“How Can You Mend a Broken Heart?” part 2
Mending the CORE wounds of your broken heart
How Can You Mend a Broken Heart? Part 2
Has your heart ever been broken by one person or a group of people?
Remember this song by the Bee Gees and Al Green?
I can think of younger days when living for my life
Was everything a man could want to do
I could never see tomorrow
I was never told about the sorrow
And how can you mend a broken heart?
How can you stop the rain from falling down?
Tell me, how can you stop the sun from shining?
What makes the world go 'round?
How can you mend this broken man? Yeah
How can a loser ever win?
Please help me mend my broken heart
And let me live again, la-la, la-la, la.
Has your heart been broken by lost love, by betrayal, by intimidation or toxic relationships? Mine has! Let me share a few stories about how my heart broke and then how I consciously sought to mend it, with a particular group of people; men! Now don’t get me wrong. I really like men. I engage with them on baseball, the inner life, cars, theology etc. I’ve co-authored books with men and have been in business with others. They are mentors, friends, brothers. And yet, a few men have also been the source of my greatest pain. And therefore, my best teachers as well! For instance, a huge turning point happened for me when I realized that I had something to say about how men treated me. But that evolved with time and an increasing sense of self-worth.
I’ve learned along the way that having your heart broken by someone you once loved or highly respected is likely the most universal and painful of heart breaks. The person you knew has now become like a stranger or even an unsafe person. This could be a family member, a professional colleague, or a love relationship. They may not only break our heart but wound our spirit as well if we mistakenly believe that our worth is dependent on someone else loving or respecting us. These are wrenching experiences and yet… and yet, they can be mended, with help and with intentional effort at least on our part, if not on both sides of the relationship.
Four stories of healing
These four stories are about deep healing and mending experiences I’ve had with the men who’ve hurt me the most. The first story is about healing with my father who was a mixture of goodness and deep anger. The second story chronicles my one-sided healing with my estranged brother who was a chronic alcoholic and who died of Cirrhosis. The third story depicts how my father helped me heal my experience of my broken marriage. The fourth story describes how healthy male friends helped me heal from a traumatic experience with a man who violated me. My intention is not to blame or shame anyone, including myself, but to describe how the choices I made in dealing with these situations and the support I got in the process ultimately transformed and mended my heart.
A note to the reader: It will become painfully clear in these stories that mending broken hearts is not always mutual. In fact, it is usually not the case. And it is not required for mending to happen. Sometimes the healing occurs with the presence of someone who represents the person who hurt you but is safe and respectful. This was my experience with my father helping me heal my part of my marriage and with my friend who mended my experience with the man who violated me. I call my experience of mending with no reciprocal response from the other person “costly mercy.” For me that means it takes more out of me when I stop to acknowledge that it’s truly one-sided.
Healing from father-daughter impairments
Growing up I had three main male role models; my dad, my brother, who was six years older than me, and a church youth leader who was a solid approachable male. My dad had been an alcoholic before I was born and stopped drinking cold turkey but was still a “dry drunk,” very angry for no apparent reason and intimidating for all of us. When my mother died young (she was 55, I was 22), he was my primary family member. In conversations with my therapist in my early forties I knew I had to come to terms with him. I was very angry at him. That anger felt like my only connection to him. My fear was that I would have no other way to connect with him if I let go of this anger and forgave him. “There may not be anything else there. No love, no warmth—nothing.” That was not true, but it was my fear.
My therapist invited me to write the things my dad did do for me. I made a list.
*He taught me to drive well.
*He taught me to be a risk taker in my business.
*He took me to different places in the country.
*He taught me to water ski and play baseball.
*He bought me clothes
*He let me drive his old ’54 Olds to high school.
*He didn’t dismiss my good grades.
*He protected me from male employees who often stayed with us.
He was also a provider and a good man in the community, active in church and generous with my friends. But for me personally he was also unpredictable and volatile. So there wasn’t much of any warmth.
My most significant understanding of his influence and my reaction to it was working through an insightful book on the father-daughter relationship called The Wounded Woman (by Linda Schierse Leonard.) In it I learned there are two major responses to impaired relationships with fathers and daughters. One is for the daughter to become an Eternal Girl and the other is to become an Armored Amazon. Usually, a bit of both. The subtypes of Eternal Girl are The Darling Doll, The Girl of Glass, The High-Flyer: Donna Juanna, and The Misfit. The subtypes of Armored Amazon are The Super Star, The Dutiful Daughter, The Martyr, and The Warrior Queen. I decided which ones I had become (High-Flyer and the Star!) Yikes. Then I needed to learn why these two had become my identity (to camouflage the shame of my family). I needed to learn how they wounded me (because that wasn’t my job and it exhausted me). I needed to release them as my main or only way to be in the world (thank God). As I did the work to embrace and mend them, I could feel my fears and anger with my dad diminish, and therefore I could operate in the world without reacting to men as I had reacted to him. I could forgive myself and him and have more satisfying relationships. This took years.
