217 | True Love Isn’t Static: Navigating Relationships Through Trauma With Mindfulness, Resilience, and Compassion

Show Notes:

What happens to love when trauma, illness, or injury change everything?

In this deeply reflective episode, Michael explores how trauma, recovery, and life’s inevitable changes impact not only our personal healing but also our closest relationships. Through mindfulness, resilience, and compassion, we can navigate these shifts with more grace—and rediscover both ourselves and each other along the way.

Takeaways:

• Learn how trauma reshapes identity, relationships, and resilience
• Discover mindfulness prompts to help you and your loved ones navigate change with compassion
• Understand why acceptance—not clinging to the past—is essential to healing after trauma

Take a deep breath in and a relaxing breath out and discover how resilience, mindfulness, and radical honesty can transform your healing journey—and your relationships—after trauma.

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With Whole Again: A Fresh Approach to Healing, Growth & Resilience after Physical Trauma through Kintsugi Mindfulness listeners explore resilience through personal stories of trauma, scars, and injury while learning to overcome PTSD, imposter syndrome, self-doubt, and perfectionism with self-compassion, self-love, and self-worth. Through insightful discussions on stress management, mindfulness practices, and digital wellness, the show offers practical tools like breathwork, micro-dose meditation, grounding techniques, visualization, and daily affirmations for anxiety relief and stress relief. Inspired by the art of kintsugi, the podcast embraces healing as a process of transformation, encouraging a shift in perspective from worry and being overwhelmed to gratitude and personal growth. By exploring the mind-body connection, micro-dosing strategies for emotional well-being, and holistic approaches to self-care, this podcast empowers listeners to cultivate emotional resilience and live with greater balance and intention.

Transcript:

 In this episode, you’ll discover more about love. And did you think I was going to say marriage? I’ll get to that. Well, you’ll discover more about love and healing.

Hey there, it’s Michael. Welcome to Whole again. A show about helping survivors of physical injury and trauma reclaim their strength and resilience. Through the wisdom of zuki marriage brings us together today. In this episode, we will talk about marriage, love and healing. And you’ll discover a few prompts that you can use in a moment of reflection, whether you’re going through recovery or you’re supporting someone who is.

But first, I wanna take a moment to say thank you for being here, and thank you for being a fellow survivor and if you’re supporting someone going through their own healing journey. Thank you for being a caregiver. All right. If you’re ready, let’s take a healthy breath in and a slow releasing breath out, and let’s dive in to today’s episode.

Marriage Indeed brings us together today. If you don’t know. That’s a line from one of my favorite movies, the Princess Bride. And if you receive my weekly blog, you also know that I end each post with Have Fun Storm in the Castle, which is another line from the movie. And to me that one represents the pursuit of true impeccable love.

It also represents the power of community and resilience. I appreciate that film in so many ways, but that’s not the focus of today’s episode, and I can also promise that there’ll be no kissing in today’s episode. Another reference back to the movie. But let’s get back to this whole thing called marriage.

Today is a big day release of this episode. Is our wedding anniversary. My wife and I celebrate 31 years of marriage. It’s awesome sauce. And when I think back on the vows that my wife and I took back in 1994, for better or worse, and in sickness and in health, when I look back, I realize how little we, well, actually I’ll, I’ll just speak for myself.

I realized how little I understood the power and the depth of those words. Couples say those traditional vows multiple times every day, all around the world, and often they can be transactional. We don’t really go deep and what it would be like if it wasn’t better all the time. Worse happened, or sickness happens.

At least for me. I knew I loved my wife. I knew I wanted to get married, but I also wanted to get through the vows so we can get to the kissing part and the party and the rest of our lives, which only get more difficult once you get married and you throw in a couple of kids and now it gets even more complex and then you throw in injury or illness or trauma.

Now it’s a completely different picture. Am I right? And the thing is, over the 31 years, we both have changed. We all change every couple, every person changes, sometimes in quiet ways and sometimes in very profound ways that can shake a couple to their core or shake an individual to their core. My accident was something that shook us to our core, to our foundation.

Somehow some way over the 31 years we kept on choosing each other. We fell in love with a new version of ourselves again and again and again. Today isn’t about marital advice. I’ve only had one marriage. It does not make me an expert. So I don’t offer marital or relationship advice. I also don’t offer advice on how to parent.

