What Real Love Feels Like After Divorce and Trauma | From a Body-Centered Dating Coach
Love in your 40s hits different.
It cracks you open because you had to close. You had to protect. And it does hurt, not in that abusive condescending patriarchal way, but it eases in and opens up what sealed shut. Or so we thought.
Protection is so necessary. And it's also going to block love. The paradox is so painful, many of us give up.
Love is not just the softness of being held. It's the pain of being seen for the first time. When you've swallowed an ex's poison about who you are, or your parents' poison, for so many years, it feels like withdrawal. Like a drug being released from your system once you purge it. Detox it. Necessary for the space of love to fill it.
Love does hurt, but not the way we have felt in the past. I always thought that "love hurts" was the pain of loving someone who didn't love me back. The pain of chasing, of wanting, of seeking. Of loving but not being seen, held, admired. Not being understood. Never being witnessed.
But that was not it.
The pain of love, of real love, not the traumatic attachments we've survived, comes in deep to our body. Deep to the chasm we left open. We had to leave it open. The hope. The chance. The wonder. The childlike grace to take us, transport us beyond where we are, beyond what we have experienced, to a place where we are fully accepted and loved.
Love hurts because we have never been witnessed like this before. That bright white gasp of acceptance is like cold water rushing in. It's the pain of coming back to sensation after being numb. Like our legs that we slept on, coming back to life.
We can stay not in love and stay not in pain. Or we can risk this opening. Risk pain. Know the difference between the old familiar pain and this primal seeing, opening, expansive, scary as hell pain of wide open love.
Your body remembers what real love feels like. It always has.
The Parts You Buried To Survive
This is the work. This is why I created Unf*ck Your Love Life. Because somewhere along the way, we learned that our worth was negotiable. That love was something we had to earn through perfection, through shrinking, through becoming palatable versions of ourselves.
You've been carrying parts that aren't even yours. Your mother's fear of abandonment. Your father's rage. Your ex's inability to hold space for your fire. You've been walking around with a backpack full of stories about why you're too much, too intense, too broken to be loved fully.
But here's what I know about shadows. They're the parts of you that you buried to survive. The rage you suppressed to keep the peace. The intensity you dimmed so others wouldn't leave. The wildness you tamed to be accepted.
You didn't lose these parts. You buried them alive.
That rage you've been ashamed of? It was your boundary system trying to protect you. That intensity you've been told to dim? It was your life force refusing to be contained. That brokenness you've been trying to fix? It's where your power lives.
These parts didn't disappear when you buried them. They've been waiting underground, growing stronger, waiting for you to be brave enough to dig them up.
Your Worth Is Not Up For Debate
Your worth is not up for debate. It's not a question mark waiting for someone else's answer. It's a period. Full stop. Done.
The women I work with, they come to me thinking they need to learn how to be lovable. But what they really need is to remember that they already are. What they need is to unfuck the programming that convinced them otherwise.
Your body holds the truth. It remembers when someone is safe before your mind catches up. It remembers when someone is lying before they even open their mouth. It remembers your wholeness in ways your thoughts never will.
This Is The Real Work
This is shadow work. Not the Instagram version where everything gets wrapped in a pretty bow. The real work. The messy, uncomfortable, life changing work of reclaiming the parts of yourself you've been taught to hide.
The work of feeling your rage without apologizing for it. The work of taking up space without shrinking. The work of speaking your truth without softening the edges to make others comfortable.
The work of trusting your body's wisdom over everyone else's opinions about who you should be.
Love Will Find You When You Stop Hiding
Love will find you. But first, you have to stop hiding from yourself.
You have to stop performing the version of yourself you think is more acceptable. You have to stop editing your truth to fit into someone else's comfort zone. You have to stop making yourself smaller so others can feel bigger.
Real love doesn't require you to be perfect. It requires you to be real.
Real love doesn't ask you to fix yourself before you're worthy. It sees your wholeness even in your brokenness.
Real love doesn't require you to dim your light. It celebrates your fire.
The pain of real love is the pain of expansion. Of being seen fully. Of having someone witness all of you and choose to stay.
Your body remembers this love when it arrives. It feels different than anything you've experienced before. It feels like coming home to yourself.
And that's when you realize the journey was never about finding someone to complete you. It was about becoming so complete within yourself that love becomes a celebration, not a salvation.