Mending with an estranged and chronically ill brother
“It isn’t even funny.” These were the first words my brother uttered when he looked in my crib and saw me for the first time. It didn’t get a lot better than that, although for a while we did put in some effort. But my brother and I were never very close. Eventually he developed a severe drinking habit, which I recognize as a disease, yet it severed our relationship. We could only talk to one another through letters for many years and only on business issues. Again, with the help of a thoughtful therapist and a spiritual director I grappled with how I could do some healing on my end of our relationship even if it wasn’t reciprocated, which I did not expect.
In a predawn quiet time, I came upon the idea of a creative project I could do for my brother. I spent six months making a scrapbook focusing on the first thirty years of his life. It included the friends he had, the girls he dated, the cars he drove (fifteen cars in his first seventeen years of driving), the trips we took, the camping and hunting experiences he had. I called him to see if I could just drop off this gift for his birthday and he said OK. I had to leave all my expectations at home as I started on that trip. This was just to be a gift to honor his life with the memories that I had of him.
When I gave it to him, he stood at his kitchen counter, while I was on the other side of the room. He quickly paged through the whole scrapbook but paused at one page, the one with his fifteen cars listed. All he said was, “You’ve put a lot of work into this.” Nothing more. Which I expected. But I left having gratitude that he even received it. I didn’t see him again for years until he was in the hospital after suffering from hypothermia after falling, inebriated, in the snow. He was semi-conscious and I whispered in his ear all the good things I remembered about our childhood. He awoke and for an hour talked about our family and how he was planning to be different when he got out of the hospital. Alas nothing changed.
He died a few years later of cirrhosis of the liver. I did find out at his memorial service that he had saved the lives of three people during his career as a police officer and for that I was grateful, even if he couldn’t save his own life on this side of the veil. Talking with him for that hour in the hospital, learning more about his life from others had to be enough for now. I am forever grateful that I made that book for him.
Mending from my marriage, with the help of my father
I was married for twenty years to a charismatic, public minded, good-hearted man who was a pillar in the community. Not surprisingly, he was a lot like my father! On the surface we were a great team, active in social causes, involved in the lives of his two wonderful sons, supportive of each other’s work. Under the surface things were decidedly different. Again, much like my father. Once I had that realization, several years into our marriage, I worked again with a therapist and a spiritual director, and decided I needed to do more inner work to break this pattern.
I asked myself, “Who would be the best person to help me with this daunting task?” My answer: my father, who had initially imposed his unhealthy behavior on me and had now passed over. He had shown me, in a mysterious conversation, that he was interested in helping to heal what had not been healed between us consciously when he was alive. I know talking to the dead seems strange to some people but ask almost any widow or widower and they will tell you that conversations are not uncommon, and they can be very soothing and reassuring. Anyway, my dad coached me on how to deal with my husband as did my therapist. I followed their instructions.
One difficult behavior I adopted was what I call a temporary leave. When I was being intentionally intimidated and felt scared, I told my husband that I was going to leave for an hour or two because I did not deserve to be treated this way. I said I would be back and hoped things would be different. I reconnected with him in some way each time I returned. This leave taking was a way to develop clear and sacred boundaries. It was daunting to develop boundaries with a person I lived with. How to do that? Carefully, courageously, and with a wise plan B.
Again, like with my dad originally, and with my brother, there would be no mutual heart mending experiences with my husband, and our marriage dissolved. Yet I feel that the whole process of experiencing pain, gaining insights, getting wise support, having the courage to mend and change, and developing compassion for others in similar circumstances has made me into the woman I am today. I do not want to repeat any of these experiences, but I can see and feel the transformation in me because of them. For that I am grateful.
Mending my heart after being assaulted or violated
One of the most difficult healing challenges of my life has been mending my heart after being assaulted or violated by two different men. These mendings usually take a lot longer and include counseling and truth telling among other things. It has been a life-long journey to come to a place of health, even though the healing hasn’t directly involved the men who hurt me.