I only have an N of two. I’m not an expert. But today is about change. Talking about change, the kind of change that comes when we experience illness or injury or even trauma, and the recovery that follows. A recovery that we go through individually and we go through it together. And whether you’re in a relationship or not, today’s reflection is for you and I hope it helps you see where you’ve been and see the person you are becoming.

When you go through something significant, it’s so easy to focus in on what you’ve lost, but there is an opportunity to practice gratitude and see through a different perspective what you’ve gained. Or maybe it brings something into view with more clarity for us. I saw my wife’s tenacity to support others in a new light.

It’s one of the things I love about her most today, and she saw in me my work ethic and resilience through a new perspective, and I like to think that she loves that about me. The thing is, as we go through illness or trauma, whether it’s physical or emotional or spiritual. All of it reshapes us. Even a minor injury has the potential to reshape us, and sometimes our relationships don’t know how to quite stretch to that change.

Not every relationship survives the change that we’re facing. So as I mentioned upfront, this isn’t about marital advice, that everything should be akay and you should stick it out because the truth is that some relationships don’t make it. That truth deserves some tenderness, not shame, not guilt, grief, even for love that can’t last is still sacred.

It’s still meaningful. I’m a big believer when we go through inflection points in life, like starting a new job, having kids getting married, dealing with illness or trauma. It’s good to come back to our first principles, our values. I coach on this to executive leaders because we’re always changing. We’re not the same person at 55 that we were say at 25.

And as individuals or as a couple. I think it’s good to go back and revisit and reflect on the vows that we shared with each other and everyone in attendance, for example, for better or worse. What does it mean when worse looks like daily pain or exhaustion, or identity loss or in sickness and in health?

What happens when your partner is healing from something that you can’t see or when you feel like the one that feels broken? Our vows, our values, our first principles, those cornerstones. So important to our foundation. They’re not check boxes. They are invitations. They’re invitations to ask, who are we becoming right now?

And can I meet myself here and can I meet my partner here? Now, if you already don’t know this about me. I will say I’m a big believer in asking questions, being curious, because I believe the questions we ask ourselves and each other shape our lives. So I want to share three questions. If you’re going through recovery right now, that can help you as you think about this stage of life you’re in, whether you’re in a partnership or not, and three questions.

If you’re supporting someone who is going through a recovery. So if you’re going through recovery right now, here are three questions that may be helpful. Here’s the first one. What has this experience taught me about my needs and how have they changed? Number two, if I weren’t afraid of being a burden, this one was a big one for me, what would I ask for?

And here’s the third one. What do I miss most about who I. What am I starting to appreciate about who I’m becoming? Now, if you’re caring for someone going through recovery, first of all, thank you for being a caregiver. Here are three questions that may be helpful to you, and here’s the first one. What expectations did I have about this season of life and how have they shifted?

Here’s number two. Where do I feel resentment? What might that resentment be? Trying to tell me about my needs or boundaries. And finally, what does support look like for them, my partner and for me? And am I getting enough support for myself when we meet someone and decide to get married? I know many of us want a Disney wedding or a Hollywood love story.

Or maybe a better way of putting it is that we wanna live happily ever after. But with love, love isn’t static and neither is healing. We never stay the same no matter how hard we try to clinging to what was simply put. Things don’t stay the same, and that doesn’t mean that we’re failures or it’s bad.

It’s really an invitation whether we’re growing with someone or growing apart. I hope you have the courage to be honest and tender and open to whatever comes next, and that ultimately depends on whether or not you can accept that change is inevitable, even in the best relationships. Especially in the relationship that you have with you.

And finally to my wife, thank you for saying yes all those years ago and growing with me. Happy anniversary and thank you for showing up. Thank you for being here. And thank you for being a fellow survivor or helping a fellow survivor.

And in this episode, you discovered that indeed marriage brings us together. Today you also discovered a little bit more about healing and relationships and a way to look at change and a few prompts that can help you and your caregiver navigate change at this point in your life with as much grace as possible.

Again, thank you for being here. And thank you for being a fellow survivor,

and if you wish to learn more about creating beautiful ripples and how to prevent a bad moment from turning into a bad day, please visit my website, Michael O’Brien schiff.com and sign up for my newsletter called The Ripple Effect. And join us each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday here at Whole Again, and discover how you can heal, grow, and become more resilient and celebrate our scars as golden symbols of strength and resilience.

Until then, remember, you can always come back to your breath. You’ve got this and we’ve got you.