Tour Guide Through Hell

I know it’s been said a thousand times in a thousand ways. If your struggling to get out of a toxic relationship, if you are doubting yourself and questioning everything you ever understood to be true. Read on.

I want to share a few parts of my survival story with you today Some history of where the awareness I possess comes from, and the perspective I have cultivated. A year ago this month, I was ready to die. I was so hopeless and broken and battered. So disillusioned by the people I had in my life. I didn’t think it was possible for a person’s mental state to get any lower.

Then shit got real...I learned what I thought was the worst possible of situations wasn’t even close. It had just been conditioning. I was about to learn what it really meant to suffer. Guess what? I learned alright, and I survived! If your struggling, I want you to survive too. I want you to at least have an itty-bitty spec of possibility flying in the air around you somewhere that tells you maybe just maybe this crazy gypsy is right. That’s the first step.

Now, I have been working intensively on my recovery, something I started about 2 years ago. I started (and stopped and started) often, but I became fully committed to my healing and emotional well being about 4 months before I separated from my husband. There was a lot of stops and starts with the separation too. I was digging deep, trying to find the will to survive. I finally did managed to crawl out of that wreckage with my life intact, but it was no longer a life I recognized. I was, I am, damaged goods to say the least. My marriage ended tragically. Not just my marriage, my entire reality had ended. I honest to God thought no human on earth could survive this. Especially one in the condition I was in.

I do believe knowledge is power and I love to learn. I figured if there was a way to survive, if someone had been where I am, and lived to tell the tale, then the tale must be searchable on the internet. I dove head first into learning all I could about what I was dealing with and how to survive. Slowly the time I spent crying on the floor became less, and the time I spent feeling human, a little more.

This shift started so small, an almost undetectable light that began to emerge in me. Then it grew. For me, this shift was the difference between life and death. For me, it was a tiny glimmer of hope in what felt like an entirely hopeless world. The human spirit is amazing. I had little more than a memory of faith, and a glimmer of hope. Those 2 things, as faint as they were, I had tucked away inside of me. Turns out that combination is magic. When combined, you have what it takes to survive anything. It may be messy, God knows, my life was the atom bomb of messy, but I SURVIVED.

I won’t be going into a whole lot of details of the abuse I endured. Honestly, we can compare notes later. In short, I grew up with a narcissistic mother, and then ended up in 3 marriages that ran the spectrum of abuse. Mix that in with overwhelming trauma’s of various natures and you got yourself a professional survivor. I understand the feelings of hopeless, broken, overwhelmed, and weak. So low your not even sure if you want to survive, let alone believing there is a way. I really want you to be okay. I am new at this blog thing, but after having to overcome so many things in my life, I want you to know, that you can get through this, you can survive. My heart hurts for anyone that is in that dark place I so recently lived in.

Anyone who has endured and survived an abusive relationship of any kind deserves not just a medal of honor, but a Nobel Peace Prize and the winning lotto ticket. Seriously. Abuse is deadly. Your everyday life is a war zone. Every moment spent trying to avoid a landmine.

The majority of my most recent experience is emotional and psychological abuse. Keep in mind any physically abusive relationship has no small degree of emotional and psychological abuse included. Psychological abuse is the kind of abuse that bends your mind and perception in ways that no Hollywood director could even hope to duplicate. It will take you to the brink of holy terror and insanity. Surviving, without your mind turning to complete and permanent jelly, your self-worth and outlook on life damaged beyond repair, is an amazing fete. If this is you, make no mistake, you are defiantly award worthy.

Educate yourself. Not all abusive and toxic people are full on narcissists or sociopaths. They may not have a diagnosed personality disorder. That doesn’t mean you try and wait it out, you cant fix them. It is important you know the tactics used and the symptoms. It will help you recognize it as it’s happening. It will help you to stop feeling crazy. It will cause the abuser to loose their power over you. Once you can recognize it, you will stop taking it in. That is how you get strong enough to get free.

Ignorance is the deadliest of errors I’ve learned, when you’re dealing with toxic people and those that cannot love.

When my husband, due to addiction, turned on me, it was almost impossible to wrap my head around what was happening. I could not make the reality of what I was seeing with my eyes match the love I believed with all my heart that my husband had for me. I’m not talking about simple denial here. I was suffering from a bad case of cognitive dissonance that threatened to split my mind in two. I had never heard that term before and I didn’t have a clue what was happening to me. Growing up with a narcissistic mother I did know intellectually that people could say they love you and still do terrible things to you. It’s one thing to know this logically, it’s another to accept it is happening to you. Especially in a case like mine, where I had believed in his love and devotion to me for almost 20 years, even before we were together I believed I was so special to him, that he could never hurt me. What he was putting me through I just couldn’t process. Slowly I began to accept it. Had I not, I would have continued to believe hopelessly in his traps of air. Kept prisoner by his invisible words. In the end, because of the lies he spread and the mental state I was in, I lost everyone in my life. I had nobody left to turn to. There was nobody around to pull me away. The small bit of hope I found online, learning about what was happening to me kept a faint, almost imperceptible whisper in the back of my mind. It was telling me “your better than this, it isn’t true, GET OUT.”

