Severing Ties

I think honor is a tradition that is not so greatly held anymore. It requires accountability, truthfulness, respect and an attendance to your own wounds. Seems almost like we live in a time and age when dishonor is the easier path and the one more people are willing to travel down.
I’ve hit a place recently where I had to really struggle with a particular situation and make some hard choices. Do I continue to hope that someone who has never shown the capacity for honor would shift into a place of that? Or do I take the consistency of dishonor as proof that it was time to sever all connection? And where does love live with all that?
I had some incredible friends put me through my paces this past weekend. What totaled up to about seven hours of my feet being held to the flames. Every minute belief, feeling, involvement, pattern surrounding this situation was pulled apart and looked at and I was willing to see all of it. I was willing to change what I needed to change.
I decided to honor me. I decided to love me. And I also decided that sometimes the most honest act you can offer is to hold someone else accountable to their behavior and the consequences of it. So, I chose to lose a friend this week. Or someone I wanted to believe was a friend.
I can’t tell you how long I agonized over this. Longer than this weekend. I’ve gone through a series of believing that if I held faith long enough, what I was experiencing would shift. Turns out I am the person that needed to shift. I kept taking the “good” things or the nice things and holding it fast as proof positive that this person had decency. I’m not saying we don’t all have decency, but I do think that there are times when the “price of nice” is that you are being played. And it bothers me that I allowed myself to be played.
Make no mistake about that. I allowed it. I dishonored my instincts and myself by allowing a friendship with someone that I knew better than to trust. And that is the pattern my friends lovingly held my feet to this weekend. I want to see the best in people and am often times willing to close my eyes to the very real life truth of what they represent to the world. It is something I had been working on. It is something that I will continue to work on. (I can’t tell you how many relationships I have held steady in when it was time to leave based on the hope that “this time things will be different”.)
So, how do I feel? Free. I feel better than I have since February. I feel clean and whole and free. And I have a whole list of things about myself that are worthy of being worked on. I see where I allowed myself to be dishonored by someone else’s dishonesty and their games and I am resolute about not allowing that again. Or at least catching it more quickly than I did this time.
So, where does love sit with all of this. Cutting the ties was a greater act of love. Holding someone to consequence for their behavior… a greater act of love. Anything less…. Anything that included me giving my life force to “help this person change” would have been codependency and that is a game I would not choose to dishonor myself with this time around.
Thanks for listening.