A friends of my friends are in newly committed relationships. After the heady high of romance, things can get rocky. From listening to their stories, I’m reminded of the challenges a relationship faces during that precarious and magnificent time when two people decide to merge hearts & lives.
John and I quickly decided we couldn’t live without each other; time was made irrelevant by the fact that we had found our other half. There is no more glorious feeling than finally finding the one you love. Cue: angel wings and the horns of heaven. So why then was the first year of our relationship so fraught with dramatic fights, fears and cry-fests (mostly mine)? During that first year of commitment we seemed to bring out one another’s worst fears. He: that no woman would want to commit to a man who already had three children. He had proof of this, as a staggeringly high number of single women refused to give him, a single father, a chance. He also had other, more personal fears I won’t name here, irrational fears whose origins still bewilder me today. As for me, I ping-ponged back and forth between caretaking his fears and verily actualizing my worst nightmare. Every fight was another opportunity for him to abandon me, for me to abandon me. Every fight inspired an ancient anxiety in me, the feeling I needed to flee, to save myself from being hurt. I was so deeply afraid that every argument meant our relationship was over, and so defiant in my self-protective instinct to save myself before it happened, this virtually guaranteed a fight would end up leading to that deep dark place in myself. My yo-yo behaviour could cause me to walk away, or plea in tears for his understanding. Sometimes I would go cold as ice while internally hugging my fragile Self (held together by band-aids, paper clips, chewing gum at this point) so tightly that I would come close to hyperventilation –a nod to the way I used to hold my breath as a child when my parents would fight. Where was the self-aware, courageous, open-hearted person he fell in love with? I was becoming a hot mess.
It was horrible and glorious at once, to be so in so much love and so much hurt. Both of us knew we were one another’s soul mates, so why was this happening? It was as if… our magnificent joining brought out our very best and our very worst. It was as if… we finally found the lock to the key that neither of us could unlock alone. When love really opens us up, everything opens up. The blood, the guts and the wounding. There was no more hiding the fact that our damaged souls could not hide behind a love so deep, that somewhere deep inside we felt deeply unworthy, unlovable, abandoned, and that all the crimes visited on our hearts by those we had loved would be revisited by the person whom we now loved – and more than we ever thought possible.
This is the point in the story where it could have gone either way. Looking back, I see that we were going through a powerful and painful process of trust earning. By showing one another our respective wounds, we were asking each other, albeit unconsciously: Will you betray me? Will you go away, too? Are you sure? If we had remained unconscious to those questions, if we had allowed them to secretly lurk behind every fight, our relationship would have spiraled out of control. But what happened was: neither of us left because neither of us wanted that, truly. And over time we caught onto our selves, to what was happening.We realized that if we didn’t talk about and include our deepest wounds in our newfound love, we would destroy it. Then we both began to trust that the other person wasn’t going to leave, and the relationship could survive our deepest demons.
Because our heart is so open to the people we love, they can hurt us. It’s the price of admission. We each have an animal in us that is pissed about being hurt before, and so the stakes are so very high in intimacy. We’ve each been taken before by the people we trusted, trespassed, lied to, made a fool of, had our heart broken. Yet if these, our worst fears – of betrayal and abandonment, of being victimized or out of control of our lives- remain unconscious, they will control our lives, and loves. We could mistake our breakout moment -the one where we find the courage and love in our heart to fully face our self, our unattractive parts and our deepest fears – as a disaster, instead of a victory. Worse, we could mistake our True Love for our Worst Fear Come True.
The Scorpio Full Moon sheds light on the honest, bloody, ooey-gooey guts of things. The Truth is, we cannot be wholly loved without being whole, and we cannot be whole without being fully seen by the Other. Our icky, wounded parts and all. Whether we’ve been struggling with hidden patterns in intimacy, or we feel blocked from moving forward in our lives, eclipse energy is giving us an opportunity to re-set the system, to course-correct the broken record we keep re-playing in our lives, relationships.
During that first year, we learned to restrain our selves from compulsively pushing our relationship to the edge. It’s one thing to see how the train goes off the rails, but it’s another to pause during those high-emotional-stakes-moments and refuse to engage the story. Truth-telling and soul excavation without kindness can destroy. Scorpio needs calming Taurus as a balance; it takes guts to be gentle and kind. It takes wisdom to back away from the hairy edge of a too intense conversation and get an ice cream instead.
We survived each other and lived to tell the tale. Now on the other side I can confidently say that being seen wholly by the one we most love, sticking together through hell and high water, has big healing power. It unleashes a river of healing and forgiveness we cannot access alone. It is the ultimate compassion. At this full moon eclipse, look into the mirror of your Beloved, or the moon herself. It takes courage to face your deepest fears, your disowned self-parts, to take a deep look at the truth and to finally… breathe.
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