The Moment I Knew Love Wasn't Supposed to Hurt Like This

It was an October night in Wisconsin when my husband picked me up from the hospital.

Cold. Quiet. Another endless winter, upon us.

I needed a blood transfusion, but the hospital didn’t have the right blood. I had to go back the next day for someone else’s blood to save me. I had to wait.

I was being forced to confront how far things had gone. How it was that ulcerative colitis had left me bleeding to the point of weakness, dizziness, collapse.

I should have been terrified but I was too exhausted to muster up any level of concern for me.

That drastically shifted in the car ride home.

My husband pulled up to the curb and waited. I had arranged to have the nursing assistant deliver me to him rather than add to his inconvenience of collecting me from the hospital room. Why would he even think to get out and help me into the car?

His demeanor wasn’t cruel. It was worse.

It was indifferent.

Self-contained fury over the inconvenience of me.

He complained about his day, his car, his ruined evening while I sat in the passenger seat, physically and emotionally hollow.

Somewhere between the hospital parking lot and our driveway, I heard my heart say:

Love isn’t supposed to hurt like this.

I had No Idea I Of What I Was Doing To Myself

I was educated. Successful. A doctor. Independent.

I would have told you I had good boundaries.

Yet, I kept telling myself:

“It’s not that bad.”
“I can handle it.”
“Other women have it worse.”

That was the voice I had been living with for years.

The Body Always Knows

Long before I consciously admitted that something wasn’t right, my body knew.

Tightness in my stomach.
Chronic insomnia.
A subtle hum of anxiety I called “normal.”

I rationalized endurance for devotion.
I intellectualized that staying silent was strength.
I spiritualized my experience.

I had mistaken self-abandonment for unconditional love.

And my body was signaling the difference.

I just hadn’t learned how to listen.

Externally Composed. Internally Bleeding.

For a long time, I framed my illness as unfortunate. Genetic. Stress-related. Conventional medicine told me it was a mysterious defect in my immune system set to literally devour me.

But sitting there that night — emaciated, drained, and finally too weary to keep excusing and justifying — I felt something else.

Recognition.

Ulcerative colitis affects the lining of the colon. Bleeding. Inflammation. Tissue breakdown.

At the time, I didn’t yet have the language for it. But I would later come to understand a biological model that suggests symptoms are not random mistakes of the body, but meaningful adaptations to unresolved emotional conflict.

When something feels shocking, isolating, intolerable — and we cannot speak it, leave it, or resolve it — the body moves into survival mode.

Not maliciously. Intelligently.

I had been suppressing emotional conflict for decades.

Minimizing.
Swallowing anger.
Overriding intuition.
Negotiating with reality.

I preferred to lie to myself than acknowledge what hurt.

My husband’s indifference sitting beside me in that car — his total lack of concern during a genuinely frightening health crisis — stripped away the last of my denial.

When someone can witness your life-force waning before their eyes, yet bitch about their minor life hassles as if they are your fault, something is profoundly misaligned.

I learned the hard way that if you continue explaining that misalignment away, something inside you will pay the price.

The Spiritual Bypass I Didn’t See

I studied the philosophy of A Course in Miracles. I understood that fear is a call for love.

But I allowed my ego to misguide that teaching.

I thought it meant loving harder.
Being more patient.
Finding compassion for behavior that unsettled me.

I did not yet understand that self-compassion is not optional in the curriculum of love.

I also resonated deeply with the “old soul” framework described in The Instruction by Ainslie MacLeod. Old souls tend to internalize blame. We look inward first. We assume the lesson is purposefully abusive because it is ours to master.

But sometimes the lesson is not to endure.

Sometimes the lesson is to stop.

When the Body Speaks

Germanic biological medicine describes two phases that occur when we are stressed: a conflict-active phase, when we are in survival stress, and a healing phase, when resolution allows repair.

Looking back, I can see how long I lived in quiet, active conflict.

Hypervigilance.
Low-grade anxiety.
Sleep disruption.
The sense that something wasn’t safe, even if I couldn’t articulate why.

My nervous system knew before my mind would admit it.

The hospitalization wasn’t random. It wasn’t a moral failure. It wasn’t weakness.

It was the cost of sustained internal conflict.

And the night he picked me up from the hospital — emotionally distant, inconvenienced — was the moment I stopped arguing with my own biology.

“You cannot heal physically while emotionally betraying yourself.”

That quote from my book, The Love Liar: A Memoir of Narcissism, Codependency and the Pursuit of Self-Love would later become foundational to my Loving Yourself Whole™ Method.

Because healing is not just about symptom management.

It is about congruence.

You cannot claim sovereignty in your health while outsourcing your emotional truth.

You cannot restore your body while continuously overriding your intuition.

And you cannot experience real love while your nervous system is in survival mode.

For Anyone Who Is “Managing:”

If you are functioning…
If you are strong…
If you are explaining away behavior that quietly destabilizes you…

If you are sick and in pain…

Pause.

Your body may not be betraying you.

It may be protecting you.

Symptoms are not proof you are broken.

They may be evidence that something inside you has been unresolved for too long.

Healing does not begin with blaming others.

It begins with radical honesty.

In the next post, I’ll explore how being “the good one” wires the nervous system for self-sacrifice — and why that pattern can quietly shape both our relationships and our biology.

Because sometimes the most spiritual act is not enduring.

It’s telling the truth.