A Broken Heart Cracks Open the Past

The heart broken in love opens like an archeological dig into the past. The velocity of the fracturing draws you down, down, down through layers of feelings, strategies and beliefs that have been protecting your heart from a primeval pain.

The grief and longing of betrayed love come not from this particular loss alone, but from events much further back—from infancy and childhood, from our lineage, from the collective experiences of humanity, and perhaps beyond, from lifetimes or dimensions we can hardly comprehend.

Sitting with my distress after my partner left me exposed this terrifying ancient injury, a wound recoiled quietly inside, stirred alive by the abandonment. I viscerally began to understand how our earliest relational traumas form the bedrock of our lives. How abandonment may be our deepest fear and earliest wound.

Betrayed Trust Takes You Back to the “Primal Agonies”

Close interpersonal trauma disconnects the rational mind from the primitive brain. When the primitive brain takes charge we are seized by core impressions that were laid down as the foundation of our reality. We are still in an adult body, but have been set adrift in the world of a terrified infant.

In my regressed state, I recognized the panic I must have felt as an infant when mother was not there when I needed her. Until something forces us to face our early pain, we barely comprehend the degree of sheer terror we experienced as a dependent infant when we had no capacity to grasp that a frustrated need does not necessarily threaten our existence.

Before we are shattered, or deeply loved, our defenses protect us by banning what psychoanalytic theorist D.W. Winnicott called the “primal agonies”—unendurable feelings of panic, despair and isolation. Any time we do come close to this underground angst, the pain reverberates, like a raw nerve hit by a dentist’s drill without Novocain. Reflexively, we contract against the hurt.

This is one of the reasons betrayal falls on us as a catastrophic, irreversible loss. Betrayed trust uniquely touches this existential, infantile core we work hard to protect. I felt, and others have reported similarly—betrayal by a bonded partner feels like a threat to soul life, the amputation of a psychic limb.

As time goes on, you experience phantom pains that pass into intensified grieving and a pervasive sorrow that seems it will never end. Gradually, you slip into the dark shade of sorrow that can only be called despair.

A Broken Heart Brings Invisible Help

We need grace and support to stay with the long outpouring of unlived grief revealed by such a shocking attachment rupture. But if we find the strength to stay with the sadness of the loss of the loved and trusted other—whether that be partner, mother or God—we find ourselves cycling from longing to protest, to rage, to despair, and back again.

As I moved from protest to despair, in the outpourings of grief, I felt a complete stranger to myself. Yet oddly in my darkest times, something connected me to others. In these deep waters, I found it was not “me” crying, rather, I was part of a community of sufferers, crying the cry of all children abandoned and alone. The archetypal orphan we carry as a part of our humanity had come vividly alive in me—her arms reaching for care and holding. And she was answered.

I sensed something extraordinary and deep moving through me. The unmooring of the early terrors of no-mother-when-needed was revealing two distinct currents. It revealed the trauma and pain that held me back from a more soulful life. And at the same time, it stirred forces in my soul that carried me when I felt I could not go on.

My very brokenness and vulnerability beckoned help—the waiting angels of my deepest nature came to gather me up in their tender embrace and lead me home.

 

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