A post about being brainwashed in romance

 Being brainwashed for most of your life really takes its toll on every aspect of it 😅 im still trying to put pieces together to figure this thing called "life" out, and it has been one of the biggest struggles of my life. 

I was with my ex bf until recently off and on since 2013. Id say a total of 5 years "on." 

I've been realizing how messed up that relationship was...but I was so used to being brainwashed and having to do mental gymnastics in order to make sense of the world through the lens of my "beliefs," that it just made me think that mindset was normal, even in romantic relationships. 

There were a lot of things (im just realizing how many things there were) that my ex didn't want to talk/hear about. So I trained myself early on to just completely disregard my past and things that had happened to me, good and bad, simply because he was the main person I even talked to at all, and especially about "myself."

I was so used to not talking about myself/my life experiences that I literally FORGOT about A LOT OF THINGS that had happened to me/I had been a part of. I literally did not even THINK about these things for so long that my mind had literally forgotten them. All because this guy I was in love with didn't like to hear about my past. 

I was listening to an audiobook (that I have listened to several times) last night...theres a scene in the book explaining how this prehistoric woman started to ride a horse for the first time. From the prehistoric perspective, it explained it as how the very first human that rode a horse probably came to that conclusion/finally had the idea of putting things together to think "what if I sat on the horse and then I could actually 'run' with/as fast as the horse?" 

It seems so stupid but in that moment I was like, "wait a second, ive ridden horses before, too!!!!???" I remembered how much my butt hurt after and how I was thinking "how do people do this regularly???" 😅 I had literally just FORGOTTEN that i had those experiences personally!  Those memories included my mother in one case and my brother in another case and YSA (young single adult) activities where my exhusband was, and just being "church-related." 

For all those reasons, and the reason that my ex was not comfortable with hearing about my involvement in those types of situations, I had just trained myself to not think about those things. For several years. To the point where my conscious brain just FORGOT ABOUT THEM. And it's insane because that was SUCH a big part of my life for most of it! And I just never had a chance to talk about those things or bring them up. So much so that i forgot they even happened until times like last night, where I remembered I had ridden a horse several different times, and my own life was so foreign to me at this point that I was so disconnected from mySELF.

I just wanted to share that because even though it's so embarrassing coming to these realizations, I felt so much anger towards my ex for being so unempathetic, so unwilling to even listen to me at all, that I had forgotten about my own memories just to make him comfortable. That is so much more power than any one person should have over anyone. I cannot believe I didnt see how NOT normal that was until just recently! 

It is NOT normal or okay to shame someone so deeply just due to your own discomfort and inability to empathize and deal with FEELINGS at ALL that you completely make someone you "love" NOT feel anything anymore. 

What we resist PERSISTS. The FEELINGS included in those memories/life experiences for me never went away. I just never faced them/dealt with them. And it caused so much anguish, depression, anxiety, and instability in myself that I wish so much I had known how to deal with so that I could just HANDLE them so they never piled up on me like that.

Please, talk about your feelings. Man, woman, non-binary, gay, straight, gender-noncomforming, child, adult, teenager, black, white: people of ALL RACES, COLORS, GENDERS, AND AGES: 

TALK ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS. Emote! Never get comfortable with someone who doesn't want to hear those things. It is NOT healthy, emotionally, mentally, OR physically! 

I will repeat this because it's worth hearing twice: WHAT WE RESIST PERSISTS.

You might get away from your memories for seven or ten or twenty or forty years, but the feelings involved in those memories never leave you. You can try to squash them or bury them or pretend they don't exist, but you will still feel them and they will still manifest in some way. And you won't have control over them at that point. It is so much easier to just deal with them in the moment as they come rather than trying to not feel them.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk. If you have any memories of me, good or bad, id love to hear them in the comments. If not, that's cool, too. 👍🤟❤