What happens when the soul gets cracked open by rupture? When the very thing we trusted fails us a relationship, an authority, a belief and we are left holding the pieces of something we thought was whole?

There is a moment, after betrayal, after transgression, after rupture, when the body contracts around the wound. The nervous system, in its elegant wisdom, pulls back. Protects. This is not weakness. This is sacred. We build the walls not because we are broken, but because we are trying to survive.

Love, then, becomes a dangerous visitor. It knocks at the gates, and we hesitate. We want to believe in connection again, but our body remembers the cost. To love again, after rupture, is to risk exposure. But what if we approached this not as recklessness, but as devotion? What if our defenses are not failures, but invitations?

Behind the masks we wear for safety is the sacred terrain of our longing.

Attachment is the soul’s original language. In infancy, we surrender to the embrace of a caregiver, not by logic but by instinct. We entrust our tiny selves to the one who feeds, rocks, and sings us into being. From this, loyalty is born. Not earned but absorbed through presence and repetition. And when that trust is disrupted when the one, we depend on does not play by the rules a fracture forms. Over time, those fractures become familiar. Protective even. We learn to cling, to withdraw, to fawn. To adapt our authenticity to keep connection, or at least the illusion of it.

But to heal is to mature. To soften toward our patterns, even the ones that led us astray. To recognize that individuation requires grief, the grief of illusions lost. We grieve the parent who wasn’t safe. The partner who couldn’t hold our truth. The system that betrayed its promises. And when we grieve long enough, honestly enough, we begin to feel the shape of something new. The loyalty to Self. The quiet voice of God within us. The re-membering of what was never truly lost.

This is love after rupture. Not the naive love of early bonding, but the conscious love that rises after the walls have served their purpose. It is the love that no longer demands safety in order to exist. It is the love that arises from choice, not survival.

Richard Rohr reminds us in The Universal Christ that God, “the Divine Source of all that is,” is love and love is God. The separation we feel from this love is often our defense, our protection against the deep fear that we are not enough. But love is not something we must earn. It is already present, infused in all things. It is up to us to recognize it, to cooperate with the subtle grace that moves through us like breath. Rohr calls this divine transformation a kind of sacred chemistry a metamorphosis of the soul, an unexpected movement of grace that arises like tears, uninvited and holy.

In my own journey, I have returned again and again to this edge. The part of me that still seeks the bliss of my near-death experience the perfect light, the welcome, the embrace of the Divine. And yet the return to earth asks more of me. It asks me to arrive. To push out of the womb-space of childhood illusions and be fully here, in the messy truth of relationship, of betrayal, of embodied longing carrying with me the gift of remembering the love connection of God’s embrace. It is that sacred memory of Divine grace and love that enables me to truly arrive, here and now, human and whole.

The pain of betrayal is real. So is the collapse, the fawning, the confusion. But we do not stay there. If we listen closely, the body tells us how to rise. It tells us when to push, when to set boundaries, when to take up space again. The very defenses that once saved us can be softened, integrated, transformed. We bring our child self along. We update the timeline. We become the adult we were waiting for.

To love after rupture is to trust in mystery. To find the sacred in the scars. To build bridges across ruptures not with fantasy, but with fierce compassion. It is to place our trust not in the perfection of others or ourselves, but in the enduring presence of our connection with Spirit, held by the Mystery of Grace.

This is not the end of love.
This is where love begins anew.