The most important relationship is the one you have with yourself because you are the one person you can never escape from. You’ll be with you until your last breath, so it would be wise to become your best friend, your numero uno cheerleader, your own beloved.
The first step to self-love is to know and love ALL OF YOU. As long as we have an unresolved heartache, trauma (particularly feelings of abandonment, neglect and/or abuse during childhood), we will attract individuals who will help bring these hidden “painbodies” to the surface.
The polarities in your personalities will help highlight one another’s imbalances, and the hidden, rejected, suppressed, wounded parts of ourselves, that are impacting us adversely in the present.
Through this higher perspective, you can start to view your current relationship as a tool to help you reach your optimal self. Or, view past relationships as stepping stones that were meant to prepare you for your TRUE BELOVED.
Your beloved is the person who will strive to love themselves and you unconditionally. If you’re currently in a relationship, and both of you are willing to accept this type of perspective and awareness, you can take your connection to higher realms.
NOTHING IS BY CHANCE
All the partners you attract play a role in your life journey. Each one is an experience meant to shine a light on what needs to be balanced out within yourself. The dynamic is meant for each of you to discover what you need and want in order to feel secure and appreciated in your partnership. In healthy love each is willing and able to take accountability for the pain and strife they inflict on the other, and together they address their problems. They recognize it’s a team effort.
Often only one will wake up to this truth, and the other will resist this MINDFUL, MATURE perspective on SELF, and partnership. Instead they have the attitude of it’s me against you…they don’t see you as ONE. They’ll hold on to the past mistakes as an excuse to remain angry/pessimistic, they’ll guard their subconscious wounds – aka their self-sabotaging programming- with all their might, and will put most of the blame on their partner for their problems and/or lack of joy. All of which prevent them from seeing their inner self, and the relationship through a truthful light (the 360 degree divine perspective).
YOU ARE ON THE SELF-LOVE PATH BUT YOUR PARTNER IS NOT
If you’re making the effort to heal your subconscious mind with the intention to become a better version of yourself, and you’re taking accountability for your faults/unhealthy behaviors, but your partner won’t, it is extremely painful. The lack of mutual accountability and understanding kills any sense of trust and respect. Without that it is impossible to feel safe and loved.
Towards the end of my marriage I was deep into my KNOW THYSELF walk…I wanted to understand all of the lurking painbodies within me that were unknowingly wreaking havoc in my life. My partner, on the other hand, had his reasons for resisting seeing his hidden underworld of love distortions, communication barriers and his masculine/feminine imbalances.
I know many others (friends and clients) who were in this exact scenario. The one thing we had in common was we could see the golden opportunity for tandem healing. Through compassion, mercy and understanding we knew we could reach a higher realm of love. This is what mastering unconditional love for self and your partner is all about. It is an arduous process, but we knew the work was worth it. Our partners, however, weren’t on the same page.
We became so determined to get them to see the conflict, and the polarities in our personalities, from a higher/deeper perspective, but the words fell on deaf ears. Their protective defense mechanisms would not let them see beyond the symptoms. They could not grasp the idea that good could come from this pain, so instead they wanted to run and avoid it all together. Their unwillingness to face the truth, and see their personal part in creating the chaos, would not allow them to perceive our intentions in a positive light. All they could see, feel, hear, believe is, “I WANT TO CHANGE AND CONTROL YOU”.
Unfortunately the repeated pain and frustration we faced caused us to feel like we were losing our minds. Their resistance pressed on our deepest wounds triggering our unbecoming fearful ways. The hurt we felt from the constant stonewalling, and/or gaslighting, would eventually be expressed through anger, or tears and when these natural emotions would arise they did not feel they were justified. They made it clear they thought we were being irrational, overly emotional or sensitive. They would see us in this light, then use it against us to not trust us. In situations like this it is better to love yourself enough to WALK AWAY.
(Sidenote: If any of this sounds familiar to you study everything you can about the narcissist-codependent dynamic, as well as the “avoidant attachment style“.)
KNOW THYSELF = LOVE THYSELF
To love thyself you must know thyself, yet we spend very little time truly getting to know the inner workings of our own mind, body and heart. You must know your physiology, and your psychology if you want to know thyself (how the brain, mind and body work). When we start to set the intention to cultivate a sacred caring and curiosity for ourselves, it’s much easier to attract and/or cultivate harmony…particularly in relationships.
This self-love journey is about loving yourself enough to discover what and who brings you EASE, and joy then doing everything you can to align with that. This deep sense of caring for ourselves is the epitome of self-love and self-compassion. (Below I posted a link to a great article that describes the self-love deficit disorder.)
Getting up close and personal with ourselves is a vulnerable process. It includes getting familiar with the inner most parts of the psyche. It takes curiosity, courage, desire and commitment to consciously build a relationship with the side of ourselves that shows up as the fearful sabotaging voice that causes you to react in ways that create disharmony in your inner world, and outer world.
Becoming mindful of your sabotaging behaviors and limiting beliefs, which mostly stem from our childhood and societal programming, is no easy feat. Learning how to trust the loving, wise, intuitive voice that is guiding you to your highest good is equally important. You can’t accomplish either without the willingness to dive deeply into your thoughts and emotions, then caring enough to uncover the root of them.
Making the conscious effort to learn how to decifer between your fear based voice of anxiety, and the love voice of reason makes it easier to make mindful choices in all of life’s situations. This is how you slowly begin to shed the old ways of thinking and feeling, so you can step into the new and improved way of being and perceiving.
(Sidenote: Even though I had parents who provided a loving, stable home I had repressed abandonment trauma due to my adoption that I was not aware of until I started to go down the path of knowing and loving myself. As I learned more about my birth parents it was clear that I had also taken on biological/energetic imprints from them that were adversely impacting me in the present. One day I will write about this fascinating information in detail. I also dealt with a variety of sex trauma, including when I was a child, so this too was causing me to attract certain kinds of men in my life. God helped me to make sense of all of it!)
HEALING AND MOVING FORWARD
When you heal you no longer have to experience certain patterns and cycles. I have been healing all of my trauma, including the pain from my broken marriage. Through this process I discovered all the reasons I married a man that deceived me, betrayed me, abandoned me, and had no desire to understand me.
A man who struggled with respecting equality, validating and affirming me, empathizing and saying sorry when he hurt me. His unwillingness to go deep within and face his own shadows was preventing him from making me feel safe and loved. It was preventing us from healing and rising above our conflict once and for all.
The truth is my deep seeded fears did not allow me to see the situation clearly. I fought tooth and nail to keep our marriage alive, but he didn’t have the same WILL, or POWER. I was completely blind of the dynamic I had attracted, and had succumbed to. God helped me to see my time with him had to come to an end. I suddenly understood walking away from that marriage was stating, I AM READY TO LOVE ME UNCONDITIONALLY and do the work God had in store for me.
Thankfully due to my mindfulness work and my spiritual connection, I was able to view it all from a soul perspective. I see I needed him to break me down, and put me through hell so that I could see what I'm truly made of and who I really am.
Self-Love Deficit Disorder: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/ross-a-rosenberg/reinventing-codependency-_b_11036330.html
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