Discover @ Desire Good

It's come up in our family (one of the kids recently got dumped), whether if the one who dumped should be allowed to continued to be in contact with the one who got dumped. This is not from a parental position but from my kid's position - that viewpoint. So I was asked by my child, and I gave my answer, which was, "How do you feel? What do you want to do?" Later, on another day, Mom was asked and gave her response, which was the same as mine. I just so happened to be present.

Then she and I both chimed in with this, "It depends on how you were dumped. If you were dumped without a discussion, then the one who dumps gets a zero access level and shouldn't expect anything else. It comes with the territory of how the dump went."

I used to not feel that way. But I have experienced time and time again that the same behavior will keep happening (the nature of the dump) by letting the person have greater than zero access level clearance.

It's nearly impossible to go from having had been vulnerable without limits to getting cut deep and cut off and becoming guarded to later being asked to go away from the security of being guarded and dropping that guard to becoming AS vulnerable again as before.

The fear of being cut deep again is perhaps too much (probably for most people), which is where our child is presently. The distaste for that treatment has no pleasure in it that is worth a reunion.

When someone cuts you emotionally when you are trusting that person to not cut you, it's just not the same anymore - the euphoria - the trust - unless some miracle happened to change the person who did the cutting. I imagine it's similar to dropping a baby from a cuddle to a street corner and then expecting the child to trust that cuddle again.

So our child is that riveted with this being the first serious "like". Waiting until after college is our kid's thought now. That's how bad it hurt.

I get it. I do. Personally, for me to have liked someone and then to see that person move on, especially with someone else, is a deep cut. Then for that person to expect to think that eventually reconnecting will restore what was tossed, um, no. Realistically, fear is ever present now.

It's easier to have memories of what was better before and expected to have become sweeter in time ... easier to remember those memories and that momentum ... than to be burdened with having to calculate "what reality has become" + "what reality is likely to be" = "since having had since experienced rejection by that person".

For me, it is easier to remember the past for as good as I had believed it to be rather than to dream of a future knowing that that blade once swung so precisely to purposely cause that injury that it could swing just so easily again. It's as if a person pointed a gun at my head and then said, "What's wrong? I was just kidding."

I now know the best it could have been but not the worst of what is yet to come, so "Hard pass!" is easier of a reply to trust coming from me rather than trying to not trust the fear of being dumped again by that same person for whatever reason it was as before.

So I supported my child in the decision held because I get it, I got it, and I've experienced it. Sometimes, we as parents can stuff the past and move on, but when our children experience something similar to our experiences and then ask for advice on it, that is when our "senses" kick in.

Out of what is safe for our children, we instruct our children to protect their hearts even better than we might tend to instruct ourselves to protect our own hearts.

What is best is to realize sooner rather than later is that if that was love, no, it wasn't. Love doesn't do that kind of damage. It's over.