My Marriage as a Container for Healing
Right off the bat, I am going to say that I don’t claim to know anything other than what I think I know right now. This perspective can change, as can my opinion about it, as early as tomorrow. This is because things are constantly in flux, constantly dying and being reborn, and new dimensions of a situation can always open to reveal that the situation is actually something completely different than what I think I know to be true. The outcome of the situation I describe below is still unknown and I am unattached to it, as I must be with all things. My goal here is to offer a lens for others to view situations from a new dimension (perspective) and allow it to help them in their own lives.
Over the last few months, my husband and I have been working with a relationship coach who has been injecting some crazy Medicine into our mix. I thought we were just going to learn some new tools, but instead, everything has been shredded to pieces and massive wounding has been revealed. I did not even know our relationship was stalled out (stuck) until we started working with her! One of the things that have become very clear is that our relationship is not what I thought it was – it is not me and him living our happily ever after. One where we adore one another and co-parent our kids with ease. It’s a sacred contract that we made with each other to co-create a container for healing work. A container where he and I both get the healing we need in this lifetime. Can those two things happen in the same relationship? I have no idea, but I can tell you that I am not getting both right now lol.
The hard pill to swallow with this knowledge is that once this healing work between us is complete, the relationship may very well be done. Immediately in figuring this out, everything I think I know about “what it means to be married” is shattered and my heart feels completely broken. It’s been a hard six months.
Knowing this potential outcome sometimes feels like a curse, as does most things I know as a psychic/seer. I see the timelines and the potential outcomes of many things. I know our chances of a “happily ever after”. I know that I will proceed through these challenging times only to find out that our relationship may come to an end sooner than “til death do us part”. Do you mean to tell me that marriage isn’t forever? But we have kids, I put in so much work, the sex is so good, I am so comfortable with him… What the fuck!
Yea, this is pretty vulnerable stuff I am talking about here. It’s not something we say out loud often.
This story is easy to tell while looking backward because we are no longer in the thickest of the sauce. Early in our relationship, we treated one another the exact way that would cause us to have our childhood trauma or core beliefs about ourselves triggered. Once something is triggered in a person, it has the opportunity to come to the surface for release and healing. In our case, neither of us let the trauma come up for healing, we chose to stuff it down further into the depths of our being. For me, it was through avoidance, and for him, it was through flat-out denial. It wasn’t until I started working with Plant Medicine did these things start to come up for me to be healed. Once the bulk of my shit had been looked at, and I had the majority of my inner power restored, my husband started to have all of his come up for processing. Since the beginning, all those feelings of resentment and rage toward each other had been stored deep, festering, causing illness in the body, and would have led to very serious health problems if it had not been released.
Fun Shaman Fact: This is what I see causes the majority of cancers and many other health conditions – the putrefying or calcifying of emotions that need to be expressed/released but haven’t. Sometimes these things are from when we were in utero, in early childhood, or even as an adult. I have even seen it as not even ours, but our mother’s or father’s unprocessed stuff we have agreed to carry forward. Everyone has this to some degree, and I mean everyone. I see most commonly those unprocessed emotions cause fibromyalgia, intestinal issues, cancer, autoimmune disease, bad breath, and seriously most other things. I can often see this clearly in people when I lay my hands on their bodies and this is what I summon out of them in my Ceremonies. I can look at a person’s stomach and the body will tell me – this person has resentful feelings they need to express and if they don’t, they will eventually get stomach cancer. I see unprocessed emotions as being the number one cause of illness and disease.
Anyway, back to the relationship.
About two months ago, during the depths of my own personal shamanic death, something shifted for me in my relationship. Although I had been working on myself and had been devoted to my husband for many years now, I realized that I never actually chose to be with him. I always had a backup plan if things went south and never gave myself over 100% by choosing to be with him and accepting that we would be together forever. It was only 99%. We were talking about this one night, and he explained to me how this wasn’t a question for him. He always knew that we were in it for good, he had no plan b. This blew my mind! During the next week, I mulled over what he had said and made the decision to fully commit to our marriage – something I thought I did a long time ago.
