Healing Rejection and Abandonment with Tarot, Tapping and a Teapot in Bangkok

I’m sitting next to my boyfriend at the airport, and I have his phone in my hands, I’m eating a mini Toblerone and I’m looking through photos from the weekend we’ve just had in Bangkok. We often do this after a weekend away, so we can send each other the cute candid pictures of the other that we captured when they weren’t looking.

I scroll through a bunch of beautiful shots. Bangkok is so aesthetic and diverse and we did so much in such a short time; we ate at Michelin recommended restaurants, painted a canvas together in an artist café in the floating market, had sunset drinks on the river near Chinatown. A dream of a weekend in a city we weren’t initially that excited about, but after three days here we’re now playing the ‘could we live here’ game in our heads. It’s a very charismatic mix of vintage and cosmopolitan and the food of course was delicious, the city spoke to us in a way we really hadn’t been expecting.

So, I’m stretching out the memory of the weekend, watching the video of us eating a Scorpion on a stick in the market and scrolling past the photos of the very suave stall holders at the men’s vintage market in Talad Noi. I get to the last day of photos and my heart drops into my tummy and my skin goes prickly. There is a photo of an arm and some handlebars with some lanterns in the background. A photo taken accidentally by someone riding on the back of a bike in Chinatown, taken this morning. Now, my partner and I had had different itineraries this morning; I’d gone to the shopping centre to stock up on some essentials I hadn’t been able to find in Vietnam and he had wanted to walk around the markets near the hotel. We’d both given each other detailed accounts of our mornings when we’d met back at the hotel and he’d not mentioned going back to Chinatown. I asked him about it, and he said he’d gone back to see if the men’s vintage market was there still, to try and get some of the denim he’d seen, he’d just forgotten to mention it.

My spidey senses shouted, ‘LIE!’ and in this moment I time travelled. I went back about 15 years to when I’d glimpsed a nightclub stamp on the inside of my then boyfriend’s wrist and discovered that, the night before, after we’d been out for dinner with his visiting parents, he’d dropped me home and then gone out to a club to meet a girl from University. I know my current partner, who I’ve been with for 7 years would never do that. Logically. But I also knew he was lying to me, so my brain and my nervous system weren’t really able to differentiate the two.

Even though we were in Bangkok, where the tourism industry for years has been marketed around seediness, I still thought my partner couldn’t have been up to anything too dodgy at 10am on a Monday. So why was he lying? Well one fight later, I can tell you. This sweet, sweet man had gone back to a vintage shop in Chinatown to buy a floral teapot that I had told him about. I’d said it was beautiful, but too impractical to carry, but would make a lovely memento of Bangkok. He’d found the shop, bought the exact teapot, wrapped it and hidden it carefully in his backpack and was waiting to surprise me with it when we got home.

I very nearly ruined an exceptionally lovely weekend, and a super thoughtful gesture and it was a very big wake-up call for me. I had known rejection and abandonment programming was still running in my brain, but I had had no idea to the extent. I like to think of myself as a strong independent woman but perhaps that was just part of the armour I had built after some experiences at boarding school and a few rubbish boyfriends. My strength and independence quickly turn into a wild dog snarling at anyone who looks like they might be about to reject me, ‘not before I get there first sir’!

We were home early evening and the very next morning I set to work. I got my Tarot deck out and started the systematic process to interrogate what the hell was going on in my brain. I don’t ever again want to jeopardise my relationship or even just the special moments of it, with my fears of rejection. I shuffled and flipped about ten cards. What beliefs do I have around rejection and abandonment? What should I stop doing? What should I keep doing? What should I start doing? The story unfolds and I write it down and then I tap it out. Abou ten minutes of tapping, some of the specific scenarios and people get a mention, but mostly it’s about how young me, took some situations and made them evidence that I am unlovable. That people will eventually leave when they figure that out. Not easy to look at, but of course the harder thing is to not look and to let it run the show.

I pulled a card for who I was before my tapping and who I was after. Before, in that moment, in the airport, I was the Knight of Swords reversed. Ungrounded and armed, letting it all hang out, momentum that won’t stop and no chance at achieving anything productive. Who I was after? The Emperor. Seated on a throne, my feet on the Earth and a sceptre in hand to represent the control I have. Control of myself and the situation. I cannot tell you the relief I feel around this now. Not because I think that I’m done with this baggage forever, although it certainly feels a lot lighter, but because I know I have tools to change myself. I don’t have to be the same person I was yesterday. Tomorrow I can be better and then the day after that again. Sometimes I will slip, but when life shows me what is holding me back, I can upgrade my story.

There was a danger that instead of being a thoughtful momento of a beautiful weekend in a city we loved, that delicate vintage teapot, could instead be a memory of a fight we had. But now I will look at that lovely teapot and think not only of my beautiful thoughtful partner, but also of a significant moment of healing for me, one of where I stopped seeing myself as unlovable and rejection inevitable, and where I set up the framework for trust and leaning fully into being loved.