The Catalyst for Awakening: What Do You Do With The Dark Night of the Soul?

She stared at the pair of sea-shell pink panties, silky soft and sexy.  She didn’t know why she had kept them for so long.  She knew they were not hers.  She believed him when he told her that he didn’t know.  She believed many things he told her, all of the things, because she wanted to, because not believing would make her a fool.

But it was the opposite.  It was the believing that made her the fool.

There were many opportunities for her to beat herself up about it, now that she really took a good look at their relationship.  She remembered the first time he lied to her when she asked if he’d been with anyone else and he said he hadn’t, but she’d tasted another woman on him when she went down.

He was charming, seductive, well-respected, well-spoken, intelligent and oh-so-very-confident.  She liked that about him.  She liked how much attention he would give to her, how he would call her several times throughout the day, always so interested in her and getting very upset when she did not answer her phone.  He would call again and again, repeatedly, sometimes more than a dozen times until she answered.  He told her in a rushed voice laced with worry and crisp with anger, “I thought you were dead in a ditch!”  She made sure to always have her phone with her so that she could answer when he called, so that he would not have to worry about her.  She was thankful for the attention, the overt concern.  It made her feel special, desired, cared for, protected, loved.

That’s all she really wanted and that was what she was willing to give.

It was not too long into their relationship that he got fired again for looking at porn while at work.  This was the second job in a row she knew of that had let him go for the same reason.  He told her that he had decided to start his own business instead of trying to find another job, that he wanted to make lots of money, that social service jobs were not going to get him there. 

She was excited and grateful to be on this new adventure with him of starting a business together.  Well, it was his business, but it was their family business, too.  It meant that life would change and they would be birthing something together.  This would be their baby, because he never wanted to have children with her.  He’d gotten the surgery to prevent that from happening a month prior to their wedding.  He said he did not want to contribute to the over population of the world.  She loved the surety he had about things like that.  It was the strength of character she was looking for in a mate: a man of integrity, honor and love for humanity and the world at large, someone to stand with proudly in the battle against greed and corruption, someone to mirror her own heart.

She continued to work full time in social work while he worked part time with a person with disabilities in the community and part time working on building his business.  It was how they’d met: they both were “doing good” for the world by working as county employed case managers and privately hired mental health professionals supervising those who worked with the disabled in the community.  She loved the challenges it presented to her, regardless of the high stress and low wages, for she knew she was making active, positive differences in people’s lives.  She took her job seriously and because of her personality, dedication and skill-set, was very, very good at her job. 

So good, that she began to become burned out by the things she was witnessing- how people would exploit each other and use the system, how she was asked to overlook accountability measures when she brought them up, how she got reassigned the staff she was supposed to be supervising when she looked too deeply and asked too many questions, how she had to apologize for tilting the boat and ask forgiveness to continue to be employed, and kept her mouth shut as she became more aware of the incestuous and greed-riddled financial relationship between the disabled peoples’ funding sources and the people hired to help them.

She was so grateful to be done with that part of her life and jumped right into promoting her husband’s new business.  She was now a “business woman” and established herself in the community as such.

So many things to learn!  All he wanted to do was fix the computers and she was gifted the opportunity to learn everything else about running a business.  She learned everything from accounting to payroll, to taxes and inventory, to creating policies and procedures, scheduling and answering phones, hiring, managing and firing employees, every aspect of human resources and marketing… marketing… oh the marketing!  It was her father’s profession.  In all truth, she never in a million years would have guessed she would be following in his steps with her profession, but she took to it like a duck takes to water.  It was her sincerity that always cemented the relationships she had with people.  It was because she believed so very strongly in the integrity of her husband’s business that she touted its credibility with each and every breath.  Her enthusiasm was nigh contagious!  People remembered for years the impression she had made on them, and when they needed computer help, they already had that seed planted in their minds long, long ago, watered by her sweetness and warmed by her sunny smile.

As the business grew, for grow it did, they moved from a home office, to a rented space, to a storefront with employees.  Each and every year she worked for him the business grew by leaps and bounds!  It was wonderful to be able to give everything she had, her heart and soul, to something she believed in.  That was why she was created: to love and put the love in everything she enjoyed creating.

