We all have a “toxic ex”.
Someone who triggers us even beyond the timelines.
Avoiding them is probably the only answer - because in moments of weakness, we’d just fall back into the loop, given the chance…
*
Past 2 years I’ve been on a slow burn rollercoaster ride with one of these “ghosts”.*
[*and I’m calling it a ghost because it has mainly been a relating with their absence, from afar, a fantasy of what-could-be, rather than a reality. But also because ghosts don’t rest, they haunt us, they come back time after time, sometimes in another form, but always with a message or a reflection of the past… an injustice of some kind.
I’ll return to this at the end.]
The sudden trickle of a message like “I want you now” is enough to set me off.
It’s my weakness, my crack, when someone is so far in their own loops of distance and pushing me away - I love to hate it, I yearn to fix it, it makes me want to pour out all my top shelf loving on them, it rubs on that deep wound of my father’s abandonment, over and over and over…
I am aware how toxic this behavior is.
And I choose it every time.
Addiction is addiction, whether it is a substance, or a person - of the feeling itself.
This is how attachment wounds are - we find them in those intense, lightning strike connections that we cannot help but pursue.
Yet, it’s just like a drug addiction - it feels so meant to be.
It touches such a deep part of my heart, it makes me feel alive.
I get to be that little girl waiting, hoping, wanting for daddy to return.
Forever and ever and ever.
And it is always projected onto someone who has an incredibly low capacity to meet me in my emotions. In fact, they run from communication. Of course they still feel it all - but RUN from any actual commitment, connection or healthy relating…
I have been through this fairytale healing fantasy numerous times, in big and small forms.
I know we all have our toxic infatuations - they feel so good and are so bad for us…
And quitting it (which always eventually we must) is like going to rehab.
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