Trying to heal from my past

'There is something wrong with you.'

I have heard this sentence too many times from a few persons that are/were close to my heart. Did they mean it? Yes. Did they try to hurt me with it? Yes. Did they manage to break me down? Yes. Did I listen to them like their words are the words of God? Yes. Did I believe them? Yes. Am I still believing the words that they said? Yes. Did I know they were hurt and tried to put their pain on me? No. Do I know this now? Yes. While knowing this, does it make me disbelieve their words, and is the pain around it leaving? No.

I am still caring about the pain of those words because time heals wounds, but it takes time. Those scares are reopened because of the unhealthy, abusive relationship I had from the age of 21 years old to 24 years old. It broke my heart when I was able to admit that I found a similar abusive love relationship while being on the other side of the world. It took me a while to admit it because I wanted to believe that I could heal him or help him with his hatred towards himself. Once again, I came to release that you can’t help someone who doesn’t want to help themselves. The relationship started so beautifully, but it ended with both of us being so toxic for each other. Right now, I go back in my mind and give that version of myself a big hug while saying oh, little Amber dry your tears, and don’t you worry there will be a time and place where you don’t need to listen to those toxic words anymore. There will be moments that prove those words wrong. People are loving you for being so special, there are lovely people who don’t yell and blame you for being alive. You will heal bit by bit, and you will realize that there will be a time and place where you let nobody speak to you like that anymore.

I was so ashamed when I arrived back in Belgium as a 24-year-old with no money, no goals, no place to call home, more unhealed scars, and once again another fuck-up view on how ugly other people show me how they ‘love’. I did so much self-reflection and worked so hard on myself to bit by bit love myself a little more. This experience made me feel that a million steps I manage to get forward were gone, and I was back at the start. Because how could it be that even I, with the knowledge I have, got again a relationship where I thought I deserved that. Every relationship I had started or broke down with toxicity. From someone that yelled at me for not believing I was raped, to someone who cheated on me, to someone who only looked at himself, to someone who mentally and emotionally abused me. Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying I was an angel in each relationship because I am also accepting the fact that I have my toxic traits too and because of my experiences in life, I have different ways of dealing with stuff that could have affected them. And I am not saying that it was all toxicity because I did experience beautiful moments and after all, it made me into the person I am today. So, I am grateful for all the positive and negative traits of my ex-partners. I do stand by the fact that I have given them my way of loving to the fullest because they came into my heart. And when I realized I came close to given toxicity as I have known from my youth, I changed that. I started early with a promise to myself and the people I love that I wouldn’t give them anything similar to what I have known as a child because that isn’t who I am. I am a loving, warm person who has so much positive energy to give and everybody deserves to be loved the right way. Do they realize this? I am not sure, what I do realize now is that none of them understood my way of loving them. Maybe because they didn’t love themselves that much, or maybe because they judge themselves more instead of loving themselves. Love is something you do not need to explain to someone. When you feel love and when you acknowledge love, you do not want to hurt the person you love. When you love yourself to the fullest, you don’t want to hurt yourself.

24 years old and there I was yelling at my mom that it was unfair for her to act like there was something wrong with me while she did not even try to listen to my wounds. That even if there was something wrong with me, I have felt those emotions, I have listened to those words, I have attracted a man who said those ugly abusive words to me similar like she did while I grew up. I told her it was unfair that I can not even speak up about my pain to her without being called crazy or having the words ‘you are good at always imagining things.’ I broke down in front of her because my inner child is in so much pain. Because the pain of my inner child goes back from the relationship of an unhealed parent who has so much self-hate from before I was born. The pain that my mother carries since she was a child has never been healed. She passed down that hate and pain to me while saying that I can’t know how much pain she is in. I have seen her anger, her pain, and her sadness. I have seen what it did to my mother. Furthermore, I have seen how she couldn’t handle it and tried to find so many ways to forget it. I have felt how she blamed it on me from time to time. I was there from that tiny little egg to the woman I am today. Furthermore, I can not tell you how many times I cried for my family’s pain or someone else’s family’s pain that passed through me. It has been a lot. I am a sensitive person, which means that I am aware of the energies around me and I feel the emotions people go through even without them telling me about it.

While writing this, I have tears in my eyes because there are a few sentences that my ex-partner yelled at me that I can’t forget even though I know that it isn’t true. When his anger and stress were high, he yelled for hours the ugliest things at me. He hated the way I am, what I believed in was bullshit, I wasn’t able to do anything (without him), … He knew my scares, looked at them, and reopened my wounds to use them against me. When he was in a happy mood, I was the best that has ever happened to him, and he admired the floor I walked on. Every single day, I woke up with almost a confession on how much he loved me and how beautiful I am. In the beginning, he didn’t show his anger that much to me, but then it changed to now and then, and at the end of our relationship, he lost it at least 3 times a week. That was one of the reasons why I couldn’t admit for a long period that he was emotional and mentally abusive towards me. Because he made me believe that he was able to give ‘real’ love to me after breaking me down. Your body and mind are so powerful. Try to never forget that! My mind and body were trying to protect me from his anger. I broke down so many times to pick myself back up from the pain of his words. I am so proud that I did find my power to get back up until I couldn’t anymore. I am so proud that my body did communicate with me, even though I misunderstood it back then. Right now it makes so much sense but back then I was believing his words. The more he threw his anger at me, the less I wanted to have sex. ‘It isn’t normal that you don’t want to have sex.’ ‘It isn’t normal that you don’t like porn.’ You have been raped, so there is something wrong with you.’

