Performing an Autopsy of Your Relationship

Your relationship is over.  Dead.  Ka-put.  Departed.  Defunct.  Final. 

Resting in peace.  Or maybe not!

What happened?  To be able to move on with your love life, you will need to accept the ending of your relationship.  Acceptance means to receive the lessons that that relationship has to offer.  Are you open to what that relationship can teach you? Are you curious as to what you can learn about yourself from having been in that relationship? 

The perfect time to do an autopsy of a relationship is after it ends and before your desire for another love relationship is acted on.   An autopsy is a thorough examination to determine the cause and manner of why the relationship failed.    The autopsy is performed postmortem on yourself as you look at you in that relationship.

What better time to do an autopsy than when you are open to understanding what contributed to the relationship’s demise.  Why not understand what happened and stop repeating the same mistakes?   These mistakes get in the way of having loving relationships. 

Even if you have not been in a relationship for a while, you can still exhume any dead relationship from your past and find the clues of its demise.    The process is the same. 

Here are the questions to ask in performing a thorough autopsy. Your honest and heart-felt answers can bring to light valuable information that you can use to move forward towards love:

1.      What were your thoughts about yourself while in the relationship? Was there a pattern to the thoughts?

2.      Where did you spend energy and time in trying to change your partner?  How could you have used your time and energy to love yourself?

3.      Where did you change yourself to please your partner?

4.      What needs of yours were not met? 

5.      What signals were you sending out? 

6.      Where did you ignore your intuition that would have guided you towards love- if you trusted it?

7.      What were the problems and frustrations in your relationship that were a reflection of you?  What were the problems and frustrations- that your partner had with you- that were a reflection of you?

8.      What are the pains and open wounds that you currently have from that relationship? What were the open wounds and pains that you brought into that relationship?  What were your role and responsibility in having those open wounds/pain?

9.      What were your decisions and behaviors that led to its finality? Where did you see the consequences of those decisions and behaviors in your life now?

10.  How would you describe your true self at the beginning of the relationship? Describe your true self when the relationship ended?

11.  How did you teach your partner to treat you?

12.  What do you want to change in yourself to heal from your last relationship?

13.  What did the relationship teach you about yourself? What are the lessons learned that will not need to be repeated?

Take time before you bury your relationships.   Even if they are over, they still have a shelf-life of their own. The process of saying goodbye to a relationship that has ended is essential before you choose to welcome in love of a new relationship.  The time you take to understand and accept the gifts from all your past relationships is precious. 

The birth of new love relationships are built on the lessons accepted from the ending of love relationships.

An autopsy is a gift that keeps on giving.   

 
Mistakes happen.

There is no  such thing as a  perfect  person. Imperfection is the gift of being human. The only  perfect thing in the world may be  snowflakes. They're exquisite, unique and perfectly shaped. Perfection  melts quickly.

How quickly we forget what it means  to be human.  How quickly we forget the mistakes we have made - those seemingly life-altering, wish-I-wouldn't-have-done-that,  can-I-do-it-over-again  kind of mistakes. Those humiliating, life-shattering mistakes.   Big and small mistakes -the hallmark of being human.

In the news, there have been visible examples of parents making mistakes. There was  the father who allegedly left his child in the parking garage for three hours while he tended to business, forgetting to take her to day care.  There was, too, the young mother who gave birth to her child and allegedly  left him for dead in a toilet.

Before passing judgment, we should remember: There is no such thing as a perfect parent.

For many parents, what  starts out as a joyful and deeply rewarding experience becomes  increasingly more challenging.  Mistakes will happen, They can easily become life-and-death mistakes that affect the future of the planet, no matter insignificant they may appear at first.  What a responsibility to carry.

My parents made mistakes.  I am a  parent and have made mistakes.  Some of my mistakes I can laugh at, others I use as an opportunity to beat myself up with one hand as I use the other to ward off the verbal strikes of others.

I know that my parents are good people who love me  and want  the very best in life for me.  They have always tried their very best  to love and care for me.  It took all that they had to  keep up with the daily pressures of life with their constant   exhaustion,  isolation  and confusion.    Add to this the overwhelming  responsibility of  sheltering me from the oppressive impact of society and the challenge of just finding the time  and energy to pay attention to me.  What little was left at the end of the day was  stored to fuel the next day's parenting.  How many of us were really prepared for parenting?

Parents have always done the best they could.

Parenting is done largely without preparation.  There are limited resources to call upon when the work becomes overwhelming. When I make mistakes, I feel as if I have personally failed.  The guilt prevents me from seeing my successes and enjoying my child  completely .