The second violation was an assault and I dealt with directly by going to the police and getting the support I needed. But the first one was much more complicated to deal with. I was young, in my mid-twenties. It was my boss who I respected and was eager to work with who sexually violated me. It started with suggestive comments that then led to surprising me by coming up behind me when I was working and putting his hands on my shoulders, then sliding them down the front of my blouse. To stop this behavior, I suggested to him that our working styles were incompatible. It had no effect. Eventually he required me to work late a few nights, and since I rode the bus, he offered to drive me home. On one of those trips he abruptly stopped in a parking lot and lunged at me, molesting me until I yelled at him to stop. And after that I started getting bad headaches on my way home from work each day.
You might wonder why I didn’t do anything more about this along the way. Three reasons. First is that I had no legal recourse because sexual harassment wasn’t even in the dictionary, and I thought I would not be believed. Second was that he was a well-educated black man. Third, I had to keep my job, since my husband was in graduate school, and I was the major wage earner. So I just kept going. One day my boss told me he was going to his boss to discuss me, since I had become a problem in the office. Something within me opened (I still marvel at the risk it took to open but it did) and I told him I was going to talk to his boss’s boss. I did. I asked for a different job and did not say why except that our working styles were incompatible. I was too afraid of the consequences to say more. Yet I said I could quit if another job was not available. Yikes. Thankfully I got a new job. But I didn’t heal from the experience until several decades later.
How that happened is quite a miracle story. Over the last several years I’ve developed a timely and special relationship with two healthy African American men. One is my dear pastor and mentor. The other is an artist who I share projects with and who has also become a wise mentor and colleague. A few years ago, I invited my artist friend to share his story of growing up in Mississippi under heavily segregated laws. It was a difficult story to tell and for me to hear. After I heard it, I said I was truly sorry and asked for forgiveness for all that had happened to him because of “my people’s behavior.” In part of his story white women were very dangerous because of what could happen if you even looked at them or met them on the street. This was the era of Emmet Till, who was brutally murdered for talking to a white woman, so it was terrifying. And now, although my friend had several white women friends, I was deeply moved that he felt safe enough with me to share the deep story of his substantial fears of white women growing up. Despite the experiences of his childhood, his parents had taught him not to hate white people but to forgive them.
A year or so after this reconciling conversation I felt like I was ready to tell him the frightening story of my sexual violation at the hands of my black boss and my feelings of being imprisoned in that job and relationship. He listened to me carefully and told me that he understood. In fact, a female family member of his had a similar experience. I felt that my experience with my boss so many years ago was finally heard, understood, healed and put to rest. My friend represented, for me, a group of men I had feared and generally avoided. Just like I represented for him a group he had learned to avoid. Now my relationship with him, which allowed me to tell him the whole story, helped me to mend and not be afraid anymore.
The process of telling broken-heart stories
These stories are hard to tell. They are usually hidden below the surface and involve shame, so they rarely get publicly addressed. It is vital to tell these stories—but in a safe and secure place. And to keep telling them as long as it is helpful. And there is also a danger in continuing to tell them for so long that we get stuck in the stories and begin taking on a martyr role. This is usually because of underlying fears or lack of resources for moving forward with the healing process. With wise help there are paths available to continue the healing process, so the memories are healed and the events of the stories will not be repeated.
Just a word to readers who might be wondering about my conversations with God (and Jesus) throughout these essays. People have vastly different ways of praying and I honor that. These conversations are how I pray. First, in quiet I listen for God. I also pour out my heart to God. I ask for clarity about what is going on in my life. Then I ask what God is inviting me to be or become. I take in the invitations within my spirit. It’s hard to explain in words how that works. Then I respond. I am very honest with God and God is quite honest with me. We don’t always agree! I often find that God’s side of the conversation and God’s sense of humor is quite delicious. And God’s endearing name for me is Sweetie. I love that.
The results of the process of mending
Mending broken hearts with people who have hurt me deeply feels like a life-long journey. At the same time, the whole mending process lightens my load. I needed to remember the experiences. I needed to get the support to face into them. I had to decide how to mend. Then I needed to act on my choices in safe ways. The payoff was the interior freedom that came with the mending. To reiterate, in some mysterious and deeply spiritual way I feel that these four stories and this healing has helped make me who I am today. I tell these stories only as an example of one person’s journey. I am grateful for the courage within me to share these stories. And I am grateful for the people who accompanied me and for the presence of The Holy, which allowed me to take these deep dives into wholeness.
