I Thought He Was My Twin Flame — Turns Out It Was Just Trauma With Good Lighting

The Reinvention Edit

Let me tell you about the money I spent trying to reunite with a man I now understand I was never meant to be with in the first place.

Actually, let me back up because to understand the money, you first need to understand the ten years. And to understand the ten years, you need to understand what happens to a woman when she mistakes a trauma bond for the love of her life.

How it started

I first heard the term twin flame around 2013. At the time, I was deeply immersed in a relationship that felt unlike anything I'd ever experienced — intense, consuming, and electric. The kind of connection that makes you feel like you've finally found the person who understands you completely.

I now know that feeling has a name. It's called trauma bonding. But back then, I called it love.

He was charismatic, deeply creative, a musician living the life I had suppressed in myself for decades. Being with someone who was actually living their creative dream was intoxicating to me — someone who had buried her own creativity under years of responsible choices and other people's expectations. I was drawn to him like a moth to light.

There were many red flags from the beginning. I saw them. I chose to ignore them. Because the connection felt so extraordinary, I convinced myself the red flags were just part of the complexity of loving someone that deeply.

I was wrong. But I wasn't ready to know that yet.

Enter the shaman

A friend introduced me to her. She was a shaman — a spiritual healer who specialised in twin flame connections. The shaman told me with complete certainty that he and I were twin flames. Divine counterparts. Destined.

I believed her.

I want to be honest about something: I think even then, somewhere underneath, I knew it wasn't true. But I was broken. Genuinely broken — lost inside a decade of suppressing my needs, numbing my feelings, making deals with myself to keep going just a little longer. When you're that broken, someone telling you that your pain has a divine purpose is exactly what you want to hear.

So I paid her. And then I paid her again. And again.

The sessions involved her tapping into our energy — his and mine — across the distance. Healing our connection. Clearing past life trauma between us. Preparing us for the reunion.

I spent a lot of money over the time I worked with her.

I am not embarrassed to say that anymore. I say it because I know women are reading this right now who are doing the same thing — or something very similar — and I want them to know that being that desperate for love and connection is not stupidity. It is humanity. These people prey on the broken specifically because the broken are the most willing to believe.

The reality of those ten years

The relationship wasn't all bad. That's the complicated truth that the twin flame narrative actually captures accurately — there was real love. He has a kind soul. There were genuinely good times.

But I spent much of that decade in a haze. I drank too much. I smoked weed daily — not recreationally, but as a survival mechanism. To soften the edges of a reality that was too painful to sit with clearly. To pretend that what wasn't okay was okay.

I made deals with myself constantly. Just a little longer. Try harder. Love him better. Ignore his bad behaviour. Fix this.

talking to myself in the third person, pushing myself to answer the hard questions.

Why are you staying? Why are you accepting his misogynistic behaviour? This is not love — this is abuse.

But he doesn't hit you. He doesn't yell. In fact, he is sweet. He loves bombs you, showers you with kisses and gifts, tells you everything you need to hear.

Alli honey — that is still abuse. That is exactly abuse.

Is this the version of you that you want to appear in the world?

I knew the answers. I just wasn't ready to act on them yet.

The moment it cracked open

I got sober. And then I did the real work — healing my childhood, understanding the patterns, sitting with the uncomfortable truth of why I had chosen what I chose.

And then one day — with clear eyes and a clear mind — I looked back at the twin flame belief, and I laughed.

Not cruelly. Not at myself. Just — the laughter of someone who finally sees clearly after years of deliberate fog.

It was trauma bonding. From the very first conversation. Two people who had both survived difficult childhoods, who recognised something familiar in each other, who bonded instantly and intensely over shared wounds. That intensity felt like destiny. It wasn't. It was two wounded people finding each other and recreating the only kind of love they'd ever known.

The twin flame framework gave it a sacred name. It told me our pain was a divine purpose. It kept me connected — financially, emotionally, spiritually — to something I should have been healing from.

What I want every woman inside the twin flame world to know

The twin flame industry is a multi-million-dollar machine that runs on your pain. The coaches, the shamans, the courses, the readings — they need you to believe in reunion because reunion is what keeps you paying.

The intensity you feel is real. The connection was real. The love, in whatever form it took, was real.

But intensity is not destiny. A trauma bond is not a divine contract. And the runner/chaser dynamic that the twin flame world romanticises is often just one person who is unavailable and one person who cannot stop trying to fix that.

You are not failing your spiritual mission by leaving. You are not abandoning your divine counterpart by choosing yourself. You are not blocking the reunion by healing.

You are just healing. And that is enough. That is everything.

No regrets

Here's what I didn't expect to feel when I finally saw it clearly — no regrets.

Not about the relationship. Not about the decade. Not even about the money.

Because all of it — every painful moment, every deal I made with myself, every session with a shaman who was taking my money and my hope — all of it made me who I am today. The woman writing this. The woman who finally knows herself completely. The woman who will never again mistake intensity for love or a trauma bond for destiny.

That decade was my hardest lesson. It was also my most important one.

And I would not be the person I am now without having lived every single moment of it.

If you recognise yourself in any part of this story, you are not alone, you are not stupid, and you are not broken beyond repair. You are just someone who wanted love. That is the most human thing there is.

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