In an earlier post I spoke some about men who go from one relationship to the next without taking the time to recover from the initial divorce (and subsequent relationships). As I mentioned at that time this sets a guy up for a string of failed relationships and a lot of pain. But there is another danger associated with a string of break-ups that is kind of like radiation exposure.
You probably know that persons who work with any form of radiation have to very closely monitor their exposure to whatever radioactive substance they are working with. Radiation destroys the cells ability to repair and replace itself; if too many cells are damaged it can lead to cancers and radiation sickness. To avoid this people keep track of their cumulative total time of exposure and the strength of the radiation they are exposed to. It’s my understanding that the workers who helped clean up the Chernobyl site had a total work time of 15 minutes; any more than that and they would have had an unacceptably high risk of irrepairable harm. Broken relationships are very similar to radiation. We can survive a few without permanent harm but the more it happens the deeper the damage becomes and we are in grave danger of developing a sickness or spiritual cancer that destroys our ability to have a healthy relationship. I think it is a trust issue – your ability to trust others and trust yourself with others becomes too deeply damaged and since trust is the basic building block of all relationships you are left unable to rebuild closeness. Very much like a cancer in which the cells ability to repair damage and replace themselves is lost.
So how do you avoid this? I believe it’s through remaining aware of your “breakup exposure rate”. When you are coming out of a divorce or other close, intimate relationship loss give yourself time to recover from your “exposure” to that loss; letting yourself heal and rebuild the ability to trust again. This will take longer for some than it will for others and will depend a lot on the circumstances of the prior loss. If the relationship was dead long before the divorce or the break-up then you are probably further along in the recovery process than the man who has it sprung on him without apparent warning. The severity of the emotional trauma coming from the break-up can be thought of as the strength of the radioactivity to which you have been exposed. So be aware of how deeply you were hurt, give yourself time and build a self-awareness of your own state of recovery. Sometimes it can be very tempting to anesthetize the pain of loss through a second “rebound” relationship . . . but that’s really just setting yourself up for more break-up exposure and even deeper damage. The key is time.
Hope this is a helpful analogy . . .
Bill