I want to point out something I did discover on my journey to becoming a bon-a-fide world class expert in the inner workings of some of the world’s most devious and manipulative minds(not really but I feel like it sometimes). I do not believe all toxic or manipulative people are intentionally out to get you. Some are just really broken and unaware of their truth. They don’t have a clue of the pain they leave behind them. Not every toxic relationship you have experienced or observed is due to innately evil intentions. That is far too wide of a brush to paint all damaged souls with.

We could, and many of us do, dig into the reasons those that are hurting us are the way they are. We want to find out the original trauma or neglect that shaped their poor young mind. At this point, I would really advise against it. Let me be blunt. Nothing you learn about their past can heal them. Nothing you learn about their past can heal you. Trying to dig into their past and heal their wounded inner child is only going to trigger your loving and nurturing instincts to save them. You will start thinking things like "It’s not their fault, if I can just love them through this..." Let me tell you something. That’s bullshit. Ninja those thoughts out of your head. Don’t go down that crappy rabbit hole. Its not where you find anything good. You know what’s down that hole? Hell. That’s the hell hole, stay away. If you start empathizing with them and feeling bad for them you know what else will happen? They are now free to spend even more of their time and energy living however they want and caring even less about what you think of it. Why? They don’t have to waste as much of their time twisting you all up because you have just twisted up yourself! Now your keeping yourself hooked! We know toxic people generally only do things if they get something out if it. Getting better means you have time to heal and will probably leave, but staying toxic means your around trying to save them. Do we really think anything is going to get better?? No!! If you want an inner child to heal, guess what? You got your own. Decide your inner child is the most important one to heal (and the only one you can heal for the record) and then leave. You will have to leave. There is no time for you to heal anything when you are dealing with toxic people!

Whatever kind of broken you feel you are, no matter if your pain is caused by a lover, a parent, a friend, or even your child. You can’t fix them. It’s never going to happen. Ever. They will have moments where they seem like it all has clicked. Then morning comes, or a week goes by and amnesia sets in. You will be on that hamster wheel as long as you allow them to keep spinning you on it. It won’t stop until you jump off and STAY AWAY! Stay away and don’t look back.

For those who are familiar with the bible, remember the story of Lot and his wife? She was told not to look back or else. She looked back anyway and got turned into a pillar of salt. Don’t do that. How about just this one time, even though it’s against human nature, let’s just learn from someone else’s journey. Think about it, if it was possible to pay someone to give you a tour through hell, would you buy a ticket? There are plenty of us that have been there. You don’t need to go deeper to make it real. You don’t have to wait until its bad enough or has been going on long enough to justify leaving. Your standards and self-worth should say I’m leaving this just got bad, not I’ll stay until it’s too bad. If you really feel like you need to experience all the levels of hell, I can paint you a vivid picture. Consider a verbal recap. I can sit down with you and tell you all about my adventures, show you pictures and souvenirs and everything. You don’t need to spend anymore time there yourself. You don’t need to explore every level and all it can offer. Truth be told I’d far rather give you a tour through my new world. A world of peace and joy, and strength and sleep!

If you are in any stage of the leaving process. If you are just wrapping your head around the fact that you have to leave. If you are out of the relationship but wavering. If you are far along in your healing journey but find yourself allowing nostalgia to creep back in softening your resolve. Stop second guessing yourself and keep moving forward. Your soul knows the truth, you can’t stuff it down without doing serious damage to yourself, trust me. If your feeling lost, not sure which direction your facing or even if your right side up. Let me point you forward. Forward is the dead opposite direction of the toxic person or people in your life. Turn and walk away.

I don’t care right now if you have made one step towards the idea of leaving, or 20 leaps and are almost out the door. All that really matters is the next step you take is in the same direction. Run there, crawl, inch your way to freedom if you need to. Only you can choose the speed in which you take these steps, just don’t forget the direction your going. Follow the light my friend. We are all waiting here on the other side, with puppies, rainbows, butterflies and margaritas! We are over here skipping through meadows and shit waiting for you!

With love and hope,

The Calé Princess