About Robert "Keith" Cartwright
I am a friend of God, a dad, a writer, speaker, and an advocate for healing-centered relationships.
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RKC's Most Recent Article
Run Or Repair, It's A Lifechanging Choice
I told someone yesterday—someone who was once significant in my life—that I regret not taking the chance to repair a rupture when the opportunity came. I balked at it. I wish that choice had been as simple as yes or no, repair or not, but to say it was more complicated than that would be an understatement.
Dr. Curt Thompson says, “When it comes to ruptures, to repair them we must first imagine doing it, and without the imagination to do it, we never attempt it.”
In the moment of that choice, I had never in my life focused on repairing a rupture.
Not. Once. Ever.
So not only did I lack the capacity to imagine what repair even looked like, I had no skill set whatsoever to pull it off.
In my world, for all of my life, rupture looked like something you ran from, or yelled over, or crawled in a bed in the back room of the house pretending there was no such thing as rupture.
Repairing the ruptures that tear two people apart is hard work. And if you've never experienced the beauty on the other side of that work—or even understood how the process works—what motivation do you have to enter into it?
If you have only ever known the pain of rupture, why on earth wouldn’t you run from it, hoping the pain would just disappear? Especially when disappearing pain feels like a far more realistic option than building something from it.
But here’s the truth: the pain of rupture never truly goes away. We carry it from one relationship to the next, and before long, every slight tremor in our current relationship feels like the 9.0 earthquake from the last one. Until there are no such things as tremors—every conflict, big or small, becomes an earthquake indistinguishable from earthquakes of the past.
And eventually, everyone learns to run and hide under their heavy furniture at the first sign of an earthquake.
I have had to work hard to reach a place where I can feel these tremors and remind myself: This is quite possibly NOT an earthquake. I have had to work hard to recognize that just because the ground shakes, it does not mean the earth is about to fall apart.
I have had to make up for decades of NOT imagining the beauty on the other side of repair just to feel the slightest hint of hope that such beauty does exist.
It is my hope to help people understand that what feels like an earthquake may simply be a tremor.
It is my hope to help people stop running from the earthquakes that have rocked their lives—to help them see that their past ruptures are not the greatest predictors of disaster in the here and now.
It is my hope that by helping people imagine repairs that have maybe not had that repair kind of imagination, that they too can begin to build a life on the foundations of ruptures and not on the run from them.
Because if I have learned anything in my long life, it is this: You never outrun your ruptures. They will always find you. And when they do, you will have a choice—keep running or imagine repair.
I know it can be hard to imagine repair, but beauty often comes on the other side of hard things.
Dr. Curt Thompson says, “When it comes to ruptures, to repair them we must first imagine doing it, and without the imagination to do it, we never attempt it.”
In the moment of that choice, I had never in my life focused on repairing a rupture.
Not. Once. Ever.
So not only did I lack the capacity to imagine what repair even looked like, I had no skill set whatsoever to pull it off.
In my world, for all of my life, rupture looked like something you ran from, or yelled over, or crawled in a bed in the back room of the house pretending there was no such thing as rupture.
Repairing the ruptures that tear two people apart is hard work. And if you've never experienced the beauty on the other side of that work—or even understood how the process works—what motivation do you have to enter into it?
If you have only ever known the pain of rupture, why on earth wouldn’t you run from it, hoping the pain would just disappear? Especially when disappearing pain feels like a far more realistic option than building something from it.
But here’s the truth: the pain of rupture never truly goes away. We carry it from one relationship to the next, and before long, every slight tremor in our current relationship feels like the 9.0 earthquake from the last one. Until there are no such things as tremors—every conflict, big or small, becomes an earthquake indistinguishable from earthquakes of the past.
And eventually, everyone learns to run and hide under their heavy furniture at the first sign of an earthquake.
I have had to work hard to reach a place where I can feel these tremors and remind myself: This is quite possibly NOT an earthquake. I have had to work hard to recognize that just because the ground shakes, it does not mean the earth is about to fall apart.
I have had to make up for decades of NOT imagining the beauty on the other side of repair just to feel the slightest hint of hope that such beauty does exist.
It is my hope to help people understand that what feels like an earthquake may simply be a tremor.
It is my hope to help people stop running from the earthquakes that have rocked their lives—to help them see that their past ruptures are not the greatest predictors of disaster in the here and now.
It is my hope that by helping people imagine repairs that have maybe not had that repair kind of imagination, that they too can begin to build a life on the foundations of ruptures and not on the run from them.
Because if I have learned anything in my long life, it is this: You never outrun your ruptures. They will always find you. And when they do, you will have a choice—keep running or imagine repair.
I know it can be hard to imagine repair, but beauty often comes on the other side of hard things.