In the past 5 years I have shared a little on the disruptions, betrayals and ending of friendships that were very dear and precious to me. Yet I did so only haltingly and while keeping the depth of pain, disappointment and devastation I have felt mostly contained to myself. Not out of fear of burdening you or making myself ‘too’ vulnerable but out of a sense of sacredness of those feelings. They were mine to feel and hold in their entirety and to share them with another necessitated, in my healing phase, a deep degree of intimacy and trust with another as well as the knowing they can and know how to hold this space with me as I was feeling and processing.

Now I feel I have come to the end of said cycle of learning and can more holistically and openly share my experience and process as I stand in a space of enough integration and transformation that I can communicate it in a way that makes this a sharing of medicine and not of distortion or affirmation of imbalance. As I progress on my path I am learning the importance not only of the intention behind my words but also their form and accompanying energy and to hold myself more accountable in being mindful of all three.

Looking back from where I stand now I understand how these 3 friendships ended in a way that opened a gateway to my three core woundings and original trauma triggers:

The first outright abandoned me in a rare and precarious moment I turned to him for help. 

The second crossed boundaries, triggered inadvertently my childhood sexual abuse and manipulations and denied me an opportunity to talk about it and ground myself through reconnecting, co-regulation and save our friendship which was very precious to me. 

The third neglected our relationship, took my being there for her for granted, without any willingness and capacity for reciprocity and distanced herself from intimacy and sharing in a time of extraordinary challenges and hardships in my life.

It is hard to convey in words the depth of abject pain I felt at the betrayal and abandonment, the disorientation, the distrust in my relational system and capacity to choose and cultivate friendships… the regression into the wounded child I was, feeling the vastness of despair, disconnection and loneliness and the need to hold my raging protectors in all their anger, resentment and vengeful feelings. All of which lasted for years.

It is fascinating how I was guided to respond to all three in a unique way and how that staid the same or shifted in unexpected ways. 

The first one I dismissed out of my life without any further communication or attempts at repairing because I sensed the impossibility of it and my total unwillingness to accept that in any of my relationships. If he crossed my path now I would be polite but I would not be open to a reconciliation. Maybe if he led with an embodied apology which expressed in all of his words and actions. And even then, he would have to re-earn my respect and trust which I willfully would not make easy for him.

The second one I unfriended after a period of trying to see them in person and process together what happened and repair the sudden disruption. It was his unwillingness to show up that made me choose to unfriend him although I still loved him deeply and ending the friendship hurt me like little in my life ever managed to hurt me.

The third I didn’t unfriend, I chose to divest my energy and engagement to equal hers and reframe our connection as an acquaintanceship, which is its own kind of ending a friendship in my universe. Though she wanted to repair and work on the friendship, after having gone dark for a long time, I was no longer interested and willing to invest more of my energy. In the grieving process of observing the changes in our connection in the period of her silence I realized a fundamental imbalance in our connection and its inherent limitations. I understood we could not travel into new lands of friendship and connection that were calling me and emerging in my other friendships and connections. And here a rather ruthless aspect of me emerged to insist my energy kept being invested in what was blossoming and not in what has become a part of the past. 

In the past years of tending to my core woundings, confronting my trauma and its distortions to my perceptions and most of all to my relational system I had to get very clear, honest and intentional with how I define relationships, how I am willing to show up and invest in them, where I am unavailable or outright unwilling to engage and where I am willing to extend myself even if it is challenging and painful. These have been years of reclusion and hermiting, pulling back from almost all real life social engagements apart from a select few that made me come out of my shell with their love and persistence. Years of deep contemplative inquiry, shadow work, self love and internal consolidation, while holding my remaining inner circle with as much love and care I could muster.

Now I look back with gratitude and see the immense gift these endings have been, each in its own way was a portal into healing the most armored and tender woundings of my past, initiations into a major part of the integration and healing I needed to bring to my being. The anger and resentment I felt have been transmuted into a changed inner landscape and wonderfully forged, nurtured and cultivated close friendships on whom I know I can rely and lean  and who have been my light in the darkest passages of this journey. The disappointment has been balanced with compassion for their humanity and storylines of trauma and wounding. All that is left in my wounded child and protectors is compassion, love, gratitude for them and a clarity on my needs, wants, desires and boundaries for friendships.

