Part 2:
Reflect on your Romantic Relationships and deep Friendships. Is it time to release some of the players on your life stage? You know the ones that no longer fit your life story in terms of who you are or who you are becoming?
What is your Relationship Story? We all have one …a story that is if we look closely. What are the repetitive patterns? Do you continue to attract certain types of people? You know the ones who seem so loving and attentive in the beginning but before long leave you feeling unloved and unimportant. Are you thinking; this person seemed so different, why then am I feeling the same? Different person, similar pattern, same story!
When the same kinds of struggles or issues keep popping up in our lives, it has meaning. Don’t be discouraged; there is a solution. But you have to stop everything and reflect on your situation. You cannot, note you cannot get clarity and move toward resolution unless you stop physically, then allow time for stillness and contemplation in order to prepare for making any course correction.
In our country we expect to solve everything quickly in linear fashion; as in setting a goal and getting it done by noon on Wednesday.
Inner shifts and changes of long embedded faulty beliefs and bad habits do not respond to speed. They were entrenched long ago when we were too young to question or assess as we absorbed them accumulatively. We develop a strong resistance to changing them even if they are not good for us because they are our familiar, thus giving us a false level of comfort.
Are you willing to let go of resistance in order to know the truth about yourself. To use an AA staple of “fearless inventory” is a courageous thing to do to get to the truth of why you keep attracting a particular kind of person who leaves you feeling an old familiar way an unhappy.
We avoid pain…and we resist the truth even when it is plain for others to see. As a result of the avoidance and resistance we continue to attract who we insist we do not want. This is the truth no doubt at a conscious level, however we attract to ourselves who and what we believe about ourselves at an inner level; our present level of consciousness.
How do we start piercing the illusions?
Start Here:
One big myth/lie is that there will be a rescuer.
Who or What are you waiting for?
How the Rescuer Myth Diminishes Feminine Power:
Have you heard “Do not to worry your little head” implying that somebody else will take care of the problem. Who will it be? What are boys told?
So what is the blatant or implied story about rescuers? Who will it be?
Daddy
My prince
Santa Claus?
The Emperor with no clothes? (After all that waiting will you have the courage to mention the naked thing?)
Were you given a message overt or implied to use you college experience to find and marry the “right” man. Inside this empty bubble is a message that is not only an affront to a young woman’s strength but creates a feeling of being second tier. The implied message is…
“Please do not make us feel uneasy. Fit in and do not become powerful in your own right. You know that you can’t make it in this world all by yourself”.
I’ve had 30+ year olds come to see me in crisis. Women who were paralyzed or distraught about what to do next. They had followed the family injunctions.
It was not just the box of “right” man that was checked off but right schools, churches, colleges, clubs etc.
Now what they cry? I am so unhappy. It was right for their parents but not for them. They had been tutored in what was right and expected and not encouraged to claim power of their own. After a crisis of some sort they find themselves having to take a first step to develop their Feminine Power.
Make no mistake I know with every fiber of my being how difficult it is to leave a relationship that is not the right fit but there still times when it’s good and it feels much better than being alone.
To avoid getting into such a predicament in the first place …read on.
What do you believe about yourself? Your life as it is the real picture of what you believe, no matter how much you protest.
Do you feel worthy of happiness and a warm, loving, and respectful relationships? Only to the extent that you really know and feel worthy, can you have it.
Your sense of self has to be strong to feel worthy of good things in life including a good relationship. To do that it is necessary stand on your own and know that “you are enough” with or without another person validating your worth… Are you ready to have what you desire?
Many of our beliefs and feelings about ourselves and the world are formed before the age of reason, when we cannot question or express. What are you choosing to believe that influences your level of happiness and peace from day to day? It is possible at this time to examine the obstacles that get in your way in the most important relationships you will ever have, first with yourself and then in your choices.
If a strong sense of self is missing, the tendency is to give away personal power and suppress emotional needs to win approval or recognition from others. You make others more important than they should be in your life… You project onto them qualities you aren’t expressing, not recognizing in yourself. When you give away personal power, you are more dependent on others leading to less self-responsibility which makes you more vulnerable to the wills of those around you.
Take for example the problem of infidelity in a relationship. First look at yourself. What in you brought you a partner who can’t commit? Did you know what you really wanted before you found yourself in this painful situation. (See …What do You Really Want/Need in a Partner, Part 1.}
Infidelity for instance is clearly a way to avoid intimacy. Sometimes emotional closeness triggers vulnerability and fear. Whether we are self-aware or not cheating diminishes trust and creates distance.
Ask questions. I have found that early in a relationship, people will answer your questions more truthfully. That is before the relationship is complicated by sexual intimacy. Women have told me that they didn’t want to appear “pushy” and didn’t ask. I suggest strongly…ask. It can save you much pain further down the road.
A woman I know fearing that she would seem pushy did not ask her new love what happened to end his first marriage. She loving him dearly and blindly married him to find out the reason for his first divorce was due to his not wanting to have children. She wanted to be a mother and assumed that they would have children. She was devastated and eventually found the strength to divorce.
The quality of your life is at stake here, so take your time ask and look at patterns of behavior that you cannot live with. These patterns won’t change after marriage. Often our conditioning that leaves us feeling as though we are second tier, our emotional scars and faulty beliefs keep us from seeing the red flags in a relationship, long or short term. Denial means you cannot be fully present with another person and intimacy will elude you.
Your degree of self-worth and self-love or at least self-respect is the degree that you are able to have a loving warm and equal relationship. If you block the experience of self-love and feeling worthy of being loved by another; you cannot be happy or remain happy.
You want to attract another who will give you the love you need, but it cannot work out if self-love is not a core of who you are. For one thing you are unable to return the love if given, you won’t feel worthy and that often leads to sabotaging a good thing.
You must risk opening your heart before you can release negative patterns that you may be carrying.
Are you able to view yourself as “enough” and embrace others with acceptance? You don’t need to do anything or be anything in order to be deserving of love. If you think otherwise, get professional help to clear faulty thinking out of the way.
The way to grow into personal empowerment is through healthy choices and commitment. Recognize your needs; make decisions based on what’s best for you.
Sometimes however we are uncertain or not clear of our best choice, due to obstacles known and unknown that get in the way. My work guides you to unearth the obstacles and gives you strategies to process them. It doesn’t have to take a long time, however it does need out attention and commitment to be free from obstacles holding us back on any front, to have an incredible life.
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