Goodbye Jackson

An excerpt from Tap, Taste, Heal: Use Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) to Eat Joyfully and Love Your Body (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, April 2019)

He was so handsome. 

Perfect for me in every way: his lion’s mane of thick, wavy chestnut hair; his pale, languid eyes; the angular soccer-player build of his body. I fell head over heels in love with everything about this man (whom I’ll call Jackson), right down to his pickup truck with four hundred thousand miles on the original engine.

I was in utter bliss. I was also walking perpetually on eggshells. His episodes of aloofness, of not calling when he said he would, of a thousand and one subtle abandonments triggered my deepest, most primordial anxiety. I could never trust that Jackson would be there for me when it mattered. I became a human barnacle of unmet need, clinging for dear life to a relationship that, ultimately, was neither good to me nor good for me.

When Jackson and I hit our nadir, I decisively realized I could no longer stay with him simply because I was afraid of being alone. I knew the gods were playing hardball with me and that, if I was in this much pain, something big was lining up to be healed in my psyche.

“Ok,” I conceded to the Universe. “If you want me out of this relationship, take it away from me. I give up.”

We parted ways with honorable civility.

In the aftermath of that demise, I made a decision: “I cannot keep attracting this scenario into my life. I can do better. I will learn to love myself enough to say no to that which does not serve my highest good and yes to that which does.” I slowly peeled my eyes off Jackson as the cause of my distress and began looking within. This wasn’t just the end of my last, worst relationship; this was the culmination of a whole lifetime of neglecting my emotional needs and harming myself in love.

Through [EFT] Tapping and twelve-step work, I recognized that I had become addicted to Jackson. Now, in withdrawal, I was a love-junkie kicking my drug of choice. I hung on my own personal crucifix for an entire year, crying my way through a box of tissues every single night. Even though I had the support of my amazing Tapping coach, my dear girlfriends, and my abundant arsenal of spiritual tools, I still had to traverse the treacherous terrain of feeling the feelings I had spent a lifetime avoiding and meeting the most brutally wounded parts of my soul.

Eventually I saw, looking at Jackson in my mind’s eye, that the physical features of his that I loved so dearly—the hair, eyes, and body build—were uncannily similar to the fantasy mosaic I had pieced together of my phantom father, who went to prison when I was eighteen months old and died there when I was nine. I thought the God-sized hole had been filled: I had found him at last. But however benevolent my parting with Jackson, the reawakening of that primal abandonment sparked an anguish that took me to the edges of my sanity.

Over time, leaning on all the supports at my disposal, I slowly flushed the trauma out of my system. Through repeated rounds of Tapping for the little eighteen-month-old me, who couldn’t understand why Daddy didn’t love her, I came to forgive my father’s limited capacity to love because of his own woundedness. His pain never meant anything about my intrinsic goodness as a human being. I was not, and am not, the trauma of my father’s behavior. He never meant to hurt me; he was just simply hurt.

As the specter of my father’s abandonment diminished, I came to recognize myself as deserving of the genuine love I desired, and my relationship with Jackson has since shape-shifted into a friendship marked by a powerful shared history.

The chips were just like him.

The heirloom purple potatoes, the wholesome ingredients, the packaging with its super-hip blue-denim texture, that handsome farmer surveying his pastoral acreage, the hopeful promise that chips fried in coconut oil are nutritionally superior to their highly processed competitors—I adored Jackson’s Honest chips just as I adored Jackson the man. And I regularly indulged in them an entire bag at a time—until my stomach felt like it was holding an aircraft carrier.

It was so easy for me to tell myself that this wasn’t junk food, really. Come on, purple potatoes and coconut oil! What could possibly be problematic about that? These chips were made just for me. Food guru Michael Pollan says, “Eat all the junk food you want, as long as you make it yourself.” Well, if I were making chips at home, I rationalized, they would be just like this. They were my friend, my secret treat, my virtuous indulgence.

As the tummy aches worsened and the charm faded, I had to reconcile myself, reluctantly, to the fact that they, like my ex, were neither good to me nor good for me. Both the man and the chips held out the seductive promise of filling that God-sized hole for good. They were—and are—delicious. But, alas, as the saying goes, “The good is the enemy of the great.”

When the time had come to say goodbye to a vision of perfection that, in reality, was only a fantasy, I tapped my way to a breakup with my beloved Jackson’s Honest chips using [EFT Tapping]. Today, I look at that sexy bag of chips on the health-food store shelf and smile. The chips and my ex alike both remind me that, indeed, with food and with men, I have come to love myself enough to say no to that which does not serve my highest good and yes to that which does.

* Adapted excerpt from Tap, Taste, Heal by Marcella Friel, published by North Atlantic Books, copyright © 2019 by Marcella Friel. Reprinted by permission of publisher.