However, there was something else that precluded her full happiness, and they would get into the most heated and hurtful arguments about it.  She thought she was going crazy because he told her it was all in her mind, but she saw how he looked at other women.  It was a source of great contention between them, for she was not wearing low cut or provocative clothing at all.  In fact, she was so engrossed in not attracting other men’s eyes that she stopped wearing make-up or even trying to be noticed at all for several years.  He would say, “You are beautiful to me,” and she would half-way wonder about the delivery of that compliment.  It seemed… half-way.

She never complained too much about the sex, because in all honesty, she loved sex.  It was why they started seeing each other- they were drawn to each other like magnets sexually.  So hot and heavy- she was aching with passion and was met with his lust.

But the intimacy between them was not very loving and she wanted that to change.  She bought some honey powder and massage oils and gifted them to him, but he complained that she bought them for her and that it was a backward gift, so he did not use them on her.  She gave him massages, but he did not seem interested in having her use the honey powder on him.  He really just wanted to fuck.

Even when they kissed, he told her to close her eyes, that it freaked him out when she looked at him.  So she learned not to make eye contact with him when they were being intimate; he’d always close his eyes anyway when she looked up at him, or turn away from her gaze.

Some of the most awful fights came after she found out he’d slept with so many women and never told her.  She laughed in the company of his circle of friends, never the wiser.  He lied to her with such consistency and with such ease that she truly thought she was going mad.

One day, he was so angry with her jealousy and she was so upset with him and herself and this entire madness, that she hit herself in the head with a can opener and her head started to bleed.  She told him that she’d hit her head on the corner of the cabinets.  He padded the corner and looked at her as if she were crazy.  So she just gave up fighting.  Something in her broke and that’s when she started taking Xanax and Lexapro.  The stress got worse between them and she got sicker.  She now had developed a full blown onset of Crone’s disease.  The anxiety and the depression wrecked her body with stress and inflammation and myriad tiny little ulcers now riddled her digestive track and stole all of her life’s blood energy. 

Meanwhile, at the office, it was becoming an increasing issue to make more money.  With the onset of employees and now overhead from the storefront, and the fact that she was now officially getting paid for the first time in 5 years instead of working for free for him made the money flow tighter.  The business was still growing and made more money each year, but it wasn’t as it had been when they were working from home and socking away thousands of dollars in the bank.  Everyone got paid and bonuses were abundant, but most of the money was going to the business, not the bank account anymore.  It was her responsibility to find out where the business was hemorrhaging money.  She spent hours and hours putting together a comprehensive report about the money flow, appointments, mark-ups and more.  This she presented to the staff during their weekly staff meeting.  He did not like what it held, for she discovered that there were so many, many appointments that he had scheduled for himself that did not have a paycheck to accompany them. 

There were often so many double-standards, such lack of accountability for himself and such scrutinizing demand of others.  He did not have respect for her at home; he did not have respect for her at the office and similar patterns were beginning to surface there as well.  All of her meetings and networking were discredited as “play” and she was to simply hang flyers several hours throughout the week, because that is how he built the business, and that is what had worked.  Nevermind that her training in marketing gave her different information.  Nevermind that what she was doing was bringing in more business.  He did not like her to be happy, recognized or empowered in the slightest and he would demean her achievements as simple nothingness.

Eventually it became so bad that she had to quit working for him.  He had chased her into her little office, screaming at her through the door she had closed to keep him out, “Don’t make me fire you!” 

She came out teary-eyed and cried, “You don’t have to fire me. I quit.”

Her depression worsened.  She felt obligated to help financially because his business was starting to fail without her and they were now getting into debt.  She did not ascribe to the belief that it should rest on one person be the sole provider for income.  She had always worked full time and had also kept the house, done the laundry, shopping and cooking and made sure to care for her daughter so she did not have to attend daycare.  But she was just so tired… her anemia and lack of digestion caused her to nap daily for hours; she just did not have the energy.  He asked her to sell the stocks she’d come into the marriage with.   Feeling guilty about not being able to work, she sold them while trying very hard to start her own business; but, mirroring its mother, her business was unable to thrive.

She was always so tired and unable to digest her food.  She did not get hungry much anymore.  It hurt to eat.  She even stuttered sometimes when he spoke down to her, and he grew to loathe her, this creature she’d become.  She saw it in his eyes.  Why shouldn’t he?  She wasn’t giving him blow-jobs anymore because she’d gotten so sick and it made her gag and nauseated.  She tried to let him have anal sex with her, but that ended up so rough and he was so lustful that it became a violent raping each time.  It came down to her only allowing missionary position the last several years they were together, and even then, her right hip got injured with the forcefulness.  A few visits with the chiropractor eventually helped.

