April 7, 2010

  • Living with Emotional Cancer

    They won't leave your heart and mind. You fight so hard to forget them, but you just find yourself replaying every interaction you ever had with them in your head. You take them off your contacts list, then find yourself re-reading old emails and texts, searching for a hint that explains why your friend or lover would turn on you and so cruelly use you. You knew you had given them some pieces of your heart, but you had no idea that you had allowed them to become your Siamese twin. You want to beg them to give you back those heart pieces to let you put back together what you once had. You might never be as happy again, but at least you'll be normal. But they ignore you, they mock you and ask why you hurt so bad, or they take the opportunity to burrow ever deeper into your heart, cutting arteries and veins and becoming the stunt that both keeps you alive and makes you long for death.

    Ever been there? I spent a bit of time in that state this year. And I'm surprised and saddened how many of my blog friends have dead hearts in warm bodies, trying to regain any enthusiasm for life while being haunted by a never-ending emotional cancer that is never quite surgically removed. How can one stop an ex-lover or ex-friend from hurting you so badly?

    It does little good to hate them. You once loved them, and you can't help but remember the good times.
    It does little good to try to forget them. Too many triggers exist; the mere sight of a revolving door reminds you of the time you spent at that restaurant, and even a casual log-in to Facebook may bring up their name and cause you to swallow painfully.
    It does little good to date other people. You forever compare any new love interest to the original, and since the original has created so many good memories and fantasies in your head, almost any new person has no chance to compete.

    I have some ideas that I'm working on assembling for a blog friend of mine as how this chronic cancer can be cured. I mostly beat my minor case of emotional cancer, but it took way too long. I don't think I can bear a re-occurrence. But the alternative seems to be to never let anyone get too close to me again. But being dead inside just to spite emotional cancer is to commit emotional suicide.

    Having recently had my birthday, I am reminded that time is precious. But each one of us must also finish the grieving process; fast-forward at your peril. But how can you stop grieving and go on with life? And what do you do if YOU are the emotional cancer, and the other person can't move on from you?

Comments (41)

  • Great post.  

  • 3 rec's and no comments. I wish I could break that small cycle. But you have sort of stunned me silent at the moment

  • I think I was there for awhile. I am really on the mend, healthy & I enjoy Xanga again. IN RL God put together a meeting (Wal Mart) with the person who made my life horrible while she looked innocent 3 years ago & I hadn't seen her till the other day....hard to imagine in a small town. God knew I needed time.

  • I don't even know what I could say in response to this post that wouldn't be somewhat painful. For me. Maybe for the reader. So damn, good job Greek-- that is my contribution.

  • Greek. You been poking around inside my mind lately, or what? Well... I have this small consolation reading your entry - apparently this emotional cancer is a common malady. Unfortunately I see myself in dual roles - having emotional cancer over someone, and BEING someone's emotional cancer (something I never, ever wanted.) I still have no idea, regardless, of how to deal with that second experience. Still... you've eloquently raised some very intriguing points... I just wish I had some flood of insight to throw out to you and Xanga, in response.

  • This is a fantastic post.

    Just sayin'.

  • this is something i've dealt with a lot over the past 2 or so years... back in August of 07 i had a pretty bad breakup (i.e. i was engaged and my fiance broke off the whole thing and dumped me). I msg'd him once on fb last year just to say hi and see how he was doing and he pretty much said never to contact him again, that he has moved on and wanted nothing to do with me anymore. I still struggle with how someone can forget 4 years of their life happened... how can u cut that out of your life completely? 

  • If you find an answer, you could quite easily become a millionaire if you wanted.

  • This is where I'm at and where I've been at.

    I feel like I really need help from someone because I have tried all the things you have mentioned. You are right. They just don't work.

  • Yep. Never getting close to anyone ever again is definitely not the answer. I think too many people do that.

  • It's tough when they still want to be friends.  I think the easiest thing it to just break off contact as much as possible.

  • Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, And therefore is winged
    Cupid painted blind.

    ~William Shakespeare,

    Mid-Summer Night's
    Dream

    , 1595  (i love that...another contribution to my silent
    thoughts on this post)

  • This is absolutely.... incredible. Thank you so much for posting this, John. After reading this, I definitely consider this to be something that I have at a good point in my life. 

  • Thank you for putting into words what I've been feeling for years and can't seem to get rid of, no matter what I do.  You are right, those things don't work.  Closing myself off from others who would potentially cause more of the same seems the safest thing, but it sure is lonely.  It feels like a physical cancer...the aches and pains, the literal heart ache.  There are times where it lifts and other things crowd it out, but as you said, there are always the reminders.  Let me know when you figure out what works to cure this.

