Abandonment doesn't have the sharp but dissipating sting of a slap. It's like a punch to the gut, bruising your skin and driving the precious air from your body.
Interpretation
Abandonment causes deep emotional pain and suffering, similar to a physical injury.
In this quote, Tayari Jones powerfully captures the emotional impact of abandonment by comparing it to physical pain. Instead of a quick, sharp pain that fades, abandonment feels like a profound injury that is both physical and emotional, leaving lasting bruises and a struggle to breathe. This metaphor illustrates how deeply feelings of abandonment can affect one's life and psyche, emphasizing that the pain is often more than just a momentary wound; it can linger and reshape one's existence.
In practice
In a therapy session discussing the long-term effects of abandonment on relationships.
And this is how it started. Just with coffee and the exchange of their long stories. Love can be incremental. Predicaments, too. Coffee can start a life just as it can start a day. This was the meeting of two people who were destined to love from before they were born, from before they made choices that would complicate their lives. This love just rolled toward my mother as though she were standing at the bottom of a steep hill. Mother had no hand in this, only heart.
We need a witness to our lives. There's a billion people on the planet... I mean, what does any one life really mean? But in a marriage, you're promising to care about everything. The good things, the bad things, the terrible things, the mundane things... all of it, all of the time, every day. You're saying 'Your life will not go unnoticed because I will notice it. Your life will not go un-witnessed because I will be your witness'.
Every time a woman makes herself laugh at her husband's often-told jokes she betrays him. The man who looks at his woman and says 'What would I do without you?' is already destroyed.
If your mother did not know how to love herself, or your father did not know how to love himself, then it would be impossible for them to teach you to love yourself. They were doing the best they could with what they had been taught as children.
Stories about mental aberration and oddity only make sense in context. Just how do people live with someone who is peculiar, gifted, strange or alien? It's odd because there's a little part of me that wants to write about exotic, strange bizarre subjects. Instead, I've rather reluctantly realised that what I write about is families.
Marriage equality does not diminish the worth of your relationships; it simply recognises the worth of ours.
Building Union among people not cooperation between states
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