference: My husband spent most of his energy avoiding the pain of healing, projecting it onto me. I am not afraid of pain. I will dive right in because after enduring so much, I know: First the pain, then the rising. So again and again, I dive in, ripping off the proverbial band aids. And with each piece of pain I heal, I put the pieces back together, not only for myself, but for my children.
Since agreeing to separate, we have all agreed to continue practicing RAG (regulate, take accountability, acknowledge each others’ contributions, and practice gratitude). We have now added W for “walk away” when things get heated. The new acronym is WARG. In the fall he will go back to work, and by the spring we will be able to afford two households. He will move into a cottage down the street and will still be a daily fixture in the boys' lives. Over the next nine months, as we birth this new beginning for our family, we’ll be focused on healing while we figure out the financials.
In making this move, literally and figuratively, we’re turning our family’s emotional lead into generational gold. We’re burning down the life we built, but we’re creating fertile soil for new growth on our family tree. From the ashes of our old life, we will rise as we grow together. As we navigate this transition, the boys’ wellbeing is our top priority. And ours matters too. Their peace comes from our peace. The other day I played Hungry Hippo with them. I won three times in a row, prompting our ten-year-old to say “See mom, you’re happy, so the universe is rewarding you with winning. That’s how it works.” Yes, son, that’s exactly how it works.
