When Sally and Laurence met, they felt very connected and attracted to each other. As I've said often, when we haven’t done our inner work, we are attracted at our common level of woundedness, and this was certainly true of Sally and Laurence. Sally had come from an extremely abusive childhood, which she had mostly blocked out. Although she had been on a spiritual path for some time, the path was about using spirituality to avoid responsibility for her pain – which is called spiritual by-pass.

Laurence, a very successful attorney, had come from a covertly abusive childhood where his parents were extremely needy. Laurence had learned to care-take others as his way to fill his extreme neediness – giving in order to get, and getting angry when he didn't get in return.

Sally, vulnerable to Laurence's caretaking, and accustomed to completely giving herself up, continued to allow Laurence to use her energy to fill up his emptiness – until she started working with me. She was quite ill when she first came to Inner Bonding, and I recognized it as the same kind of fatigue I had suffered earlier in my life when I allowed others to drain my energy.

Sally Became Devoted to Healing

Through her devoted Inner Bonding work, Sally slowly, over time, recalled the devastating emotional, physical and sexual abuse of her childhood. As she learned to bring the compassion of spirit to her deeply shamed and abandoned self, she started to heal physically and emotionally.

Unfortunately, Laurence was not available to do his own healing work. The more Sally healed and stopped giving herself up to him, the angrier he got. One day he actually said to her, "Why did you have to go and heal?"

When Sally told me this, I felt so sad. This was the height of a deep and debilitating narcissism – being more concerned with what he wasn't getting from her than with her happiness and wellbeing. He couldn’t find it in himself to value that she was happier and healthier. He just wanted her to be back at his level of woundedness.

This Sadness Was Not New To Me

I had experienced the same thing in my long marriage. The more I healed, the angrier my husband became. Because he was so threatened by my healing, he could not support me in it. Instead he tried to undermine me by criticizing anyone who supported me and by ridiculing my spirituality. This is exactly what Laurence was doing with Sally. In fact, he couldn’t even handle hearing about the extent of her abuse. "Why focus on that now – it's all in the past. And you can't even be sure it actually happened. How do you know you aren't making it up? I think Margaret is putting these ideas in your head." This all-too-common reaction is extremely undermining to someone who is struggling to believe her own elusive memories.

I assured Sally many times that, given the symptoms she had experienced in her life, she was not making up the memories. Sally is a very intelligent and loving person and would have no reason to make up the horrific things she had been through. In fact, I marveled at her courage to remember and compassionately embrace her past. Her ability not only to survive, but to retain her ability to love, attests to the strength of her soul.

Due To Finances, Sally Couldn’t Leave Laurence, So She Continued Learning To Love Herself

Sally wanted to leave the relationship, but since she was not in a financial position to leave, she utilized the relationship’s problems to become stronger in her ability to take loving care of herself. She had been so used to 'feeding' Laurence - by engaging with him when he was blaming her - that disengaging presented her with a worthy challenge. As a child she had not been able to disengage, so learning to disengage now was greatly beneficial for her healing.

Perhaps Laurence will eventually seek help for himself, or perhaps Sally will eventually leave - we don't know the outcome. What we do know is that Laurence's unloving behavior is coming from his unhealed narcissism and is not being caused by Sally. Knowing this is very freeing for Sally.

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