And with that a fundamental shift in my relational system has come about that fills me with amazement and awe as I observe its unfolding and blossoming. 

For most of my life my system could only conceptualize, feel and allow people to be in my life if the connection aligned with my wishes and expectations and if we had a huge falling out it was impossible to repair or reconnect. Now there is a spaciousness in me which can accept and adapt to the shifts of relationships and allow for others to weave in and out of my life within my internal framework of sovereignty and self love. Which means that I need not create strict boundaries and walls to keep people out or in, I trust myself to respond adequately or repair where I stumbled and allow others to do the same as long. I no longer lose sight of my sovereignty, wellbeing and self love in my friendships.

Another gift of this painful cycle is my ability to fully surrender to the leadership of my higher self or soul. A surrender and total trust which allowed me to fully be present and open-hearted with the second friend when he crossed my path a couple of weeks ago. This synchronistic event allowed me to experience the healing of residuals of the above mentioned themes of this cycle with full consciousness in the slow and measured pace of my soul, body and heart. To witness the grace of liberation of past pain and limitations is beyond words. All I verbalize is that I feel a depth of humility and awe for the becoming I am gifting myself, for the blessings I now can fully appreciate in unison of all parts of my being, for the excitement of the possibilities that are opening up and a warm welcome and receptivity for what wants to be born from this.

I have no idea if the reconnection is a process of closure before parting, or if it is the beginning of a new friendship, which may be based on a more conscious and heartful foundation, or whatever else it could be. All I know is that I have grown and get to taste the beauty of freedom and wholeness in sweeter ways than I have ever tasted them in this incarnation. For this I give thanks with all of my being!

So my loves if your friendships break, if people fall away, love yourself into wholeness and sidestep best you can any temptations to frame them as toxic, unworthy or similar. 

See it is our dearest soul kin who will volunteer to teach us our most painful and lessons, not out of negativity but their souls generosity and love toward ours. They avail themselves to enter the field of trauma and take the karma upon themselves of hurting us for our consciousness and soul expansion. I bow to these souls in gratitude and in the knowing of the costly gift they have given me, even if their human expression is unconscious and not capable to show up in the love of their soul essence or if my human decides they no longer have a place in my life.

May our human family evolve into a state where we can co-create our lessons without utilizing pain as the messenger and pathway of learning. And may we be gentle with each other and hone our skills of healing self and our relationships until we get there.

And may we hold the ones who stand by us in loyalty and love with the gentlest and most nurturing embrace and keep showing up for them in all the ways they need. I bow to my beloveds who carried me through this time of pain and healing with their love, presence, compassion, humor, being and radiance. 

The post Friendships, Betrayal, Abandonment, Neglect & Healing into Wholeness appeared first on Venuskind.

At my core I hold a hypersensitive, loving, gentle and guileless little girl believing firmly in the goodness of humanity. These very qualities singled me out and attracted many forms of subtle, overt and pathologically cruel abuse and heaped shame on all of these traits beyond anything I could bear. To the hurt and confused younger versions of my self it felt at as if life was teaching me to drop these aspects of self and so I developed a seemingly powerful outer persona that numbed the sensitive in me to a degree my mind could handle, learning and expressing the ways of unlove like a new language I had to gain fluency in, practicing delighting in harshness and derision of others, cultivating a cold unfeeling capacity for ruthlessness and hyper-vigilant distrust.

In my healing journey of reclaiming said little girl a new layer of shame began to be heaped on all the traits and behaviors I adopted in my survival and moving on from the fear-inducing past. As I reclaimed what lay at my beginning, external voices, once again, shamed the parts of me who helped me survive. Another layer of burden and drama to work through thanks to the ‘good girl’ and ‘love and light’ bias I surrounded myself with in this phase of my life. A growing unease and restlessness kept me looking for the next step of my journey because this felt equally unhealthy and unbalanced as the phase of survival did before.

Enter shadow work and mystical studies to blow dualities and more importantly preferences to smithereens in my mind, then in my emotions and now successively in my body. Nothing about this chapter of healing was and is exactly easy or painless, and yet the pain was ‘just’ the pain of having to let go of lies and misperceptions that had endeared themselves to me and to welcome the unknown in their place. 