Janet O. Hagberg, 2023. Feel free to pass this along.
Has your heart ever been broken by one person or a group of people?
Remember this song by the Bee Gees and Al Green?
I can think of younger days when living for my life
Was everything a man could want to do
I could never see tomorrow
I was never told about the sorrow
And how can you mend a broken heart?
How can you stop the rain from falling down?
Tell me, how can you stop the sun from shining?
What makes the world go 'round?
How can you mend this broken man? Yeah
How can a loser ever win?
Please help me mend my broken heart
And let me live again, la-la, la-la, la.
Has your heart been broken by lost love, by betrayal, by intimidation or toxic relationships? Mine has! Let me share a few stories about how my heart broke and then how I consciously sought to mend it, with a particular group of people; men! Now don’t get me wrong. I really like men. I engage with them on baseball, the inner life, cars, theology etc. I’ve co-authored books with men and have been in business with others. They are mentors, friends, brothers. And yet, a few men have also been the source of my greatest pain. And therefore, my best teachers as well! For instance, a huge turning point happened for me when I realized that I had something to say about how men treated me. But that evolved with time and an increasing sense of self-worth.
I’ve learned along the way that having your heart broken by someone you once loved or highly respected is likely the most universal and painful of heart breaks. The person you knew has now become like a stranger or even an unsafe person. This could be a family member, a professional colleague, or a love relationship. They may not only break our heart but wound our spirit as well if we mistakenly believe that our worth is dependent on someone else loving or respecting us. These are wrenching experiences and yet… and yet, they can be mended, with help and with intentional effort at least on our part, if not on both sides of the relationship.
Four stories of healing
These four stories are about deep healing and mending experiences I’ve had with the men who’ve hurt me the most. The first story is about healing with my father who was a mixture of goodness and deep anger. The second story chronicles my one-sided healing with my estranged brother who was a chronic alcoholic and who died of Cirrhosis. The third story depicts how my father helped me heal my experience of my broken marriage. The fourth story describes how healthy male friends helped me heal from a traumatic experience with a man who violated me. My intention is not to blame or shame anyone, including myself, but to describe how the choices I made in dealing with these situations and the support I got in the process ultimately transformed and mended my heart.
A note to the reader: It will become painfully clear in these stories that mending broken hearts is not always mutual. In fact, it is usually not the case. And it is not required for mending to happen. Sometimes the healing occurs with the presence of someone who represents the person who hurt you but is safe and respectful. This was my experience with my father helping me heal my part of my marriage and with my friend who mended my experience with the man who violated me. I call my experience of mending with no reciprocal response from the other person “costly mercy.” For me that means it takes more out of me when I stop to acknowledge that it’s truly one-sided.
Healing from father-daughter impairments
Growing up I had three main male role models; my dad, my brother, who was six years older than me, and a church youth leader who was a solid approachable male. My dad had been an alcoholic before I was born and stopped drinking cold turkey but was still a “dry drunk,” very angry for no apparent reason and intimidating for all of us. When my mother died young (she was 55, I was 22), he was my primary family member. In conversations with my therapist in my early forties I knew I had to come to terms with him. I was very angry at him. That anger felt like my only connection to him. My fear was that I would have no other way to connect with him if I let go of this anger and forgave him. “There may not be anything else there. No love, no warmth—nothing.” That was not true, but it was my fear.
My therapist invited me to write the things my dad did do for me. I made a list.
*He taught me to drive well.
*He taught me to be a risk taker in my business.
*He took me to different places in the country.
*He taught me to water ski and play baseball.
*He bought me clothes
*He let me drive his old ’54 Olds to high school.
*He didn’t dismiss my good grades.
*He protected me from male employees who often stayed with us.
He was also a provider and a good man in the community, active in church and generous with my friends. But for me personally he was also unpredictable and volatile. So there wasn’t much of any warmth.
My most significant understanding of his influence and my reaction to it was working through an insightful book on the father-daughter relationship called The Wounded Woman (by Linda Schierse Leonard.) In it I learned there are two major responses to impaired relationships with fathers and daughters. One is for the daughter to become an Eternal Girl and the other is to become an Armored Amazon. Usually, a bit of both. The subtypes of Eternal Girl are The Darling Doll, The Girl of Glass, The High-Flyer: Donna Juanna, and The Misfit. The subtypes of Armored Amazon are The Super Star, The Dutiful Daughter, The Martyr, and The Warrior Queen. I decided which ones I had become (High-Flyer and the Star!) Yikes. Then I needed to learn why these two had become my identity (to camouflage the shame of my family). I needed to learn how they wounded me (because that wasn’t my job and it exhausted me). I needed to release them as my main or only way to be in the world (thank God). As I did the work to embrace and mend them, I could feel my fears and anger with my dad diminish, and therefore I could operate in the world without reacting to men as I had reacted to him. I could forgive myself and him and have more satisfying relationships. This took years.