  • Ha. I know. It got to me so bad I even sent naughty pictures of myself when they asked me to and called these blog "friends" whenever they wanted ... oh well. You learn, and "man up", and move on. Sometimes it just takes a while. As you say, we don't have enough time to dwell on the pathetic ways of others we believe were friends ...

  • Share your grief with God. Your Father wants to give you healing more than you want it for yourself.

    Blah, I want to write more, but none of it comes out like it should. I'll be praying for you tonight.

  • yeah, does no good to hold onto resentment or hate and precious little good to try and forget. what's been working for me is to know what i'm feeling is valid but also recognize feelings aren't facts. i guess it's cliche cuz it's true: give it time. also, i think everyone tends to be a little hard on themselves in the sense of how long it should take them to recover from a loss. it will take as long as it takes. learn what you can about yourself in the process, don't try to rush it and don't try to slow it. remember all the things that still make you you and stay connected to all the other people who care about you. as for the other side of the equation, i think i did okay when i've found myself there, listened, did what i could to honor their wishes. be honest in a kind manner. that should at least be a good starting point, in general! 

  • Literally reading about the fact that everything can BE a trigger, WAS a trigger. Painfully, painfully true.

  • I went through that once.  In looking back, I realize that the triggers were only in my mind.  Grieving of any kind takes time, but the pain begins to fade, and later when the good memories come, they are just that - good.  They don't have power over you indefinitely.  It is very similar to any other temptation, this temptation to let the "triggers" propel you back to your unhealed state.  I Corinthians 10:13 is a very powerful reminder that God is much bigger and stronger than your biggest, strongest temptation.  It's not an easy fix, but with faith and trust that God has good things for you, He will shed the sunlight on your soul.

  • Y'know, this actually reminds me of a quote a friend told me once...

    "You never get over your first love until you get under your second."

  • You write: "But each one of us must also finish the grieving process; fast-forward at your peril." I could not agree more. I get discouraged by people who try to rush me through stages before I'm ready. I want to tell them, "I'm working through this, but it's at my own pace. NOT yours, so back off." Thanks so much for posting this. I look forward to reading your thoughts on some possible cures.

  • I've been though similar.  Bless you!

  • This is very touching. Story time! I met my best friend on here. 4 years ago. I ended it.  Why?  She chose her ex boyfriend over me. He would beat her, call her names, do drugs, and drink in front of her, and her impressionable little boy who is 2. I told her how I felt, and she called me a whore who doesn't listen.  She called me a bad friend. Maybe she is the emotional cancer that I had gotten rid of. Thanks for writing this. I felt like I needed to share this with you.

    -Suzanne

  • You know when I said I hadn't read anything recently that dazzled me? Well, I hadn't read this post yet. This was great. I'm still in the process of removing my emotional cancer. The worst part is that, I do everything in my power to get rid of the cancer, but the cancer keeps coming back to me. Know what I mean? It's a two way street and I've turned around. 

  • Hmmmm...very good metaphor.. This is such a difficult topic to deal with and I have personal experience with going through an intense struggle to rid myself from the emotional cancer. But I think in a way bits and pieces will always be floating around...they just get less severe over time. I think alot of times we tie this rejection or leaving of a friend into our own personal sense of self. So when we are rejected..it's like the whole self is rejected or left. But, those two need to be separated. Often times people leave for different reasons, maybe parts that they can not comprehend or work with in the other person-but not rejecting the whole person. Also, I think we each have our weakness, something we make our lives dependent on-meaning emotional gratification or praise from others or achieving in the world-and when one of them is not the way we want it to be it comes at a much harder blow than it should have. I honestly think that just as one goes to an oncologist if one has cancer one should go to a therapist/counselor if one has emotional cancer. But that is just my two sense :) Great Post as usual. 

  • I've never had true emotional pain from a man I love leaving me behind to "see other people" or whatever. I've never had what could really be called a bad break-up of a romantic relationship. I had a couple confusing and painful moments before I met Eric, but nothing so serious as to what you refer. In that sense, I really don't know what I would do.
    But I am grieving for someone I loved dearly who died last year. Someone who should have been too young, someone whose health deteriorated so quickly, someone who was there in one breath and gone before the next could come.
    It's been nearly a year. I think I am almost to the place where I can accept the fact that my daddy is dead and that his absence is going to cause me pain for the rest of my life. The despair over it has nearly gone, and I think that's made the difference. It's no longer a paralyzing pain. It's a pain I can live with, even learn from. I guess the key for me has been redefining my life, rediscovering my purpose, and getting out of a self-centered mindset.
    I would imagine doing the same when you've been essentially rejected romantically would at least be a good starting place.