And the deeper and more visceral pain of facing the accumulated shame, the pain of titrating in and out of it until I could hold more of it and for longer periods without giving in to the habit of fleeing it, read compensatory avoidant behavior. It took some time to make my peace with a reality in which I can feel shame, around certain things, and can be lovable and beloved to myself and others. To not judge shame or only perceive its corrosive effects and to see equally its natural and helpful manifestations and functions. To end dualities held in the depth of my subconscious, non-verbal conditionings and belief systems.

The Unknown – the ultimate fear fed by the orthodoxy of beliefs, the illusion of knowing what I haven’t experienced, researched, explored or deeply contemplated myself and the fear of ego death. Who would have thought that the unknown has always been my best friend, a space of blissfulness veiled by the nonsensical lies of my conditioning?

I like to think of the Unknown as another word for the Field – the Dark Mother of all that is in form, sound, geometry and light. The first step of the One becoming the many and the last in going from the illusion of separation back into oneness. I like to gender the Unknown as a HER: mystical, nurturing, creative, playful, surprising and loving from a non-dual perception and manifesting vantage point. 

When I allowed my mind to explore many a rabbit hole or alternative narrative about reality (which some like to label as conspiracy theory in their varying levels of cognitive dissonance), she sat by my side and watched me get drawn into dark and light narratives, snagging here getting entangled there, struggling to grasp the reality of multidimensional concurrent realities feeling my human captivated by some and their strange effects on my biology. When it got intense she would tap on my shoulder and let me gaze deep into her luminous darkness as she smiled at my slow disentanglement and transformation. 

I owe her my freedom from energy sucking entanglements and the clarity that arose with blinding light from the depth of her darkness and I delight in the laughter we shared about my slowness and blindness to fact that fear of the unknown was what allowed for entanglement and entrapment in limiting narratives about life. 

She taught me to dance through and across narratives, to dip my feet, to swim and dive deep into them without losing my perspective or anchored vantage point of not knowing. To entertain ideas which align or contradict with no attachment but with all the more joy and creative playfulness. To be free from the egoic need for certainty, absolute truisms and setting myself apart from others by virtue of illusions of absolute knowing. 

She reminded me to enjoy this ‘soul playground’ and helped me develop new skills of engaging and interacting with it from spaciousness and with bliss.

I bow to the plentiful gifts of embracing the unknown, of letting the dark mother hold me and inspire me through changes and evolutions, to her gifts of expansion to my consciousness and to her mysteries that shall remain untouched by me in this timeline. 

In gratitude to all that is unfolding as I dance with my fellow travelers across timelines, dimensions, incarnations, narratives, system and cultures with lightness, ease and grace!

Art: “Ms. Universe” by Jessi Jumanji

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I love this little girl with all my being and will gladly let go of anyone who hurts her and doesn’t hear her. She will always be my priority and beloved, all other relationships in my life will be secondary to her.

As we have come a long way I had to apologize for failing her more than I like, yet I am getting better at understanding her needs, honoring her boundaries, moving at her pace while teaching her about my adult perceptions and insights about the world and reframing beliefs and experiences to reveal their exciting possibilities and gifts.

We live in gratitude, magic, miracles and endless blessings and treasures of life as intuition and spirit guide us.
We love easily, generously and freely and live in the belief that everything is possible in life. We have learned to intuit the level of flow, inner peace and ease we need to cultivate and nourish in order to be open to the bounty of life.
We are getting better at discerning who comes to us as a catalyst or teacher for a short while and who is meant to stay by our side..
We have amazing and inspiring people in our lives, whose inner children have become beloved play mates and co-creators of fabulous experiences and much admired fellow journeyers in this life.
We keep meeting wonderful and expansive new people, always open to include more into our tribe as we are open to let them go when our time has come to an end.

How blessed we are to have this loving and caring relationship after all the pain, separation and unlove we experienced… I am feeling very proud of my little girl and my primary relationship.

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Photo by Jan C. Schlegel – Alitash (9), Hamer tribe, Ethiopia

In the Hamar language, Alitash’s name means: “I never want to loose you, whenever I look for you may I find you again always. You are a precious treasure.”

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