In case you didn’t know this about me, here is a raw personal storytime.
I grew up in a dysfunctional home, enduring developmental trauma from birth through age 17. When I entered adulthood, I had to learn how to lay my own inner foundation.
Due to my dysfunctional familial life when it came to romantic relationships I chose less than ideal humans to be in partnership with. This led to a slew of bad romances until one broke me open to the core of my being and I knew I had to change in order to ultimately end the cycle of my poor relationship with myself.
Here is the story of the one that changed me forever…
Eight years ago today, I found myself being evaluated in a mental hospital. The day before, I ended an engagement to a man who mirrored the emotional dysfunction of my parents. On Christmas Day 2016, a voice inside me screamed, “This is not your husband.” I took off my ring and left our home, unknowingly taking the first step toward learning how to truly love myself.
The fallout was brutal. I returned to face blame and shame, feeling broken and unsafe. I sought help at the hospital. Though all I got was Xanax and a therapy referral, it marked the start of my healing.
2017 became a year of stripping away: selling my home, losing stepchildren, losing a job, and totaling my car. My identity crumbled, and I spiraled—blackout drinking, chain-smoking, negative self-talk, and seeking validation from outside myself. Christmas was a trigger, numbing, distracting myself from and denying the pain made it worse.
Luckily I leaned into the priceless work of healing through—talk therapy, yoga lifestyle practices and principles, shadow work, inner child healing, spirituality, nature, writing, & community. Slowly, I faced the triggers, leaned into discomfort and built a solid foundation within my own being. I know what it means to love and accept myself fully, and embrace the lessons of my journey.
In recent years, due to my arsenal of self-love tools, I’ve faced heartbreak differently. I refused to let it break me. Instead, I turn inward, pouring the love they weren’t open to receive back into myself. I trust that what’s meant for me will never miss me and if the Universe removed their presence from my life, there must be bigger and better things on the way. Other people's inability to keep their hearts open isn't a reflection of my intrinsic worthiness to be loved.
Today, I stand stronger than ever. In 2021 I became a Certified Yoga Therapist AND shaved my head to embrace sovereignty over my body through androgenetic alopecia. I stayed mindfully single 2019-2023, quit smoking in 2019, spent 2023 alcohol free, dropped 30 lbs of “love weight” and loved myself back together after heartbreak in 2024.
Every step in my life, up until this moment, was teaching me how to heal my relationship with my body, energy, emotions, mind and spirit. It's now time for me to share what I learned along the way to help others who are navigating mucky waters, feeling like the pain of not changing has grown stronger than the pain of staying the same.
The beautiful, messy process of laying my own inner foundation led me to create Blissful Butterfly Yoga—to inspire others to do the work of transforming times of crisis into tools for cultivating strength, courage, deeper understanding and resiliency. To remind others that it is through the grace of the Divine, partnered with our own will and determination, that we transform shattering experiences of our lives into stages of growth, leading us to live in alignment with our most blissful selves.
If you’re navigating recovery from dysfunctional romantic relationships and/or recovery from a dysfunctional relationship with yourself, you don’t have to do it alone. My Bad Romance Recovery program is coming in 2025. Email me at Veronica@blissfulbutterflyyoga.com or DM me with “Bad Romance Recovery” to join the mailing list. The time to transform is now.
With love & gratitude,
🦋Veronica Carpenter
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