Mending with an estranged and chronically ill brother
“It isn’t even funny.” These were the first words my brother uttered when he looked in my crib and saw me for the first time. It didn’t get a lot better than that, although for a while we did put in some effort. But my brother and I were never very close. Eventually he developed a severe drinking habit, which I recognize as a disease, yet it severed our relationship. We could only talk to one another through letters for many years and only on business issues. Again, with the help of a thoughtful therapist and a spiritual director I grappled with how I could do some healing on my end of our relationship even if it wasn’t reciprocated, which I did not expect.
In a predawn quiet time, I came upon the idea of a creative project I could do for my brother. I spent six months making a scrapbook focusing on the first thirty years of his life. It included the friends he had, the girls he dated, the cars he drove (fifteen cars in his first seventeen years of driving), the trips we took, the camping and hunting experiences he had. I called him to see if I could just drop off this gift for his birthday and he said OK. I had to leave all my expectations at home as I started on that trip. This was just to be a gift to honor his life with the memories that I had of him.
When I gave it to him, he stood at his kitchen counter, while I was on the other side of the room. He quickly paged through the whole scrapbook but paused at one page, the one with his fifteen cars listed. All he said was, “You’ve put a lot of work into this.” Nothing more. Which I expected. But I left having gratitude that he even received it. I didn’t see him again for years until he was in the hospital after suffering from hypothermia after falling, inebriated, in the snow. He was semi-conscious and I whispered in his ear all the good things I remembered about our childhood. He awoke and for an hour talked about our family and how he was planning to be different when he got out of the hospital. Alas nothing changed.
He died a few years later of cirrhosis of the liver. I did find out at his memorial service that he had saved the lives of three people during his career as a police officer and for that I was grateful, even if he couldn’t save his own life on this side of the veil. Talking with him for that hour in the hospital, learning more about his life from others had to be enough for now. I am forever grateful that I made that book for him.
Mending from my marriage, with the help of my father
I was married for twenty years to a charismatic, public minded, good-hearted man who was a pillar in the community. Not surprisingly, he was a lot like my father! On the surface we were a great team, active in social causes, involved in the lives of his two wonderful sons, supportive of each other’s work. Under the surface things were decidedly different. Again, much like my father. Once I had that realization, several years into our marriage, I worked again with a therapist and a spiritual director, and decided I needed to do more inner work to break this pattern.
I asked myself, “Who would be the best person to help me with this daunting task?” My answer: my father, who had initially imposed his unhealthy behavior on me and had now passed over. He had shown me, in a mysterious conversation, that he was interested in helping to heal what had not been healed between us consciously when he was alive. I know talking to the dead seems strange to some people but ask almost any widow or widower and they will tell you that conversations are not uncommon, and they can be very soothing and reassuring. Anyway, my dad coached me on how to deal with my husband as did my therapist. I followed their instructions.
One difficult behavior I adopted was what I call a temporary leave. When I was being intentionally intimidated and felt scared, I told my husband that I was going to leave for an hour or two because I did not deserve to be treated this way. I said I would be back and hoped things would be different. I reconnected with him in some way each time I returned. This leave taking was a way to develop clear and sacred boundaries. It was daunting to develop boundaries with a person I lived with. How to do that? Carefully, courageously, and with a wise plan B.
Again, like with my dad originally, and with my brother, there would be no mutual heart mending experiences with my husband, and our marriage dissolved. Yet I feel that the whole process of experiencing pain, gaining insights, getting wise support, having the courage to mend and change, and developing compassion for others in similar circumstances has made me into the woman I am today. I do not want to repeat any of these experiences, but I can see and feel the transformation in me because of them. For that I am grateful.
Mending my heart after being assaulted or violated
One of the most difficult healing challenges of my life has been mending my heart after being assaulted or violated by two different men. These mendings usually take a lot longer and include counseling and truth telling among other things. It has been a life-long journey to come to a place of health, even though the healing hasn’t directly involved the men who hurt me.