Each year there was less joy in the household.  From grocery shopping to birthday and Christmas gifts for her niece and nephews, the purchases she made on behalf of the household were always ill-spent.  He told her that she had champagne tastes while he had beer bottle pockets.  She offered to make his lunches, but he refused.  Somehow there was enough money for him to go out to lunch every day, a privilege he said he was going to keep because he worked hard every day.  There was also money for him to drink 3-6 bottles of beer each night and go out with his Brothers after Lodge for drinks in his newly purchased tuxedo, his gold Masonic ring and his new false teeth. 

She knew this pattern would not change when he asked her to liquidate the remainder of her retirement account to help pay down the increasing debt.  She saw her life being set into a cemented block of servitude as they made plans for his mother to build onto the house and move in with them.  It was to be her responsibility to take on the personal care needs of her mother-in-law as she aged, because that is what family does for each other.  

And then something happened that changed everything.  She got a tap on the shoulder from someone in the past that she had not allowed herself to think about for nigh 20 years.  She was gently reminded by the memory of what it had been to really experience being loved, valued, honored and appreciated. This contact helped her see that what she was currently living was not anything close to that.  It was this realization which woke her up, gave her that necessary contrast required to perceive herself differently.  She became solidly aware that she did not want to live this way anymore.

On Christmas day, 2013, she asked him to leave.  She made the bed in the guest room and moved him down there under his grand protest.  He bristled that she was kicking him out of “his” bedroom, but she was not going to let him sleep upstairs next to her daughter’s room without being close by; she’d heard the way he grunted with sexual appreciation for her 12 year old daughter when they had been wrestling together the week before.  It was the only time she had ever said she hated him out loud.  She carefully and conscientiously packed up all of his belongings for him during that time and split the utility bills with him down the middle until he found a place to live. 

It took him nearly 2 months to get him to move out of the house after she had asked him to go.  It seemed to be the longest 2 months of her life.  He never came by or called or checked on them even though he was within walking distance and only a few blocks away.  He had found a place to rent that was within shouting distance if one yelled from the backyard.  He stayed close without wanting to be close.

For their separation agreement, his requests were that neither of them drop randomly in on the other, and that they be free to see other people until the divorce was finalized.  That was fine.  She wanted him to move on and was glad to not be under his hawk-like scrutiny anymore.  She asked to keep the house.  He kept his business.  She did not seek alimony for she did not want to be reliant on him and she knew he had not the ability to help support her and her daughter at any rate because of his own precarious financial situation.  She signed away any responsibility he had in helping them, believing they would find support in other ways.  She did not expect there to be posts of him and his new girlfriend on FaceBook the day after they signed the separation agreement.  Who knows how long he'd been having a relationship with this other person?

She wanted to march over there and confront him, but she knew that would not solve the issue or make things better.  He would deny it anyhow, as he always did.  That Christmas day she had asked him to leave she said to him, “You know you raped me, don’t you?”  He simply shrugged and looked away nonchalantly.  There was no guilt.  There was no remorse. There was simply a total disconnection from the heart and that was why it was so difficult to spot.

Before you cast your first stone, know that this cycle of abuse is a type of communicable disease that is passed down from generation to generation, from perpetrator to victim who turns into the perpetrator who victimizes.

He had been victimized throughout his youth by family members and clergymen, psychologically and sexually.  With this type of incredible trauma, how can one expect to stay connected to their hearts when it hurts so very, very much?

There is yet room for forgiveness for she knows he is also a victim, a victim who chose not to seek help.  She sees how familial abuse is an on-going silent disease that needs to be addressed openly for it comes in many uncomfortable and covert flavors.  The very first step to healing is to shine light on the wound, to acknowledge that it is there and hold accountable the choices that have been made manifest.

Let us all seek to shed greater awareness by sharing our stories and strength of unity and compassion in the light of love, to heal the atrocities caused by being disconnected from the heart, for hatred never ceases by hatred, but by love alone is healed. 

Remember: Be brave.  Be bold.  Speak your truth, even if your voice shakes and you fear no one will believe you.  We are not alone.  Let our stories be heard, let our wounds be tended and let our hearts be healed.  Stand strong in your Truth.

Let this trend of not being held accountable and reverent with each other, end now.

Employ your Dark Night of the Soul to bring Light and Love and healing to our World.