Mental Health Monday: A Love That Heals

Eight years ago, on a rainy Tuesday evening in July, I left therapy and, in the quiet of a cab ride home, captured my therapist’s words before they slipped away into a moment in time.

Flashforward to July 4, 2025, and my husband and I celebrated 1.5 years of marriage and 5.5 years together.

My husband is many things I love. So for today’s Mental Health Monday post, which also happens to be his birthday, I am celebrating him for the gift of a love that heals.

Research suggests that your relationship with your partner does not begin when you meet them. It began the day you were born. From your earliest days, your brain absorbed the psychological and emotional dynamics you witnessed between your parents, as well as the way your parents related to you. What you saw, you internalised. What you felt, you carried with you. Those early experiences left an imprint on your limbic system, the part of the brain that stores emotion and memory. Over time, they created patterns in your neural network. Patterns that you carry into adult relationships and unless you work to change them, those patterns stick around and impact the quality of your life.

I come from chaos, pain and heartbreak and so my patterns are rooted in that trauma. I grew up in a VERY violent household and because of that, among other things I have gone through, my therapist tells me that I am always looking for the catastrophe because it is what I know. I have been actively working on healing from the trauma of my childhood for more than eight years, both on my own and with two different therapists. The therapist who told me that emotional safety is a core relationship need for me also said that having the right partner might help me in my journey towards healing. And that is the miracle of my marriage: my husband’s love is one of the biggest blessings of my life, endlessly healing things he did not break.

Less than two months into our relationship, I posted Heartfelt, a raw and vulnerable reflection on what it means to live and love while navigating the relentless grip of three anxiety disorders: Generalised Anxiety Disorder (GAD), Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). I wrote about how my anxieties intertwine to fuel cycles of overthinking, self-doubt and self-sabotage, especially in the fragile terrain of early romance. Overthinking often trapped me in spirals of doubt about Di and his past, creating storms of insecurity rooted not in reality but in trauma. Through therapy, I began to understand that these fixations were less about him and more about the self-sabotaging tendencies of PTSD, which makes it difficult to fully trust happiness. At the heart of the story was a tender, steadfast love: a deeply supportive boyfriend whose patience, compassion and unwavering presence showed me that emotional safety and healing are possible.

From day one, my boyfriend➡fiancé➡husband has continued to show me the healing power of love. Nowhere was this more evident than this year, when my mental health was the lowest it has been since my mum died. The struggle with my mental health began in 2024 shortly after I got married and intensified in 2025, and I know without a doubt that I would not have survived those two years without my bestie, sister and husband.

Today, though, I want to spotlight my husband, not just because it is his birthday, but also because he has been loving me back to life. I realised I am being loved back to life a little before my 38^th birthday, and at first I phrased it as: my husband loves like only a mother can. That felt significant, because I have often said I believe he was sent to me by my mum to love me in her stead.

But soon after proclaiming that, I understood it was more accurate to say he loves me the way Christ loves the church. That was a monumental realisation, because while Di comes from a deeply religious family, I do not. In fact, not only am I not a religious person, I downright have beef with God. So for me to say that he loves me in that way is a testament to how profoundly and unconditionally Di loves me.

Between 36 and 37, I let myself down more times than I can count and by extension, I let Di down too. Yet he repeatedly gave me grace beyond the furthest reaches of what my wounded self believed I deserved. Again and again, he showed me the same self-sacrificing, faithful love that Christ demonstrated in his pursuit of the church, even when I did not deserve it. Especially when I did not deserve it.

I got married at 36, and if 36 was heaven and hell combined, and 37 was a custom order from hell with my name on it, it goes without saying that the chaos of those two years spilled into every part of my life, but nowhere more than into my marriage. Because marriage is the mirror that reflects your deepest wounds back at you.

And yet, in the middle of that reflection, I began to see something else. Dieudonné means “God given” in French, and those two difficult years revealed to me what his very name has always declared: my husband was created for me with divine intention. This realisation has opened me, however reluctantly, to the possibility of knowing the God who entrusted me with the most incredible man.

I am anchored in the conviction that 38 is destined to be the most monumental age of my life so far. The second most monumental age should be 83, if I am fortunate enough to see it 😅 Since 38 officially marks the beginning of the second phase of my life, I am determined that as I design the blueprint for the next 45 years until my next most monumental age, my marriage will be the most joyful part of it.

I am not naïve to think that because I want my marriage to be the most joyful part of my life that is exactly how things will pan out. After all, we make plans and God laughs. Life constantly reminds us that joy and sorrow walk side by side, so I expect laughter and tears. I expect ordinary days and extraordinary ones. Heartbreaks and homecomings. What I do not expect is certainty, because life has never promised anyone that. What I have instead is something far more precious: a partner who stays, who steadies, who loves. And if my marriage becomes the most joyful part of this second chapter, it will not be because life was easy. It will be because we chose joy, together, through the highs that lifted us beyond our wildest dreams and lows that tested the very core of who we are.