A boundary or a prison wall?

During a trip to Peru a few years ago, a shaman told me that it was perfectly normal to close off your heart after a loss or a traumatic experience but he quickly caveated the statement with, just don’t forget to truly live you have to remember to open it back up.

His words at the time felt like the lovely blanket of permission at the time so closing my heart became the secured and locked doorway for me to go inside to sit with all of the hurt, with the chaos that had been my life for so long when you love and live with someone who was struggling with an alcohol addiction. You just want to be the choice they make and yet they struggle with any choice other than the hold that alcohol has on them. It is heartbreaking to watch someone want to show up so fully to just fall prey to the desire to drink again. It is heartbreaking to see the cycle of it, to know what is coming, to wonder if this time there will be a “rock bottom” and to always worry if that rock bottom will include some event that might also swallow you whole. This is the traumatic experience of living and loving an alcoholic.

It is why, I had to make the hardest decision of my life and that was to leave, to save myself while the whole time praying with everything I had that my leaving would be his rock bottom. You see I loved him, I could see his potential, I was deeply in love with the man but I was even more deeply in love with his potential.

Being in love with someone’s potential is a false kind of love, loving a future that doesn’t exist and may never exist.

I was fooling myself, yes, I left but did I really save myself if all I did was move away and continue to nurture the love for his potential. Well, death become my biggest teacher, his death forced me to grieve both him and his potential. So I encased my heart, brick by brick like a security blanket and I went inside.

These last years of learning to take care of me, learning to live in a peaceful life everyday. Learning to trust that I could live everyday not worrying about what shoe might drop. I needed to learn how to put myself first. As this new life that I have created has developed into ground that feels solid under my feet, as my own life and its rhythm feel like a normal that I can rely upon I have begun to be plagued by a question, will I be able to lay down the bricks and open my heart again if the opportunity were to come along?

Frankly, this question terrifies me more than any other journey I have had to take. It crushed me to lose him, to process that kind of grief, it was terrifying to choose the move to France not knowing if I could make it work but each of these things as scary as they were I knew as I took each tiny baby step I would gain confidence and over time each step would become easier but this, this journey of opening my heart again. This journey requires me to look at each brick that I have laid around my heart, which of those bricks are appropriately there, reminding me to not sacrifice myself for another, those bricks protecting my sovereignty are necessary and important. Will I be able to discern those bricks from the bricks that I have laid keeping another out, the impermeable armor.

I know that in order to truly and deeply connect to another person, this requires putting down the armor and allowing some of those bricks to be permeable. This is the question that I am sitting with, can I trust myself to lay down the armor allowing my heart to be permeable again, while ensuring I care and maintain my sovereignty. Walls and armor or sovereignty with connection?

These are the questions that I am currently sitting with in my journal, they are the mirror to my own healing, perhaps they may be the same for you.

• What boundaries do you have around your heart?
• Are those boundaries protecting your sovereignty or an armor keeping you from connection?
• What is the next tiny step that you can take to lay down your armor?

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In love,

Renee