And of course, making that choice to be “all in” is what caused things to shift like never before. This is a life lesson I don’t want you to skim over – be all in or don’t be in at all. Standing around complaining about our circumstances is a way to keep yourself in the position of victim. Either do it or don’t, but stop complaining about it, instead, accept it fully one way or another. Living in this place this will change your life in ways you cannot imagine. It may start with something like your marriage, but it will quickly branch out to all areas of your life and spread like wildfire. Once you see this scenerio clearly, you can't unsee it.
When I went all in, something magical happened and the relationship became a mirror for me. All of a sudden, I could see all the places where I was not taking responsibility for my feelings and was instead projecting them on my husband. I could see that I was keeping myself a circumstantial victim, or standing in the threshold of two things, unwilling to cross over to one side either way.
I actually created a visual for this when it came to me, and I am going to share it here. Charts, lists, and visuals always help me digest information or see it in a new way so I can figure it out:
Not Choosing to be all in This represents being disempowered, a victim of your circumstances, or taking on a passive role in your life. You are not in charge, the things around you are.
I am judging my husband constantly.
I keep feeling and talking like I want to leave, but not enough to act on it. This is triggering him and keeping me stuck.
Frustration.
I accuse him of making me feel ______.
I constantly think one of us “is the problem”.
I want things about him to change, like his ability to toss me around during sex, to be more romantic, to be more considerate, to compliment me more about the way I look, etc.
Choosing to be all in This represents being empowered, making choices, and playing an active role in your life. You decide how your life will look.
Fully choose to leave or to stay and accept everything that comes with it.
Owning my feelings as mine, not as something he caused me.
Seeing all judgments as projections as judgments I actually have about myself.
Love and acceptance all around for things exactly as they are. This allows me to hold space for him when needed and feel fulfilled by Nadia.
I understand that I need to give the things I want to myself. Do I want romance? Create it. Do I need complements? Dish them out to myself. Do I want a stronger man or do I really want to lose weight but haven’t accepted it fully?
Once this stuff shifted, I started processing emotions rapidly and what was once stuck is no longer. It made room for other things to move. Things feel easier to identify and less confusing overall for me. Now when a big thing happens, I identify that I am feeling _______, I move through it, and then it passes. I am no longer turning it outwards onto my partner, blaming him, and everything becomes an opportunity to heal.
But now we have reached a deeper layer. One that goes underneath the needs that are now being met by self. One that is a separate category of “this is what I want and need from a partner — not because I need it from them, but because this is what I want”. And shit has hit the fan. How deep does this healing process go?
It is a common thing for people to complain about their partner not doing enough and it is likely that they are not taking responsibility for their end of this deal. This is part of the victim energy that we all carry. Either it’s not enough and we are ready to leave — or we accept that they will never give us enough and we stay. A partner can only step up where we allow them to and if they are not, we must be looking at ourselves for the answer. If we are stuck in a trauma cycle or parent/child cycle with our partner, it’s because we are feeding that cycle too, not because our partner “is the problem”. If we aren’t getting what weneed, we must ask ourselves where we can give these things to ourselves.
Now, once you reach the bottom of that spiral, what sits below it?
So my question to you, dear reader, is where are you doing this in your life? Is it in your relationship? Is it somewhere else? Where are you straddling two worlds and keeping yourself stuck or in a circumstantial victim state but not choosing something 100%? If the ability to choose is power, where are you keeping yourself powerless?
These days I find myself wondering if this is the only thing a relationship really is. Is a relationship simply a container for healing? Is a marriage actually just a binding contract where we agree to stay in it to help ourselves and our chosen partner to heal, no matter how hard it is? Why are we taught that relationships are something different in all the movies and books? Or is this simply one kind of a relationship that is available to us if we should choose to accept the healing journey? Are there others? Can you have more types with the same person?
I have so many questions and so few answers!
Right now, I have to be content with not knowing the answer to these questions and just keep moving forward one day at a time, consciously choosing to be present for whatever is in store for me, regardless of the outcome. This is the only way to move through life.
I would absolutely love to hear thoughts and comments below. What do you think?
