Healing from what no longer is..

Disordered hope is the reality for a lot of us, we have developed a hope in our mind that may have been based on our desire and not our reality, creating this disordered hope that only we feel and therefore only we mourn when it doesn’t come to be. 

We have sold ourselves the narrative that we created in the dreams of what could be, so naturally, this becomes such a hard things to detach from. Healing from what no longer is as well as things that never were or will never be, has to be one of the toughest things we will encounter, because its reality only lives within our mindset and heart there isn’t anything tangible only emotional but this doesn’t make it any less tolerable or simpler. 

I think that this has been the number one question or problem I’ve gotten via social media dm’s or on the website in ways that people need help, I say that for two reasons: 

1. It is a common reason why so many of us choose to do wrong and fail to do good, we stay stuck in the rut of healing from things that no longer exist or never had the chance to do so, we unpack and refuse to move on because we became so used to the emotional jail we were captive in. 

2. You are not alone, this isn’t an isolated issue and it isn’t unique to you. I think there is comfort in that, not because it justifies any behavior you’ve acted upon because of this, but the reality that it is a common universal issue that we all have suffered through at some point in time. 
   

The dream you sold yourself. 

The truth is that we began to dream, we began to create this whole life narrative in our mind, we began to envision a whole world with this person, from the name of the kids we’d have all the way down to the morning routine we’d build in the future. You created this whole life in your mind that was what you pictured as ideal and the dream life you wanted to live out, to now need to break up with the idea of what could have been too. It’s already bad enough that this person is no longer a reality in your life, but any hope, plan, or dream you had, is now something you need to break up with in your own mind and heart. 

It’s okay to mourn this, it’s okay to feel the pain of no longer having this reality and knowing that what you had planned, with this person at least, is now a dead dream. I think it’s actually healthy to mourn the vision too because the reality is that you invested emotions and thoughts into this, it wasn’t just a passing or fleeting moment for you but a reality of what you hoped for. 

This maybe one of the tougher things to do but coming to terms with this first expedites your healing process. Often people focus on forgetting the person first and intentionally creating distance as well as having no levels of contact, (we’ll talk more about that later actually) and thats absolutely important to do so but if we continue to replay and bask in the things we planned or dreamed of we will continue to create and emotional bond with this unrealized reality. 

Getting over the dream can hurt, but we need to face a reality that who we plugged into that dream, might not be the person that belonged in it to begin with. It doesn’t mean that this won’t be a reality for you one day, it just means it won’t be a reality with them. 

It isn’t in your best interest to paint people in a better light than they have shown you they are, sometimes people show you where they want to be, it’s up to you to believe them. 

Stop running into burning homes for people who have become comfortable with the fire, it’s not your job to force people out of places they don’t want to leave. You’ll end up causing yourself wounds trying to heal theirs. 

The reality is that we will never get over the dream we sold ourselves if we keep trying to justify every action someone takes. We do this not because they’re good people, and to be clear they really might be amazing people in general, but they’re not amazing people to you. No one ever deserves to feel as if they are not valued or pursued and while you may want to justify the stages of their lives they’re in, based on the fire they’re living in, it doesn’t mean that it is your job to force them out of it. 

A lot of times this is directly correlated with our understanding of self-worth. The reality that we will bend the value we have to fit the cheapness of attention someone gives us, because we’d hope they’d see the fullness of who we can be and not the mess around them. I can’t stress this enough, it is not your job to save people, in fact, you can’t. In the best case situation you will get a disconnected version of them that just submitted to the will of your persistence but not to the desire of your heart, you will get a person that knows your value but only partially appreciates it.  The dream may have been so good but the reality will kill you.