    ~V

  • I really wish that I would have had the chance to read this about 5 years ago. I went from being pretty happy to having insomnia for six months because I let my feelings get the best of me. It took a long time for me to get over those feelings of abandonment and anger. I never made ammends with that person (I'm not sure what that would have done, I'm not the kind to stay friends with exes) and now they are gone. I wonder if the emotional cancer got the best of them too...

  • This is exactly how it feels. But looking at it from the other side of that pain, it's odd to look back isn't it? I just got to the point where looking at those things that reminded me of that person were too painful. I trash all memory of them or burned them in a bonfire. It was a relief but certainly didn't solve anything. Baby steps.

    I have a theory that it takes you half the time of the relationship to get over the person. Both for lost friendships and lost relationships. So, if you were with them for 1 year, at about the 6 month mark you should start coming out of that fog.

    So sorry you had to go through that. It truly makes you a stronger person. Can't wait to read what other posters have said.

  • I think that like you said it takes time to turn those pains into something positive. Like someone else said God is waiting to help you carry that load while you can't handle it alone. Every relationship is different and every person is different too. I think that whether you are the cancer or you are the one with the cancer as a Christian your job is to love that other person in ways that build them up. Because people are different that won't be the same for everyone. I've been the cancer and it's awful to know someone wants a level of love from you that you can't give... it's painful to see someone you care about in pain. In my case after letting them know I wasn't interested in 'that way' I just let them keep our relationship contact or lack of in their own way. If they call I take the call. If they don't call I don't hound them. I try to encourage them in their work and in future relationships they have etc. I have a fella who has crept into my heart lately and occasionally there is a dull ache from that; but the good of knowing him is worth the occasional ache. In this case I seek his good while recognizing I'm not good for him right now, I pray for him every time he comes to mind, I don't hound him, I try to find ways to build him up and make his life easier and I go on with my life which is full of many good things for me to focus on.

  • "But being dead inside just to spite emotional cancer is to commit emotional suicide." True, and once done it's not so easy to come back from the dead.

    My heart had a problem in the early hour, so I stopped it dead for a beat or two -- but I cut some cord and I shouldn't 'a' done it, now it won't forgive me after all these years... - KT Tunstall

  • Unfortunatley, I have a major case of the very disease and it's been almost two years. (according to myfate22 I still have 3 1/2 more years to go)When you find the cure, please let me know.

  • But how can you stop grieving and go on with life?

    You can accept that whatever was is no longer but that takes time and it IS unfortunately a process that may have to get as ugly as it is long and painful. I think the worst thing you can possibly do is pretend you aren't angry when you're furious.. or to invite/allow people close to you.. knowing you aren't ready to trust them, let alone reciprocate full fledged emotions.

    I believe feeling anger and/or hate ..especially when they hurt you, is a part of getting over it. You need those negative emotions to burn away the primary attachment that keeps you bound to hoping things reconcile with them.

    You need to feel hurt and down because that's what people do when they're hurt or injured any other way. The purpose being to have your system using minimal energy while it's healing. This applies mentally much the same as it does after a major physical trauma.

    You also need to have that period of death where you shield your heart for a while from everything, because you need that time to heal and also to re-orient yourself as a productive individual unit. You need to isolate yourself from those kinds of bonds so that you can remember what it is to be an individually functioning machine and thus not depend on other fixes of being with someone.

    Get mad at it so you can achieve resolution. Allow yourself to hurt so that you can grieve. Quarantine yourself emotionally so that you don't subject yourself or other people to needless danger or discomfort.. and begin to do things for yourself when your strength returns so as to learn to move on.

    The process might take years and you might be left with scars from it, in the end. But I promise you that trying to avoid ugly emotions just because they're inopportune or not nice isn't the way. The only thing you don't have to do is let it sink you permanently or be the reason you make worse choices, like starting to drink, smoke or do drugs (which I did :D ).

    And what do you do
    if YOU are the emotional cancer, and the other person can't move on from
    you?

    I only know what not to do. I wouldn't try to contact them too often but I also wouldn't stop contacting them altogether, because that isn't any less painful. When I did, I would keep things purely friendly. I wouldn't talk about or show what new relationship I might have going. As much as I know they care about my happiness, I know they wouldn't want to know about my happiness with someone who isn't them. I wouldn't insinuate or talk about feelings or.. about what happened between us in the past. I wouldn't touch anything that could evoke an emotional flashback or reaction & I wouldn't let them get too endeared by my presence.