As parents we  often lack information about the needs of young children. Who else  works 24  hours a day, often alone, unsupported and under criticism from others?

Exhaustion prevents parents from making clear and fresh decisions, relating well to others and resting completely.  That's  why my parents always looked so tired.

Ever hear of parental oppression?  It is one of those secrets that we don't talk about.

Too often we lose  track of the fact that improving the lives of children could also mean improving the lives of  parents.  We no longer have to settle to just get things right for our children.  The fact is, we won't be able to get things right for our  children until things are also right for us as parents..

I think back to the mistakes made by the forgetful father and the confused young woman and I hear the comments of others.

 

"How stupid can that person be?"

 

" I  would have never done that."

 

"He's  a bad person to have done that."

 

"She'd better be punished so that she doesn't do that again." 

 

I have found myself thinking those things too. Blame, anger and disappointment fills the air.

 

Then I hear the sound of glass breaking as the stone tears through the walls of my house.

 

Our ability to move children's lives forward is linked with making sure that all parents have steady access to support.  Yes, sometimes mistakes are large and hurtful and we must take responsibility for the impact of our behavior on others.  Yet it is never helpful to point fingers and accuse in a self-righteous manner.

 

Mistakes are an opportunity to move us forward as a society.  Our children's lives are enhanced to the extent that society makes sure that parents are valued, cherished and honored.

 

These are the gifts for imperfect parents.

As a child, I heard there were certain things that I better not try: swim within minutes of eating, touch a hot stove, run with scissors or cross my eyes for too long.  If I did, it would mean bad luck and certain pain.  

Included in the "better not try that" category was to date a person of another race or to cross racial boundaries.  It was considered a risky thing to do and definitely in the category of "are you crazy" and "why would you want to do that to your children". A boundary is something that conveys  "you stay over there and I remain over here".  As self evident as a rock wall or a barbed wire fence, a boundary designates a forbidden line that you cross at your own risk.  History shows the broken lives and broken bodies of those who dared cross this particular boundary of race.   

 Race and racism affected multiracial teens everywhere.  They are caught between the worlds of their racially different parents who gave them a life straddling the knife edge of their racial identities; each foot with a toehold on all or none.

Who are these parents who threw caution out the door and dared to enter a world where attraction across the racial line is taboo and forbidden?  In a world where one's skin color is at least a stop sign and at most a reason to hate, they dared to look at the unthinkable and the unimaginable- getting close to someone of a different race.

They reach out to make contact across that human-conceived divide based on skin color.  They hold up the possibility that love can be courageous as they parachute into unknown and treacherous territory.  Their children's lives often become the barometer of how well they managed the rocky racial terrain.

There are no guides and few role models for the interracial journey between men and women.  There are experts who profess to know about gender relations hawking their popular self help books that suggest the notion that men and women are from different planets with different communication styles and different responses to the world.   In spite of this help, the divorce rates suggest we have not done well.   Race relations may not be any better.

My parents chose to cross racial boundaries.  Without the equalizer of a similar class background, they reached out to one another,  my father as a Black Pequot Indian man and my mother as a Japanese woman.  I am the physical manifestation of this decision.

I knew a woman who is the daughter of parents with different races.  Her father is Puerto Rican and her mother is of English descent.  She shares that “people who marry inter-racially are people who don’t allow the pressure of society to dictate to them who they will love.  They deserve to love unconditionally.  If my parents had not been willing to do that, I would not be here.  For them to go ahead and have the relationship, they had to be willing to understand the reality of how others would view them and not make it the basis of the relationship.  It would provide them with the needed foresight.” 

Loving across racial lines takes a willingness to go it alone.   It means going it alone in a society that says that if you marry outside your group, you will be ostracized.  It means going it alone as your own racial group conveys that your betrayal will result in your groups gene pool dying off.  It means going it alone as your own family can not bear the weight of the shame and abandons you.   

Reaching across racial boundaries is an act of courage.  It is an act of courage to cross that well-defined, stay out, no-trespass precipice of race relations.  It is an act of courage to look into the face of no agreement and into the belly of racial feelings.  It is an act of courage to love.  

A powerful force in the world is racism.  An even more powerful force is loving another human being. People who dare to love across racial lines are ambassadors. They encourage those who want to enter these relationships.  “I would encourage them to be open and willing to challenge societal norms and to love who they want to love”. The tangible results of this love are multiracial children- the future for this planet.