Synchronicity

I’ve had a tough week this week. A dear friend of mine lost the man she loved with all her heart. They were buying a new beautiful home, her five year old and two year old year old adored him. He was a great guy — we all said so. A successful business executive who retired to work with charities and as a coach. It was love at first sight. We were all so thrilled. She’d had some rough times with her husband: he was abusive and mentally challenged. My sweet dear friend deserved the best — and we all knew she’d found it.

He left for Asia last week on business. Called her every day, as always. Let her know he was at the airport to come home….and then came a  message that scared her to death.  He’d had an emergency — an embolism —  and was in the hospital. He sounded terrified, sobbing, losing it. Very unlike the man we all knew. He’d call as soon as he could.  That was five days earlier. No one had heard from him since.

When she didn’t hear from him, my friend began calling the hospitals, clinics, ambulance services, hotels around the airport — no records. She called the airline to find he didn’t made the flight from Asia  to the US.

Then things began to unravel. We contacted a friend who began to check the names and locations he’d given her in Asia. None of them existed. And it just keeps getting worse. The bottom line is he conned her. Her house is in foreclosure (he didn’t pay back a loan, and had forged the documents that he showed her to prove he did). Her five year old is screaming for this man she adored. My friend is broke, stunned, abandoned and still in love with this Dream Weaver.  I know exactly how she feels.

I’m searching for ways to give her strength. I’ve been where she is. He’s the mirror image of my beau, the man who broke my heart even as he opened the doors to my truth. Her story is my story. Different specifics, but the same magical love, trust and  bliss. A fantasy crafted by a master manipulator. Heaven on earth, then without warning, a world exploded.

My heart is breaking all over again. Funny, as I write this I realize that it’s two weeks shy of the third anniversary of my own beau’s betrayal. These past few days, I’ve felt as though the betrayal were only yesterday. I wake up in the morning, happy. Excited at the abundance that is flooding into my life. Then I remember my friend, and the pit of my stomach sinks. That sadness leads to memories of my beau, and my heart breaks all over again. Then my father washes over me  — and I want to curl up into a ball and disappear.

That’s a familiar position. It’s the place my little girl went before and after I was tortured by my dad and his mom. Curled up in a ball hiding —  the corner of the kitchen or cellar, under the stairs to the basement, behind the washing machine in the wet room — all places where I was brutalized. All places where they left me to wait for, or recover from, their attacks.

Just when I thought I was on the other side, I’m feeling  dark again.  The darkness is heavy on my heart and lungs, my neck and shoulders. The tone is back. Not overwhelmingly. This time is different. I’m calm, detached in some ways from the energy. I feel it fully, but it doesn’t consume me.

I know that feeling my friend’s pain, opening my wounds, releasing the still-stored pain, is the perfect next step in my healing.

But it hurts, almost as bad as the first time. Yet this is synchronicity at its finest —as I help her, I heal myself.

There are blessings in all pain. We simply have to recognize them. I’m grateful I can do that now.

Photo Credit

“broken heart ii” lulugaia @ /flickr.com. Creative Commons. Some Rights Reserved.

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