Chapter 5

The Danger of Using Another Person to Heal

There is an important difference between finding someone who helps you heal and finding someone you use to avoid healing.

The first can be healthy. The second can create another problem.

When we seek support from good friends, wise people, and those who genuinely care about our well-being, we give ourselves an opportunity to understand what happened and make better decisions.

We can talk about our pain without pretending that every person who listens to us must become our partner. We can receive kindness without turning that kindness into a romantic obligation. We can appreciate someone's presence without making promises we are not emotionally ready to keep.

But when we jump into another relationship simply because we are trying to escape the pain of the previous one, we risk creating another problem while attempting to solve the first.

The person who is hurting may believe they have found love when, in reality, they have found temporary relief.

They may think they need this new person, when what they actually need is the feeling this person provides.

And there is a difference.

You can enjoy someone's attention without genuinely knowing them. You can feel safe around someone without being compatible with them. You can feel understood by someone without sharing the values necessary to build a healthy relationship.

Yet, because you are hurting, you may overlook all these differences.

You are not necessarily thinking about the kind of person you want to spend your life with. You are thinking about the kind of person who makes the pain disappear.

And that can be dangerous.

Eventually, the pain may begin to fade. You start sleeping better, concentrating again, and finding happiness in other parts of your life. You become less desperate for the attention you once needed so badly.

Then something changes.

You begin to realize that you were never as interested in this person as you thought you were. You liked the comfort. You liked the attention. You liked how they made you feel when your life was falling apart.

But now that you are feeling better, you no longer feel the same need for them.

And suddenly, you want to leave.

But what about the other person?

They may have genuinely fallen in love with you. They may have believed your attention meant you wanted to build something together. They may have become attached to you and begun imagining a future with you.

Now they are the ones who are hurting.

You came into their life looking for peace, but you have left them with pain.

And the situation can become even worse if you discover that the person you chose for comfort is not someone you would have chosen had you been thinking clearly from the beginning.

You may discover serious differences in character, values, or expectations. The relationship may become unhealthy. You may experience another betrayal or another disappointment.

Now you are dealing with the pain of the original breakup and the pain of the new relationship.

You may have started with one emotional wound and ended up with two.

And if this pattern continues, you may eventually begin to resent an entire gender because of the actions of a few individuals. You may start believing that all men are the same or that all women are the same.

But the problem was never necessarily an entire gender.

Sometimes, the problem is that we keep making decisions while we are trying to escape our own pain.

We enter relationships before understanding ourselves. We choose people because of how they make us feel rather than who they are. We make promises when we are emotionally desperate and break them when we no longer need what those people were providing.

And in the process, we create the very kind of pain we were trying to escape.

Sometimes, in trying to fix what is broken, we break something else.

And sometimes, we make the original problem even bigger.