A Love Story: Finding Love After Trauma & Addiction

Twenty-three years ago, Regina Chari’s life was very different from the one she enjoys today with her husband, Nyasha, and their two daughters.

Regina’s parents were both alcoholics and battled addiction her entire childhood. She started drinking at a young age to numb the pain she felt at home. In high school, she also became addicted to drugs. What followed were many years of addiction and depression. You can read her story on overcoming addiction here.

About 10 years into recovery and four years after relocating from the USA to Zimbabwe, Regina met the man who would later become her husband. Their love story reminds us that love is possible even after a complicated past. As we celebrate love this month, I hope you are reassured that true love can be part of your story too.

What was your perception of love and relationships growing up?

I would say that my perception of love was incredibly skewed growing up. My mom and dad married very young in the late 70s because my mom was pregnant with me. Addiction probably marked their marriage more than anything else.

By the time I was born, they were both alcoholics, so their love was incredibly unhealthy. On the good days, there were grand gestures, big promises and a lot of chaotic excitement. Then on the days when it wasn’t good, it was chaos, violence and abuse. That was probably the most defining thing for me: my parents’ marriage was just this huge continuum of big emotions all of the time.

Did you see examples of healthy love?

When my brother and I were removed from my parents’ home – he was 7 and I was 8 – we were put into foster care with my paternal grandparents. I would say their love was real. They met and married very young as well. Their love always felt like freedom. My grandma just was so beloved, and my grandpa was an incredible man. So I moved from this big chaotic love to a very calm, stable, steady love. And if I’m honest, it was incredibly boring because I was used to just chaos and change.

For kids who grow up with trauma, life is forever altered. And for kids who experience abuse, the message from that is ‘I don’t like you,’ but for kids who experience neglect or abandonment, the message that shapes our identity is ‘I don’t even see you.’

My parents were not bad people; they were just unhealthy. The message that I understood from my parents’ marriage is that they didn’t like each other, and the message that I heard about myself is that I wasn’t even worthy of being seen. When they divorced, they vanished from our lives for a very long time. That absence altered my perception of the love that they had for us.

How did addiction affect your own relationships?

My entire life was impacted by my parents’ addiction and then my own. There are a couple of hard truths about trauma and addiction, and the influence it has on us that I’ve had to come to terms with. One of those is that when kids are harmed in relationship, they find healing in relationship.

As a kid who came from trauma, I so desperately needed healing relationships. But the shame that I felt at the core of myself made it nearly impossible to feel safe enough to receive love from anyone. I would be drawn to relationships where I could feel the drama and the chaos because then it didn’t matter that I couldn’t feel the love. I was equally addicted to relationships as I was to alcohol or drugs. They provided the same experience.

At some point, Nyasha, your husband, came into the picture. How did you meet him?

I met Nyasha at a braai held at a friend’s place in Harare on Africa Day in 2009 when I was 29 years old. I’ve been very lucky in my life to have had a lot of love. In my teens and early adult years, I certainly gravitated towards very unhealthy romantic relationships. However, my friendships and my interpersonal relationships with my family and my community since recovery have always been really deep and fulfilling.

When I moved to Zim, I was not looking for romance. It wasn’t something I was hopeful for, and I didn’t think this was going to be the place for me to meet a man. People would say to me, ‘You’re past your expiry date. You really need to hurry up and find a man.’ That was really weird to me because in my community in the States, it was not uncommon to be in your late 20s, have a fulfilling career and not be looking for a man. I loved being single and free to experience romance the way that I wanted to, and I didn’t know if I would ever want to get married because my experience of marriage from my parents made me afraid that I wouldn’t be good at it.

When I met Nyasha, it was a little bit surprising. We had this really great conversation and talked for hours. He is a handsome man but nothing like what I thought I would want in a man at first sight (other than being attractive). At one point, he told me about his church and volunteer work at an orphanage. I thought he was just saying that because he knew about my line of work. To prove he was telling the truth, he invited me to attend his church the next Sunday so he could introduce me to some of the people at the children’s home. When he left the party though, he did not ask for my phone number. I thought, ‘What’s up with this guy?’

I went to his church that Sunday, and we ended up going with a couple of my friends to the children’s home. Every child and staff member knew his name, so clearly, he’d spent a lot of time there. We ate lunch and had a really incredible connection. We started a friendship via text and had lots of phone calls. When I would be in Harare, he would take me out for coffee, and we just slowly got to know each other and built a friendship.

