A year of healing my heart

everything I learned in recovery

Have you ever been so betrayed that it rocks you to your core? This week marks the one year anniversary of discovering my then-partner was leading a double life. While he was asleep in my bed, I found out that he was secretly spending tens of thousands of dollars on sugar babies he’d met via the Seeking Arrangements website. It wasn’t just one or two other women, I lost count around the 28th.

In happier times at a wedding in England.

I’ve already shared all the sordid details in Revenge is a Dish Best Served Cold, which I published back in September 2024. I gave my shady ex a month free subscription the night before it was scheduled to go live. I was able to see on the back end of STARF⭐️CKER that he read it six times within the first 24 hours. But he never said a word to me about it.

Poof, he disappeared into the shadows of Los Angeles. I may not ever get closure —or accountability—from him, but I did receive loads of messages from people with similar experiences which helped me feel less alone. One man even wrote a poem in response to my share. Turns out I am in good company, which I want to believe is the “open hearted believe in love” club, but might also be, “looking towards the light in the shadow of heartbreak” committee.

I’m revisiting this experience now, not due to any bitterness or residue of anger left to release, but to move forward.

I swear I’m not an LA woo woo flake whose life is ruled by astrology, but Venus and Mercury are currently in retrograde, which means ex lovers appearing out of nowhere and an opportunity to review our patterns in love relationships. This isn’t a cue to dwell on the past, but learn from it so we don’t repeat the same mistakes.

At a dinner recently I was sat next to a tortured artist who screwed tight his eyes when speaking as though each word was too painful to see, which reminded me of my ex who did the same. In my ex’s case because he was either lying or too filled with shame to speak from the heart. Shame really fucks us up because it keeps our so called “dirty” secrets in the shadows. When we share our shame with others, we bring it into the light to dissipate. I wrote Revenge is a Dish Best Served Cold, partly to acknowledge how ashamed I was of being deceived. I didn’t want to keep all that locked inside to fester and prevent me from trusting in love again.

One of the many DMs I received in response to Revenge is a Dish Best Served Cold.

In honor of Mercury/Venus RX and the anniversary of having my ass handed to me in the love department, here’s some takeaways I learned over the past year of healing my heart (and keeping it open.)

1. It’s going to hurt like hell for a while. When I say I had my ass handed to me in the love department….I literally fell on my ass 48 hours after discovering his web of lies. I was sitting on an outdoor hammock swing, talking on the phone when boom—it fell from the ceiling and I hit the floor with a thud on my tailbone. I bruised my cocyx something awful and was hobbling around for weeks. Of course I blamed him for this act of the hammock gods and every time I sat down I cursed his name. I swore that rather than metaphorically “falling” blindly in love again, I would sink gingerly into love’s embrace.

2. Move like molasses. As I dipped my toes into dating again, my guard quickly went up, a primal self defense instinct to avoid being hurt. When I allowed myself to slow down and feel into every uncomfortable moment, I realized I wasn’t ready to be intimate without establishing real trust. Moving slow allows you to LISTEN to what people tell you, especially in the beginning and NOT fall in love with the “potential” of who they might be. This means taking off the rose colored glasses (also known as “dick/ pussy haze”) and seeing potential mates for who they actually are, not who you want them to be. I remember being so head over heels with a boyfriend after a month that we were talking about buying a house together. My brother Tony (always sensible) cautioned me to slow down. At the time I was annoyed that he wasn’t aboard my love train, but after the relationship spectacularly flamed out I realized my rush to be in love prevented me from seeing the red flags my brother did.

   

3. Getting under someone is not always the best way to get over someone. My friend Gila Shlomi, aka “Weezy” is co-host of the WHOREible Decisions podcast. She is EXTREMELY sexually liberated, yet told me that, “through certain breakups I need to be celibate until I feel like I'm over this moment. Because then I'm just going to be having sex to cover the pain up. It's like we wrap it in a blanket and think that sex is going to solve those feelings or make us feel better, which it doesn't. I'm not a big rebound sex person. I've never found it to be helpful or healthy. I think that when we think of someone being totally celibate we have this image of a nun who can't do anything. And that was what I kind of had to learn towards the end. "Oh, I can be sexy and sexual but not have sex.” People don't look at celibacy as a journey into discovering yourself more than they do a pity party.” That said, if you need to fuck the pain away, by all means, do so, just remember it’s a temporary fix.

   

   Raquel Welch as a sexy nun in Bluebeard., 1972.

4. Know the difference between instinct and reflex. Our instincts are ruled by the brain and our brains are often overthinking/ analyzing/coming up with wild ideas. For example, revenge may be an instinct when someone does us dirty. In my case, it was one I had to overcome. A reflex is a somatic response ruled by the spinal cord, such as pulling your hand away from a hot stove. Our patterns in relationships/attractions usually fit into the instinct category, even if we are repeating broken ones. So we have to get clear on when we are operating from outdated or unhealthy instincts and train our reflexes to get sharper, which requires bypassing the brain, tuning into our body and senses for somatic cues to respond to. I’ve been lucky to train jiu-jitsu with a couple members of the Gracie family, Cesalina and Rayron, who are to Brazilian jiu-jitsu what my family is to Hollywood—except the Gracie’s number in the hundreds and feature black belt champions instead of movie people. Cesalina is particularly epic because she focuses on empowering women to hold strength and boundaries, on and off the mat. Recently she had me doing a series of choke hold drills with my eyes closed, so that I would operate from reflex rather than get caught in thinking about what I “should” do (instinct.) She told me that top fighters (like her cousin, Rayron) train their reflexes hundreds and thousands of times so they get out of their own (thinking) way and stay completely in their bodies when seconds count. When I look over the scope of my relationship with the man who betrayed me, there were so many times I betrayed myself, letting my brain overdrive my emotional, energetic body, who felt plenty of pangs of “this feels off.”

goldilocksg

A post shared by @goldilocksg

5. Trust in the dance. It’s been said by smarter people than me, that love is a dance. If you are insecure about the moves, it’s easy to trip over yourself, fall behind or go too fast. Rushing headlong into a relationship used to be my default, as I told you above (move like molasses.) I recently took a friend for a private salsa class at ME Sabor Studio in Santa Barbara. The tradition in partnered salsa and most Latin dance, is for men to lead and women to follow. Marco, the owner of the studio and our instructor, told us that 95% of his female students have trouble with this, and end up taking command. We laughed, relating to the idea of needing to know (ie to control) where the proverbial “dance” was going. In love, like dance, timing is everything. Sometime we get ahead of where we are at, anticipating the next step instead of being in the moment, relaxing into the rhythm of two bodies learning how to be in tune with each other. Marco had us do a “trust” exercise similar to the reflex drills Cesalina ran with me. Instead of being put into choke-holds, Marco instructed us to close our eyes, and do the basic foundational salsa steps, while he held our hands. Then, using only a slight shift of his wrist to indicate a turn, we would spin around in time to the beat. This allowed us to stay completely in the present (when we weren’t peeking and losing count.) Trusting in the dance and my own feet on the ground, eyes closed but every sense alive and in tune gave me a major AH FUCKING HA moment.

   Now, if I can just translate this flow off the dance floor… therein lies the work.

Here’s to a smooth astrological transit and DON’T TEXT YOUR EX!

PEACE & LOVE BABY

xx Liz