The second violation was an assault and I dealt with directly by going to the police and getting the support I needed. But the first one was much more complicated to deal with. I was young, in my mid-twenties. It was my boss who I respected and was eager to work with who sexually violated me. It started with suggestive comments that then led to surprising me by coming up behind me when I was working and putting his hands on my shoulders, then sliding them down the front of my blouse. To stop this behavior, I suggested to him that our working styles were incompatible. It had no effect. Eventually he required me to work late a few nights, and since I rode the bus, he offered to drive me home. On one of those trips he abruptly stopped in a parking lot and lunged at me, molesting me until I yelled at him to stop. And after that I started getting bad headaches on my way home from work each day.
You might wonder why I didn’t do anything more about this along the way. Three reasons. First is that I had no legal recourse because sexual harassment wasn’t even in the dictionary, and I thought I would not be believed. Second was that he was a well-educated black man. Third, I had to keep my job, since my husband was in graduate school, and I was the major wage earner. So I just kept going. One day my boss told me he was going to his boss to discuss me, since I had become a problem in the office. Something within me opened (I still marvel at the risk it took to open but it did) and I told him I was going to talk to his boss’s boss. I did. I asked for a different job and did not say why except that our working styles were incompatible. I was too afraid of the consequences to say more. Yet I said I could quit if another job was not available. Yikes. Thankfully I got a new job. But I didn’t heal from the experience until several decades later.
How that happened is quite a miracle story. Over the last several years I’ve developed a timely and special relationship with two healthy African American men. One is my dear pastor and mentor. The other is an artist who I share projects with and who has also become a wise mentor and colleague. A few years ago, I invited my artist friend to share his story of growing up in Mississippi under heavily segregated laws. It was a difficult story to tell and for me to hear. After I heard it, I said I was truly sorry and asked for forgiveness for all that had happened to him because of “my people’s behavior.” In part of his story white women were very dangerous because of what could happen if you even looked at them or met them on the street. This was the era of Emmet Till, who was brutally murdered for talking to a white woman, so it was terrifying. And now, although my friend had several white women friends, I was deeply moved that he felt safe enough with me to share the deep story of his substantial fears of white women growing up. Despite the experiences of his childhood, his parents had taught him not to hate white people but to forgive them.
A year or so after this reconciling conversation I felt like I was ready to tell him the frightening story of my sexual violation at the hands of my black boss and my feelings of being imprisoned in that job and relationship. He listened to me carefully and told me that he understood. In fact, a female family member of his had a similar experience. I felt that my experience with my boss so many years ago was finally heard, understood, healed and put to rest. My friend represented, for me, a group of men I had feared and generally avoided. Just like I represented for him a group he had learned to avoid. Now my relationship with him, which allowed me to tell him the whole story, helped me to mend and not be afraid anymore.
The process of telling broken-heart stories
These stories are hard to tell. They are usually hidden below the surface and involve shame, so they rarely get publicly addressed. It is vital to tell these stories—but in a safe and secure place. And to keep telling them as long as it is helpful. And there is also a danger in continuing to tell them for so long that we get stuck in the stories and begin taking on a martyr role. This is usually because of underlying fears or lack of resources for moving forward with the healing process. With wise help there are paths available to continue the healing process, so the memories are healed and the events of the stories will not be repeated.
Just a word to readers who might be wondering about my conversations with God (and Jesus) throughout these essays. People have vastly different ways of praying and I honor that. These conversations are how I pray. First, in quiet I listen for God. I also pour out my heart to God. I ask for clarity about what is going on in my life. Then I ask what God is inviting me to be or become. I take in the invitations within my spirit. It’s hard to explain in words how that works. Then I respond. I am very honest with God and God is quite honest with me. We don’t always agree! I often find that God’s side of the conversation and God’s sense of humor is quite delicious. And God’s endearing name for me is Sweetie. I love that.
The results of the process of mending
Mending broken hearts with people who have hurt me deeply feels like a life-long journey. At the same time, the whole mending process lightens my load. I needed to remember the experiences. I needed to get the support to face into them. I had to decide how to mend. Then I needed to act on my choices in safe ways. The payoff was the interior freedom that came with the mending. To reiterate, in some mysterious and deeply spiritual way I feel that these four stories and this healing has helped make me who I am today. I tell these stories only as an example of one person’s journey. I am grateful for the courage within me to share these stories. And I am grateful for the people who accompanied me and for the presence of The Holy, which allowed me to take these deep dives into wholeness.
Janet O. Hagberg, 2023. Feel free to pass this along.