I’m pretty open and public about my life and my story. I had also met a young girl named Ruth whom I hoped to adopt. So before we even decided what we were doing, I wanted him to know who I was. I told him my story – the good, the bad and the ugly. I said:

‘I don’t want to waste your time. I don’t want you to think that this is going to be something that it’s not. I’m about to turn 30. I wouldn’t date somebody that I wouldn’t marry, and I wouldn’t marry someone that wouldn’t adopt this little girl and who wouldn’t be confident standing next to me knowing that I talk publicly about all of these parts of my story.’

He was shell-shocked. He did not know what to do, but he started volunteering at the children’s home that Ruth was living in, and he was sending me a lot of messages. Within a few months, he flew to Victoria Falls to spend some time with me, meet my community there and to ask the pastor whom I was living and working with for permission to take me out on a date. Nyasha must have passed the test because that night, we went out on a date, and he told me that he had been volunteering at Ruth’s orphanage. ‘I can’t make any promises about where this is going,’ he said, ‘but I want to let you know that I see what you see that makes that little girl so special. And I think this is really worth a shot.’

I would have married him precisely that night. We tied the knot a few years later.

Due to your past, was it difficult to receive love?

My relationship with God was incredibly strong. First, I had to be able to receive love from God, then I had to be able to love myself, then I started to receive and feel the love from the safe, trusted people in my life – my mentors, family, friends and my community. And because I had this rich, full love in my life from God, myself and all of these incredible people (most of whom were women), I was able to receive the love of a man.

When you have a complicated history and a lot of trauma, that’s how it has to go. There needs to be healing work that leads you into a deeply personal relationship with God, a deeply personal and loving relationship with yourself, and a deeply personal and loving relationship with trusted people before you try to enter into a relationship with a man.

There were choices that I had to make in of my relationship with Nyasha that I didn’t know how to make. There were emotions that I had to manage, and I couldn’t always trust my perspective. So I needed to be able to trust the voice of God, trust the voice inside of myself and rely on the people around me to ask, ‘Am I understanding this correctly?’ Otherwise, I don’t think my relationship with Nyasha would have worked.

When did you get married?

Our wedding story is actually even better than the story of how we met. We got married on October 8, 2013 in California. It was a Tuesday night, and our wedding was a surprise. My ‘village’ in California threw us a wedding. They planned everything.

We thought we’d go to California and have a little vacation where I used to live and while there, apply for a marriage license in California and get married in court. So I applied online, and we were going to go to the courthouse Tuesday at noon. Since we needed a witness, I called my best friend and asked if she could fulfil that role. She agreed but called back a few hours later and said, ‘Regina, you’ve waited to marry this man for so long. Please do not get married in court.’ Within 24 hours, this community of mine in California, planned, organized and paid for an entire wedding. The goodness of God!

It’s also the goodness of God when you are well-loved by your community and you choose a partner who will be a good fit.

Our community matters. And the reality is our community is there to love us well before, during and after a romance. I have friends who are single, friends who are widowed, friends who are divorced…and the one thing that I say is that I have seen throughout all of those changes in my life and in the lives of my girlfriends that our community matters. So I would say you’re not ready to invest in a man until you have invested well in the community around you.

What advice do you have for women who long to find love but feel unworthy because of their past?

It makes me want to cry just thinking about how many of us do not feel worthy of love and belonging. I think it is probably the biggest struggle in the world today – we feel unworthy of love. I don’t know that I necessarily have much advice, but I have a lot of experience. And what I know is this: do the hard work of healing. It is hard work, but it is infinitely worth it.

Whether you want to be open to romance or not, the healing process is a way that you love yourself; it’s a way that you show up for yourself and say, ‘I’m going to be vulnerable. I’m going to do this work because I want to fully experience love and belonging in myself, in my relationship with God, in my relationship with my community. And maybe, just maybe, one of the benefits of that will be a romantic partner as well.’

Regardless of whether there is romance in your life on any given day does not determine your worthiness. Our worthiness is determined by the fact that we were created by God for the experience of connection, love and belonging. We have to love and belong to God and to ourselves and to the women in our lives before we can ever really love and belong to a man.

*Regina and Nyasha Chari run Refuge: Zimbabwe and live in Harare, Zimbabwe with their two daughters.