Marriage is like a fingerprint, no two unions are alike. You have different personalities, different backgrounds, different likes, dislikes, and opinions all coming together to create one life together. You go into this union with every intention of it being a lifetime of love and laughter and the occasional bit of heavy lifting. Rarely does someone say, “I do” imagining that someday their marriage will end in heartache.
For Kevin, that’s where he found himself after four years of marriage and seven years with his partner.
When they first met, Kevin was sure that he had met his soul mate. She was fun and adventurous. She kept him on his toes and challenged him in a thought provoking way. She was the one, he could feel it. By all accounts, Julie felt the same way about him. So, after three years together Kevin asked Julie to marry him, and with an enthusiastic yes, they got hitched.
For a time everything was perfect. They bought a house, they talked about having kids, they brought a rescue dog home… Life was about as close to perfect as it could get. Then, out of the clear blue sky, Julie’s father passed away from a medical condition no one knew he had.
It was this turn in her life that changed everything that Kevin thought he knew about his marriage. Julie had become depressed. She started drinking more and more. She was staying out at all hours of the night without telling him where she was. For Kevin, this was so out of character he didn’t know how to react. He thought, “She’s grieving. Who am I to tell her how to grieve?”
If that was where the erratic behavior stopped, then he could live with that. They’d figure it out together. But it’s not where it stopped. Soon she was hanging out with a friend from work, a man that Kevin was uncomfortable with. This started fight after fight. Kevin was becoming depressed himself. His life was spiraling and he had started drinking and smoking to numb his feelings. He knew before she ever said anything that she was leaving him for this other man.
Kevin was blindsided by this whole situation. What had he done? Why wasn’t he good enough? Why wasn’t he worthy of her love?
For the months that followed he pushed the pain down and did his best to put on a happy face. This facade only made the depression worse. Soon, he wondered if life was even worth living. When he confided his feelings in a friend, she told him he needed to get help for himself or he’d die from the grief. Scared that she might be right, Kevin started searching the internet for therapists.
At first, he started with traditional talk therapy. Then he moved to medication when talking wasn’t enough. The medication seemed to work for some things, but when he was really overwhelmed or he felt especially lonely, all the feelings of grief resurfaced.
Months went by and Kevin’s divorce was finalized, which he thought might make things better. Having that weight lifted off his shoulders might take away some of the anxiety and depression that he’d been carrying. However, after it was all said and done, he was still heartbroken and still burying his sadness with alcohol. No amount of medication, self-medication or therapy was helping anymore.
The same friend who encouraged him to get help before had recently started watching videos on youtube of people tapping. She watched all of the EFT videos she could find and eventually ended up on Robert’s page, eutaptics® FasterEFT™. She was getting over a long term injury and used the videos to help her ease the phantom pains that would keep her up at night. She told Kevin how it had worked for her insomnia and her physical pain and thought, maybe it could work for his depression.
So, with nothing to lose, Kevin started following along with the youtube videos. Slowly, but surely, he was starting to have less and less anxiety. After a few weeks he was leaning on the bottle less and on himself more. It were these at-home changes that encouraged him to attend a seminar.
He flew to Oklahoma and joined one of the transformational weekends. It was life changing. So much so, he didn’t want to leave, so he ended up booking the rest of the week. He had never felt so good in his life.
After being tapped on at the front of the room, Kevin was feeling on top of the world. He knew that when he got back home he wanted to continue with a practitioner and even take some online courses to really get the most out of his eutaptics® FasterEFT™ journey.
During one of his sessions, he decided it was finally time to address the catalyst for his depression - his now ex-wife. He talked and cried and tapped and talked some more. But it wasn’t the story about his divorce that made him realize what was really the problem… it was the joy in his marriage that really made him think about the links between how he was feeling and what started it all.
“It wasn’t my divorce that was breaking my heart,” Kevin told his practitioner, “It was my happiness. I gave my whole life to someone else thinking that would make me happy, but all it did was make me dependent on someone else’s happiness.”
Kevin realized that when he fell in love, he had stopped caring about Kevin. He stopped taking care of himself, stopped making sure he was willing and able to stand on his own two feet. When he said “I do” he was also saying, “But you have to be happy or I’m going to be miserable.” Throughout his marriage, whenever his wife was feeling down, his life got turned upside down. He would bend over backwards to relieve her stress, often to his own detriment.
He walked away from that session feeling renewed and empowered. Like suddenly, he had found the key that he was missing all this time. It was never about his heartbreak or the failure in his marriage, it started long before that. It started when his happiness was second to someone else's.
With his new found confidence, he made a promise to himself that the next time he finds love, he would treat his joy with the same importance as his partner’s. As of today, Kevin is still feeling hopeful and emotionally strong. He has goals that he’s working towards and when he becomes overwhelmed he turns to tapping.
I’m sure that anyone who has ever been in a whirlwind relationship can probably understand how Kevin felt. Wanting so much to be in love, wanting so much to have that feeling of “forever” can sometimes make you believe you have to hand off your own happiness in order to just keep that person in your life. If you take anything away from Kevin’s story, let it be that your personal empowerment matters, your peace matters, your fulfillment matters… YOU matter.
1 comment
Fascinating, thank you