Having sex with someone is something so sacred. You share every single energy that you have inside you with each other. It is called making love for a reason. When a woman feels good around the person she loves, she loves to make love with that person. There are so many emotions and hormones involved in making love. It took me time to release that my body and mind didn’t want to have sex with someone who called himself a man, who spilled so many toxic words to me. First, I believed that there was something wrong with me for having any sexual desire or not wanting to be sexually active. I never had any issue with having sex. I was very sexually active, and I knew how to enjoy it. I enjoy talking about sex too. Being raped hit me in many ways, but it never affected me on me being sexually active. So there I was, being 22 years old and struggling with being sexually active. I started to do some research, and I came to the information that a lot of women have at least once in their lives an experience that they aren’t sexually active anymore. It can depend on so many factors like hormones, pregnancies, trauma, childbirth, and different emotions. So if you do experience this, don’t put too much pressure on yourself it can happen, and you are not alone while experiencing this, and don’t feel ashamed for this experience. I thought okay, there is something wrong with me because I believed his words, so let’s work out what is wrong with me. It let me make decisions which I am still so proud of because it brought me closer to my natural being. I started to do some research about birth control, I talked with women who stopped taking birth control and how it positively affected them. So there, I found out that having those extra chemical hormones makes a major effect on women without being told how much it impacts us. Apart from not getting pregnant (which there are other ways too) it disturbs your natural cycle, and it brings so many negative effects on a woman’s mind and body. I didn’t even know how that taking birth control has such a deep effect on us. If you don’t have any idea about this, please do your research because everywhere on earth women are having issues with it. It even changes your taste in man. My biggest experience from stopping birth control is that I finally could rest without blaming myself. I came to realize that I always felt pressured with those extra hormones. It makes so much sense that while being a teenager and getting extra hormones that I couldn’t understand myself. All those extra emotions on top of the ones you experience are driving women insane. It takes you away from being able to listen and understand your body and mind. It takes you away from being able to make the magic of experiencing those lovely natural cycles. There is so much power in our natural cycles. I changed from being the young teenager who was happy to not get her periods while having an IUD to being a young woman who finally started to understand that being a woman is so powerful because we have a womb. A womb has magic inside it, it gives you so much power, ideas, and it can create a human life. I am so grateful that I’ve experienced all of this which got me closer to being more connected with my womb.

Of course, it had something to do with me being disconnected from my womb that I let a man speak to me like that. But because I was still growing and finding things out, I didn’t realize it yet. I blamed myself for not being sexually active. I believed the words, ‘You have been raped, so there is something wrong with you.’ If someone else told me that someone said this to them, I would be so angry and feel their pain because there isn’t something wrong with someone who got raped. All the different emotions and experiences that they experience are ‘normal’. Something so sacred has been touched by negative energy. There is something wrong with people who rape others. To blame someone who has been raped is ridiculous and unfair because we didn’t want to experience this nor have the effects of it. In my case, being on birth control, being raped, and not loving myself got me being disconnection from my womb for years. There isn’t anything ‘wrong’ with me for not wanting to have sex with someone who tried to blame me for it. Not wanting to have sex with anybody, even your partner, is your right. There is nobody who is allowed to blame you for it, everyone deserves that respect because it is your choice what you do with your body. If your body and mind are telling you no, I hope you understand it and try to listen to it.

They say that the healthy relationship after the toxic one is the hardest one, and I get where it is coming from. It isn’t that it is the most difficult one in being together because it is the most natural one. But it is hard because mentally you come to realize how you let yourself be treated so wrong in the past. While realizing this, wounds are getting open and healed in ways I couldn’t imagine before. A healing process isn’t easy, it is difficult. I am so grateful that everything happened the way it happened, otherwise I wouldn’t have crossed paths with my healthy, lovely partner. He understands the way I love, and I understand the way he loves me. No explanation is needed. He respects me and I respect him. We communicate about everything without one toxic word involved. If he didn’t come on my path, I wouldn’t have known that there was someone like him in this universe that is so peaceful, open, loving, and positive who could love me as I love him. It is true what they say, you know when it is the right one standing by your side. You feel it inside and everything goes with the flow.

Some people don’t know this, and I am happy for them that they don’t know this, but it is a reality that when you have a history of any abuse you can not erase it from your past. You can heal, and it doesn’t need to be a part of who you are anymore, but it did make you into the person you are now. It is part of your past, something that you can’t leave in the past. It is something that you will always carry with you because it isn’t something that you can click on a button that makes it disappear. No, it did happen. It is something so difficult to accept as an experience to be grateful for because there is so much pain, anger, and trauma-related to any abuse. The more time passes the more you won’t heal, grow, self-reflect, and experience different things the more you can accept the path you have walked to get here and experience the new beautiful, healing, loving experiences. When you find a way bit by bit in loving yourself and trying to better your life, a more loving experience will come on your path.

So here I am, going through the healing of pain I didn’t even realize I had. Being grateful for my history, being grateful for the toxicity, and still having unhealed traumas. And that’s okay, when the body and mind went through a lot, you have to give yourself time to heal. Open your mind up and give your body the peace it deserves. Acknowledge your emotions, realize that you aren’t the emotion, and find the reason behind why you are feeling that way. Keep that mirror in front of yourself and go back to the inner core of your being. Look at who you are and not what people yelled at you. Being you isn’t related to those evil words that people yelled at you. You are light, you are love, and you are lovable. Being yourself makes you, you. Being grateful for your growing process, your healing process, your pain, and your happiness is a big part of accepting yourself. Accept your own negative and positive vibes and keep your arms around you. You deserve to love yourself. You deserve to breathe. You deserve to take time. You deserve peace. You deserve to believe in yourself. You deserve yourself.

02/01/2022