Heartache.

At the end of last year – just a few days after wrapping up the last of my sessions – my partner of ten years ended our relationship for good. It wasn’t an amicable breakup either. I sat on the couch (that’s always looming in the background of my sessions), and read through blocks of text that listed out my shortcomings, one after another. I felt gutted, worthless, and ashamed. After a decade of commitment, and trying my damnedest to be “good,” my worst nightmare had come true. Our partnership was over, and apparently it was all my fault.

I spent the next three weeks crying my eyes out; my body buckled and shrank under every surge of pain. How on earth was I going to get through this? What would I say to everyone who’d known us as a couple? Would my clients think I was a massive hypocrite for telling them how to live their lives when mine was a shit mess?!

The months that followed were equally excruciating. I was wracked with guilty anguish, that either cooled to numbing delusion or exploded into rage. I had lost my life partner, my “other half,” and it felt like I was quickly losing my mind. The depths of grief swallowed me whole and there was nothing I could do to stop it. The final nail in the coffin came when my former partner announced that she was moving across the country, to a city in the Midwest, just ten days before she was scheduled to go. As I stood in front of my apartment building, waving goodbye to her and our sweetly oblivious corgi, the last lingering fantasies of our future together disappeared from view.

Begin Again.

Endings are new beginnings. I heard this so many times over the past year, it made me want to hurl! Nausea aside, the statement is undeniably true. Everything I believed about my life, my love, and my identity had crumbled, caught on fire, and drowned in a tidal wave of cold reality. While I sat wallowing in the wreckage, something new emerged.

Slowly, I started writing again. The grief process was taking its course, and I used my stories to express the ever-changing churn of emotions moving through me. Sometimes it was joy, humor, loyalty, and love. At other times vengeance, desperation, sorrow, and loss. Writing brought me to my favorite tea shop, and with it came new friendships. They formed softly, tenderly, and grew like fresh spring buds. For the first time in over a decade, I found myself embraced in a community of creators. We shared our art and our stories, sipped wine and spilled tea. We sang and danced and set our intentions by firelight. And somewhere in the midst of it all, the indescribable emptiness I felt gave way to sweet peace. 

Healing Happens.

As newness sprouted from the ashes of my loss, I learned the importance of being honest. Moving with the tides of grief took the bulk of my energy, leaving little room for pretense. Without the capacity to “put on a happy face” I was forced to tell the truth. I had to admit that I wasn’t ok. I openly shared my story, my fears, and my flaws with safe others; and told them just how much they meant to me. I learned to speak the language of vulnerability, something my sizable ego had never allowed me to do before.

The honesty had a profound effect on me. My heart ached and creaked, like a heavily rusted door in a horror movie, as it opened up and allowed truth to flow out. To my surprise, the people I shared my story with didn’t pity or judge me. They shared their own experiences of heartache, of abandonment, of “forever” dreams that were shattered to dust. And in their eyes and smiles, I saw that joy and love had filled those broken spaces once more. I had moved through a right of passage, and now shared a kinship with souls who had loved, lost, and lived to tell the tale.

With the support of a safe community came the confidence to be and do whatever made me happy. My life was no longer defined by my relationship (or any other arbitrary marker of success) and that was absolutely terrifying, at first! Over time, I started to see myself as more than the roles I’d been conditioned to play. I wasn’t a helper, a rescuer, or someone’s “little wifey.” Neither was I the cause of my failed relationship. I was a sovereign being, a loving creator, and a seeker of my own soul. 

Alone & Deeper Wounds.

Since we’re being honest here, I’ll tell you something else. Breaking up means being alone, and alone is what we’re most afraid of. We Westerners tend to deny our fear of loneliness, and even brag about how much we love our alone time. But the fear of aloneness runs deep. Ending a close connection, that you’ve relied on for years, means no longer waking up next to that person, or hearing them shuffle around the house. It means no more long phone calls, inside jokes, or random texts back and forth. It means experiencing the kind of aloneness that reaches deep into the bowels of your psyche and triggers the primal wound. You know the one I’m talking about… The overwhelming sense of isolation and abandonment that we all felt when our parents or guardians failed to love us the way we needed. The one that left us desolate, terrified, and all too certain that we could never be worthy of unconditional love.

No matter how much I tried to squirm, avoid, or ignore it, alone crept into my life and enveloped me with its long-reaching arms. It slept in my bed and followed me to and from the bathroom. It ate my meals with me, and sat on the couch beside me, making no comments on the hours of Asian dramas I watched. Alone became my constant and only companion, and with it the writhing pain of the wounded inner child. The baby girl – who was left in Jamaica at just 11 months old, and then torn from her country and culture at the age of 3 – made her presence fully known. Her pain, my pain, was palpable and immense as our broken heart purged and bled.

Recovery is Real.

The past twelve months have felt like a strange heavenly hell. I was reduced to an empty shell of my former self, only to realize that I hadn’t really liked who that former self was! I still love my former partner, but I know now that our relationship was not the typical, kismetic, storybook romance. The countless moments of joy and soul connection couldn’t overshadow the tumultuous, traumatic codependence, born between two people who were plagued by memories of their emotionally neglectful childhoods. Still, I’m grateful all the same. I was loved, not in all the ways that I wanted to be, but genuinely, truly, and unabashedly. And I loved wholeheartedly in return. The destruction of our partnership only served to wake me up to the unfinished business my soul was longing to complete.

I now consider myself to be a person in recovery. I am recovering from being codependent with dysfunction. From spending most of my adult life readily abandoning myself in exchange for a toxic addiction to managing, fixing, coercing, enabling, and controlling the dysfunctional behaviors of others. Others who meant well, who wanted to love and be loved, but ultimately chose to avoid the hard work of facing and fixing their own wounds.

When I tell people I’m in recovery from codependence – that I believe it is an absolutely necessary step beyond processing trauma – I can see the flicker of uncertainty in their eyes, even as they agree with me. I’m sure they’re shocked to hear a therapist say that she hasn’t got it all figured out. That she is in fact working actively to reverse the compulsion to focus on others rather than herself. I can sense their discomfort, their dissonance, and I know compassionately that something deep inside them is stirring. In the tender spaces of their truest self, behind the veils of repression, control, and too-smart-for-their-own-good logic, a small, quiet voice calls out, “Me too.” ❤

October 31, 2025 by Kimoré Reid, Ed.S, LPC, CPCS

Kimoré is a licensed counselor, writer, & tea-lover from the Caribbean. Her work is dedicated to the healing & liberation of Black, Afro-Caribbean, & African Women, & Queer Women of Color. Interested in working with Kimoré? CLICK HERE!