9. Heal Before You Hand Someone Else the Wreckage
How unhealed pain quietly destroys every relationship we try to build on top of it.
I saw this online recently and I realised how many people I know are doing exactly that. Its blunt, but not wrong.
Some I know well. Others, I’ve only seen in the ripples they leave behind, ex-partners of friends, parents of children who didn’t ask to be part of the story. It’s everywhere.
A friend’s ex-wife, for instance, remarried within a year of their marriage ending. She was pregnant again before the ink on the divorce papers was dry, another child, another man, another cycle. That brought her to five children with three different fathers. And while every life is complex, what struck me wasn’t the logistics. It was the pattern.
I’ve watched men do the same, stepping straight into the arms of the next person who offers relief from pain, loneliness or guilt. Not because they’re ready. But because they’re desperate to feel something that doesn’t hurt.
It looks like healing.
It feels like progress.
But it’s not. It’s bypassing.
We don’t move on by skipping the pain. We just carry it forward, disguised. And the fallout is bigger than we admit.
You’re not looking for love. You’re looking for someone to make you forget.
Children are shuffled between houses like parcels. New partners walk on eggshells, trying not to activate ghosts they didn’t create. Ex-partners are dragged back into drama because nothing was resolved, only replaced. Even parents feel the strain, watching their grandchildren grow up in a blur of shifting dynamics.
The damage is quiet.
It’s pervasive.
It’s pernicious.
And it never stays contained.
There’s a line in that passage I saw online that stuck with me:
“Until you heal and change your thinking patterns, you will always recycle your relationships.”
It’s not just a clever phrase. It’s a psychological truth.
Every unhealed wound becomes a loop. If you don’t face it, you’ll find yourself back in the same place with a different face.
Different partner. Same dynamic.
And each loop costs more than the last, especially for the people around you.
The danger of avoiding healing is that we don’t just suffer, we make others suffer for things they never did.
We project our abandonment onto loyalty.
Our shame onto honesty.
Our resentment onto kindness.
And in doing so, we corrupt the very thing we’re searching for.
The Invitation
This isn’t about blame.
It’s about responsibility.
And those two things are not the same.
Most of us were never shown how to sit with pain. We were taught to outrun it. Distract from it. Sedate it.
So it’s no surprise that when a relationship ends, especially one bound by children, years, or dreams, we reach for the nearest balm.
But healing doesn’t happen in someone else’s arms. It happens in solitude. In silence. In nights when there’s no one to comfort you but your own breath, steadying out of chaos.
Healing looks like reflection. Like discomfort. Like radical honesty with yourself about who you were, what you did, and what still hurts.
It’s not sexy. It won’t get likes. No one claps for the season you spend staring at the truth.
But if you skip it, you become the thing you swore you’d never be.
You become the one who hurts others the way you were hurt.
You become part of the problem.
And most of all, you model dysfunction for your children as “normal.”
They won’t know what real love looks like, because they’ll never have seen it held through the hard bits.
So here’s the challenge, quiet, but urgent:
If your last chapter ended in pain, take a breath before you write the next one.
Don’t hand someone else your wreckage.
Clear the debris yourself.
The Close
Because when we do the work, the real work, we stop repeating the story.
We stop asking someone else to save us.
We become the safe place.
And slowly, love becomes safe for us too.
If this resonated…
Leave a comment, or share it with someone who might be stuck in the cycle.
Not to shame them — but to remind them they’re not alone, and it doesn’t have to stay this way.