From my heart to yours, I need to speak a hard truth today. A truth that might cut deeply to the core of you. However, it is one truth that is necessary for your survival and your rising.
Do not wait on someone who has discarded you.
If they continue to harm you without digging in for deep change within, then you must protect your heart and soul.
If they have shown you, over and over again, that they do not hold you with dignity and respect, believe them.
Do not desperately chase for reconnection to preserve the malignant hope of a relational spark. When someone lives in a vein of toxic self-preservation, treating you as an object to be used as a means to an end rather than a human to be cherished, they are engaging in a profound form of dehumanization.
Naming the Reality: The “Anti-Holding” Environment
In over 16 years of work utilizing the Minwalla Model, we talk about the dark shadows of the “Secret Sexual Basement”. And, with compassion, I hope to illuminate and help you deeply understand what that basement actually does to your soul.
In a healthy relationship, your partner provides a “Holding Environment”—a safe place where you are protected. The basement is the opposite. It is “Anti-Holding.”
Instead of protection, it creates impingement. It introduces danger, disease risk, and humiliation into your life without your consent. The “Charm” you see on the surface? That is the lock on the door. It is the shiny distraction that keeps you from seeing the impingement downstairs.
The Charm is the Alarm. It signals that you are interacting with a mask that is covering the dark truths, not a man of transparency and integrity who courageously and willingly steps toward you with honesty and accountability.
It is not healthy attachment, respect, high regard, and intimacy. It is abuse, disregard, dominance, control, and detachment. If they cannot hold themself as whole and with dignity, they also cannot hold others with that same honoring.
The Cycle of Feeding: Self as Object
If they have not shifted their relational patterns of harm—specifically Deceptive Sexuality and Integrity Abuse—they will remain in an unending loop of self and other objectification and harm.
If they are not turning toward the reality of what they are doing, bravely naming what suffering they have caused, then they will not change at the deepest level of who they are. They will remain in a toxic dance of losing identity to the dark basement, living a duplicitous life, and eroding relational safety for the intimate partner.
I often describe this as a “Vampire” dynamic, however clinically, it is called “Self as Object.” They are not fully integrated humans moving toward wholeness; they are untreated individuals that are disconnected from themself, and who feed on others to create a sense of identity.
- Patterns of usurpation take hold, where they feed on your aliveness to fill up their own emptiness, leaving you gaunt and depleted.
- Manipulative patterns are used so you shower them with devotion and adoration, so that they can feel like a “someone.”
- They engage in patterns of grooming and dominant taking, masquerading it as intimacy to keep them in a sense of normalcy.
When they are done with that feed, they abruptly sever the attachment. This is not just a breakup; it is a crushing discard. It leaves you writhing in the pain and suffering of Abuse Victim Trauma (AVT), while they desperately move away from the truth, avoiding discomfort and accountability, rushing on to the next source of supply.
For them, patterns of avoidance amplify, where a frenzied seeking and feeding outside of themself happens, not a turning towards the wounds of suffering within themselves and with their deeply impacted intimate partner.
For the victim, this critical injury can shock their nervous system as if they have been struck by lightning and then it rushes through them. The hyperventilation that ensues is panic, for they have been left in a hyper-state of loss. When they burn out, a crash to the ground can happen and this hypo-state has them barely breathing and gasping for air. All of this is happening in isolation. If this is you, my heart breaks wide open for all that you have been through and may still be going through.
Landing in Reality: You Are a Raw Nerve
Right now in your life, you might feel like a “raw nerve.” I am so deeply sorry for that.
In the transcript of your life, you were thrown away. You expected to be held, and instead, you hit the concrete of reality. This shatters all aspects of you–your body, mind, and soul. And then from there, the fragmentation of thoughts, emotions, relationship with self, abuse, others, and meaning go haywire, often causing destabilizing confusion and disorientation.
In this critical injury, you are frantically scrambling to pull yourself and the historical span of your life together. And yet, you are a “raw nerve”, unsure of how to swaddle yourself and tend to your suffering. With the strength and care of my heart, I wrap you in it.
I help you wrap you in your own heart, reconciling the enormity of what has happened. I help you quell your popping emotions and your firing nervous system. I help you tend to the rawness you feel and nurture a protective skin around you. I help you be in charge of your breath and begin to breathe life back into you.
I hold this piece carefully and with compassion: Someone who is untreated, and continues to abuse another while living a duplicitous life, is in deep pain and suffering. Yes, they are vulnerable and fragile, lacking the ability to slow down and make contact with this part of themself. However, it is not your role to rescue them. They must see and want freedom from deep within. They must be bold and rescue themself.
If they do not re-pattern into life without abusive behavior and tactics, and you remain in the cyclical rhythm of it, you will continue to be shaped into living in the Doubting-Self (tangles of the mind) and not in the powerful Knowing-Self. The Doubting-Self began when the Secret Sexual Basement began. It kept growing because the path to your Knowing-Self (gut-brain) eroded over time. This became your new way of being, dragged around by the mind and forgetting the gut-brain, unable to hear its cry. This critical injury is terrifying, however it can be healed once you are clear about what needs to stop pulling you away from wholeness and connection back to your deepest knowing.
Do not absorb someone else’s Integrity Abuse to keep you away from your own truth. If you do, you promote self-abandonment. It will get in the way of you coming back into alignment with yourself. Stand strong. Listen to your deepest gut sense. Name the abuse to the one who harms you. And if that person cannot own it and turn it around, then step away from them.
Your WAVE of Becoming: The Breathable Container
So, how do you heal from such an explosive rupture? One that has shattered your heart and ripped your soul? A life that you cannot make sense of in the same way? The constant hijacks that uproot you from an embodied self?
You cannot just “move on”. You need to slow down and honor your heart’s cry to not turn away, and courageously speak your truth. A powerful Metabolization process that is a pathway to internal healing:
- Being deeply listened to as you share the impact stories that are sounding off loudly within.
- Being gently held with grace and dignity as you find your way through the harrowing landscape.
- Being cared for and tended to with truth, safety, and humility.
- Being guided to unearth what haunts you, giving the space it needs to transform so that you find you again.
This type of traumatic impact is the enormous elephant in the home– your internal self and the life outside. It is too complex to digest all at once. You have to break it down—room by room, impact by impact. You digest the grief, agony, rage, and confusion so it no longer claims your nervous system.
Together we create a “Breathable Container.”
A prison is about rigidity, managing and constriction, where it says, “I will control you.”
A breathable container is about pause, spaciousness, warmth and care, where it says, “I will hold you while you bleed, while you cry, while you remember.” It is skin-to-skin contact with your own soul.
This is your moment to rise, PSC–Pause, Set, Catch:
- Pause the frantic chase that the nervous system and cracking brain of survival are driving.
- Set your intention to land in a safe container so you can begin to arrive in your own body.
- Catch yourself before the hijacks spiral you into an altered state of living.
You are the WAVE of Becoming: Worth And Value Expansion of Becoming.
A Manifesto for Your Heart
As you step forward, I offer you slices from my Rewritten Serenity Prayer for your reclamation:
“My dearest heart, grant me the serenity to accept that I cannot change people. And that I do not have the power to change the things in my life that have already happened.
My precious soul, gently and powerfully open my courageous self to change the things in my life that I can.
Help me to not turn away, but rather to stand brave. Naming the accurate and authentic reality that I land in—my internal home at the base of who I am.”
Let them lose you, so you can find YOU again.
