The Beyoond
Ending a relationship, no matter how dysfunctional or unhealthy, requires an immense act of courage. It demands overcoming powerful psychological forces like the fear of being alone, shunning societal pressures to stay committed at all costs, and the traumatic task of severing intimate emotional bonds. Yet, there are times when leaving represents the ultimate heroic act of self-preservation.
The Inertia of Relationships
Relationships can take on a powerful inertia and momentum of their own that becomes extremely difficult to disrupt even when the costs of remaining far outweigh the benefits. The reasons we enter into partnerships – love, lust, shared hopes, and dreams – can keep us stubbornly clinging to them long after those bonds have disintegrated.
The psychic investment builds over time through shared experiences, inside jokes, treasured memories, and profound vulnerabilities exposed. Leaving means reckoning with the loss of that entire intertwined history and imagined future. Psychologically, it can feel like erasing part of our identity.
Additionally, the more time and life force one sinks into a relationship, the higher the emotional cost of admitting it as a sunk cost that cannot be recouped. Our ego’s powerful need to prove our original choice was not a waste becomes an anchor making the prospect of escape feel increasingly daunting.
Breaking Free of Societal Pressures
Overlaid on these internal forces are intense societal pressures that make the decision to leave a relationship, even an abusive or loveless one, an act of defiance. Centuries of religious and cultural norms have instilled the belief that relationships, especially marriages, are meant to be permanent and unbroken at all costs.
This mindset persists despite rapidly rising divorce rates in many parts of the world, with many people still viewing divorce or permanently severing other committed partnerships as a source of profound personal and moral failure. Even if never overtly expressed, we take on this collective shaming from a young age.
When we do finally work up the courage to voice our desire to end a relationship, we are often besieged with warnings from relatives and friends imploring us to keep trying, seek counseling, reflect deeply before making rash decisions that we may someday regret. However well-meaning, this outside pressure merely reinforces our internal fear of acting with authentic agency over our lives and relationships.
The Existential Fears
Beneath all the emotional trappings, ending a relationship ultimately activates our most primal human fears of loneliness, lovelessness, purposelessness and mortality itself. Until we establish new love interests and social support systems, leaving a partnership thrusts us into the abyss of existential aloneness.
At a core level, we know that a partner represents the ultimate psychological hedge against being alone in the world and abandoned. Their presence serves as both a tacit reminder and promise that we are not yet destined for the final aloneness of death. Ripping that away by choice can evoke a panic not unlike a young child’s fear of being orphaned.
Then there is the dread of purposelessness – the gut-wrenching question of “What now?” when a relationship has acted as the sun around which one’s daily existence orbited for so long. Without the reassuring rituals and temporal structure provided by partnership, we can feel cast into an existential void and flooded with uncertainty about our place in the world.
Even beyond these psychoexistential layers, the pragmatic fears surrounding endings can seem insurmountable. A long-term committed relationship affects every facet of daily living – from sharing finances, property and possessions to legal binds like marriage contracts. To suddenly withdraw from that interwoven tapestry of mutual responsibilities and legal entanglements fills us with terror about how to extract ourselves.
The Hero’s Journey
When we look past the shroud of our fears and internal resistance, we can see that summoning the willpower to leave an unfulfilling or destructive relationship puts us on one of life’s most profound hero’s journeys of transformation. The very act of leaving what has become imprisoning and stifling surroundings is not just heroic. As mythologist Joseph Campbell noted, it is the first and most essential step of any heroic journey.
It is the commitment to heed the inner “call to adventure” of our deepest guiding values and truest Self amidst all the external and internal pressures to remain asleep and mired in the inertia of the familiar, even when that familiar has become toxic. Just the resolve to leave the “known world” and brave the awaiting abyss of fear and uncertainty is heroic in and of itself.
Beyond this first courageous leap, walking away from an ill-suited relationship becomes a journey of initiation into profound self-reliance, self-discovery and a more developed sense of identity. With the dismantling of what may have been an all-consuming partnership, we are forced to reckon with fundamental questions about who we are as autonomous individuals and what we want from existence beyond companionship.
This often triggers a Renaissance of personal growth and reclaimed passions that had been sidelined to accommodate the routines and needs of partnership. Creative pursuits resurface, new qualities of resilience and independence emerge, and as the fear dissolves, a confidence blooms that one has finally taken full command over authoring their life story.
This wander through the metaphorical “wasteland” the Hero’s Journey tradition speaks of, while initially barren and lonely, begins to yield gifts and revelations about our deepest sources of sustenance and power we never would have accessed had we remained in the safety of the stagnant relationship.
And ironically, it is this journey of reclaiming our wholeness and self-actualization that then magnetizes healthier partnerships when and if we choose to open ourselves up again in the future. Coming from a place of clarity and emotional self-sufficiency, we are empowered to consciously co-create relationships that enhance our development rather than arresting it.
This is often spoken of in cliches like “needing to love yourself before you can love anyone else.” But that does not diminish the profundity of it or the sheer heroic courage required to reject the safe but soul-suffocating status quo, leave the cave of a dysfunctional relationship or situation, and trust in our ability as free individuals to remake ourselves and our lives.
The Renewal After the Leaving
While the immediate period after leaving an ill-fitting relationship can feel like an ending, we soon realize it is actually the beginning – a rebirth into the full possession of ourselves. Like the chrysalis that must be shed to unleash a butterfly’s potential, what awaits is a new incarnation that would never have been possible within the confines of the former bond.
Sure, there may be seasons of loneliness and disorienting freedom. We may cycle through identities or undergo bouts of profound questioning about who we are now that the familiar scripts and routines have evaporated. But the core heroic act was walking away from what had become repressive and inhibiting of our authentic selves.
In that crucible, we are forged with fresh realizations about our resilience, capabilities, passions and power to reshape existence by an act of will. We may stumble, but we will never again be prisoners of the same limiting situation or relationship by default. We will have staked our claim as the authors of our own narratives.
The hardships of leaving become hallowed – deities we call upon to continue summoning the hero’s courage to keep bending our lives toward growth, authenticity and ever-expanding self-actualization. Our scars are worn with pride as testaments to the power of our decision to place alignment with our deepest callings above the fear of the unknown.
That is the victorious legacy of heroically leaving – to become the brave and empowered authors, heroes, and life artists who continually invoke the courage to remake our realities in service of our souls’ highest purposes. The act of leaving, as terrifying as it felt in that murky, transitional chasm, enabled us as spiritual individualists to be reborn anew and unleash dimensions of our potential that never could have flourished otherwise.
That is the deepest reward for the hero who chooses to leave – a life of authentic, wholehearted engagement with existence and continual opportunities for rebirth into higher and freer expressions of their truth. The cage is no longer accepted. The heroic journey outward and onward toward ever greater becoming is the only road that remains.
