“Always come back to love”
The coin finally dropped:
my marriage would never recover. After more years than I care to admit of trying everything we could do to mend it, I ended
it on the spot. To work a few things out in my head and heart, I saw an EMDR therapist.
EMDR stands
for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. As I see it (no pun intended), by closely watching LED lights run back
and forth, you become too distracted to game the process. It leaves no room for fooling yourself or the therapist. It is the
hard truth, and it produces results.
For me, every session with Linda brought a lesson, and some
were epiphanies. One time, when I wasn’t getting along with my mom, my beloved grandfather appeared as a larger-than-life
hologram. Looking me square in the eye, he set me straight.
“Scotty,” he cautioned, wagging
his thick, manicured pointer, “It’s my daughter…and she’s your mudda (he was a Bronx boy)…do
the right fucking thing.” I cried like a baby, and called my mom every day until she was killed by a Covid vax shot.
Anyway, Linda was a master therapist, and the first person to explain to me that I had been the subject
of long-term verbal abuse. I thought deeply that night about what she said while I read the pamphlet she gave me and re-watched
one of my favorite films, Raging Bull.
De Niro plays Jake LaMotta, a tough boxer. He knocks out the
champion, Sugar Ray Robinson. Then, he loses a decision to Robinson. In their third match, he lets Robinson clobber him, never
throws a punch. De Niro loses by decision again.
All beaten to hell, he wanders the ring blind and
bloody, calling out for Robinson. Finding him, De Niro delivers the line that still makes the hair on my arms stand up straight.
“Ray,” he says, “Hey Ray. I never went down, Ray. Ray. You hear me? You never got me down.
You hear? See? Look!”
And here, I learned a huge lesson about a mistake I made that, contrary
to my good intentions, contributed to our demise. I thought it was better to avoid confrontation and escalation, to not fight
back, to be a tough guy like De Niro and take the beatings like a man. Better for us, the kids, everyone, even me.
But I was wrong. I needed to “Come back to love.” To speak my heart, and do it with
kindness and compassion. To share my feelings, my pain, rather than swallow and hide them. In a way, by absorbing all those
blows, I lost my marriage like De Niro lost the fight.
It was a stupid mistake on my part.
Pride, ego and ignorance played their roles. I should have spoken up sooner and more often.
So,
remember, don’t be a tough guy. Speak your heart. Always come back to love. It’s the best way, every time, with
everyone you care about.
Thank you, Linda Cohn, for showing me the light, and enabling me to enjoy
greater balance, intimacy and pleasure in my relationships with the people I love.