    I don't think I've ever been someone's
    emotional cancer, but these are the things I'd want mine to have
    considered, since she adamantly refused to leave my life, after leaving
    for someone else.The reason it sank me deep under the sea was because it was the deepest
    cut among many, at the time.

    I've had this emotional cancer and survived. I did allow myself to feel angry, to grieve and feel outright contempt at times. I gained some bad habits but I also gained fuel, from anger, to make some assertive changes in my life. I declared a state of war to change my life that I've been in, ever since. I closed myself out of access for about 2 years and I became a hardworking.. furious.. rude... eating machine.. brute. Far outside the man I used to be, but being betrayed and left on top of some other things in life before that sort of filled me with enough of a terrible resolve to render the old me dead and gone & replaced by a tougher, more blunt instrument.

    As for her, we kept contact after some time passed for me to be able to speak to her again.. and we did keep a casual and gradually less frequent connection, ever after. Today, she has pretty much moved onward, though I know everything isn't perfect for her. I don't wish that it is or isn't. I have moved on with my new mission in life, also not perfect. By all means, we are two rivers who've gone our separate way & I wouldn't have it any other way.

    It did take years to beat the cancer ...but I won, in the end.

  • GREAT post.

    I think referring to "emotional cancer" raises a great point, whether you meant to or not :)  Cancer is YOUR disease, and it has absolutely no effect on the person who "gave it to you".  ("caused it" maybe?  okay, great analogy but grammatically tricky)  That person will suffer no ill effects; he/she will do what he/she will do, regardless of you; you cannot rely on that person to provide for your needs, or to "cure" you.  So, what to do?  My answer is important enough to put it in all caps:
    YOU NEED TO FIND WHAT IT IS IN *YOU* THAT IS DRAWN TO THAT TYPE OF PERSON.
    And then, rip it out, stamp on it and burn it.  Figuratively speaking, of course.  Only then can you move on.

  • This is why should always remember the friends you still have. Turn to them for help. Don't let grievances consume your life G. Cheer up friend. <3

  • I've just had my heart broken recently, and it seems like it'll be a long time before I stop thinking about it.  One of my very close friends still thinks about her ex, and it's been years.  So if you stumble upon the "cure" please do let me know.  :)

  • eloquently put

  • Great post, John.  I don't know how to respond; I guess I've been living with this cancer for years now.  All I can say is, the pain dulls with time and prayers and, I have faith (I must have faith) that it will be cured by the same method some day.  I just keep having to hold on to 'in God's time.'  Unfortunately, God's time for curing this emotional cancer isn't my time, and, though I may hope for a specific remedy, I know I can't believe that His way of curing is mine.  So, I just wait and pray ... I trust Him.  And keep praying for continued dulling and full emotional health.  For both me and the boy, really.  But you are absolutely right - being emotionally dead inside is emotional suicide and not worth the loss of the pain.  It's been a long road, and I'm ready for it to end, but ... (sigh) in God's time. 

  • Oh my, this is the perfect way to describe the feeling. I also have emotional cancer--and there doesn't seem to be a cure in sight. I am trying to spend less time alone; hanging out with friends definitely makes me happier, though the effect is temporary. And a counselor does really help, not with lessening the depression, but with clarifying the thinking. I suppose I am undergoing chemotherapy right now too. Antidepressants. They do actually help. None of these is a cure though.

  • It's difficult to know exactly what to say to someone who has gone through the emotional turmoil that you have experienced over the past year John. But it does seem to me that you are successfully working your way through it. I do respect you for your sincerity and your high ethical standards.  And in my considered opinion, the girl who finally gets you will be blessed immeasurably.  And you, too, deserve to be blessed immeasurably!

    David

  • Love in all it's forms is a mixture of pleasure and pain. I think the trick is to learn to hold on loosely. In my experience the pain of loving and being betrayed or dissapointed is far better than the dark pit of spiritual aloneness that hard heartedness brings.

  • Ah this is so good xD I guess I don't hate him at all. I love him. I think part of me just knows time heals old wounds. I no longer feel as terrible when I think of him. I think it's natural to remember him sometimes. As long as you are not thinking daily, every second of the day. Yeah at times it's very appealing to just never love again but I think it's also a phase. It's natural to take a little time off and recover. I think closure helps. If someone can't or won't give it to you, then you have to give it to yourself. 

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