S2 EP226 – How to Attract and Sustain a Healthy Relationship

Transcription:

Hi everyone! Dr. Margaret Paul here with the Inner Bonding Podcast. Most people want to be in a healthy, loving relationship, but either have trouble attracting a loving partner, or trouble sustaining a healthy relationship, and this is what I’m speaking about today.

Have you found yourself continually attracting the same kind of unhealthy person into your life, such as people who are narcissistic or emotionally unavailable? This is the situation Connie found herself in when she asked me this question:

(Quote)”As a child of narcissists, I’ve struggled for decades. My attraction to men, since the age of 14, has been to narcissists and sociopaths. I thought it was love, but really, I was seeking approval. I have been healing for many years, yet as a highly sensitive person with this history, I know I may always be vulnerable. The catch is evaluating someone new with a level head and making sound decisions before falling ‘blindly’ in love. What are your thoughts to attract a healthy love relationship that is not based on dependency or approval?”(unquote)

Many people tend to be attracted to people who are similar to one or both of their parents. Their ego wounded self says, “If I can get a person like my mom or dad to love me, then I will be okay.” The problem is that there are three different lies in this statement:

One is, you can’t have control over how people feel about you.

Two, people who are not loving themselves won’t learn to love you, no matter how loving you think you are being with them, and

Three, as an adult, you need to learn to love yourself to feel that you are okay. Others’ love can help and support you in developing self-worth, but no one can do it for you.

So trying to get a narcissistic or emotionally unavailable person to love you and connect with you will always be a losing battle.

Attracting “a healthy love relationship that is not based on dependency or approval” occurs as you learn to love yourself. The more you learn to love and value who you are in your soul essence, the less you will find yourself attracted to people who are not loving or valuing themselves. As the Law of Attraction states, “Like attracts like,” so the more you abandon yourself and then seek others’ approval to feel okay, the more you attract other self-abandoning people.

Connie finds herself attracted to narcissists because she is coming from her own narcissistic wounded self. The wounded self in all of us has some degree of narcissism, which means that when we are abandoning ourselves and are operating from our wounded self, we expect someone else to take responsibility for our feelings of worth and lovability. When we are abandoning ourselves, we are operating from a low frequency, and we attract other people who are also operating from a low frequency because like attracts like.

When we practice Inner Bonding, learning to connect with our spiritual guidance and operate as a loving adult who takes responsibility for our own feelings of self-worth, then we operate from a high frequency and we attract other high frequency people – people who are also loving themselves, taking responsibility for their feelings, and defining their own self-worth.

So I would say to Connie that it’s not about “…evaluating someone new with a level head and making sound decisions before falling ‘blindly’ in love.” It’s about becoming the kind of person you want to attract. The more you learn to connect with yourself and your spiritual guidance, the quicker you can sense the frequency of another person.

When you are operating from your loving adult rather than from your wounded self, you can quickly sense whether someone is authentically open and loving, rather than acting open and loving. Narcissistic and emotionally unavailable people are adept at acting open, but there is a huge difference in the energy between genuinely open and caring people and people who have learned to act open and caring. The more open and caring you become with yourself, the easier it becomes to sense the truth about another person.

Janis asked me the following question:

(quote)”I have been doing therapy and reading a lot about healing since a short but very emotionally abusive relationship ended. I seem to have a pattern of codependent behavior and attract narcissists like a magnet. Thanks to therapy I am learning how my incapacity of having a healthy relationship (including friendships) is linked to beliefs and behaviors that originated in my childhood. The problem is this awareness is not helping me. I am stuck in an endless and tiring analysis, and I still suffer because of the way I was treated by my ex and other people, and deep down I think that I was treated with no respect because I somehow didn’t deserve any respect. It doesn’t help when I am told that it is my choice to be stuck in the past and that happiness too is a choice. The more I beat myself up because of my negative thoughts, the worse it gets. Any advice on how to help my healing to reach the next step?” (unquote)

I also did a lot of therapy that changed nothing in my behavior and experience. Nothing changed for me until I got out of focusing on the past and instead focused on learning to love myself.

The key to the problems that Janis is having is in this sentence: “… deep down I think that I was treated with no respect because I somehow didn’t deserve any respect.”

When Janis says “deep down,” what she is really referring to is her wounded self. Her wounded self has been programmed with the false belief that she doesn’t deserve respect. She is stuck because not only is her wounded self judging her as unworthy of respect, but also because she is then beating herself up because of her negative thoughts.

When Janis is judging herself for judging herself, her intent is to control. Her wounded self believes that if she judges herself enough for judging herself, then she will not judge herself! This is a good example of the false, crazy thinking of the wounded self: “I can stop my negative thinking with more negative thinking.”

Janis will stay stuck until she decides to consciously change her intent from controlling with her self-judgments to learning to see, value, and love herself. It might help her to do this if she imagines telling an actual child, “You don’t deserve any respect. It’s your fault that people treat you without respect because you don’t deserve respect.” Obviously, a loving parent would never say this to an actual child.

When Janis decides to learn to love herself, then she will start to become aware of how much she is judging herself. She will notice her self-judgments without judging herself for judging herself. Instead, she will move into compassion for how awful her inner child feels when she judges herself, and for her wounded self, who is programmed with many harsh false beliefs about who she is. 

As she chooses compassion rather than judgment when she judges herself, she will slowly begin to connect her pain and stuckness with her self-judgments. She will get unstuck because this awareness gives her new choices. She can learn how to go to her guidance for the truth and start to bring the truth to her inner child. As she learns to see her true soul self through the eyes of her higher guidance, she will start to treat herself with the respect she deserves.

The more she treats herself with respect, the less she will be attracted to people who treat her with a lack of respect. As she develops the ability to value herself more, she will start to draw in people who also value her.

Often, once people do get into a relationship, they are not sure how to create and sustain a healthy relationship and having had few or no role models of healthy relationships, may wonder whether or not their relationship is healthy.

Frequently, the people I work with ask me, “Is my relationship healthy? How do I know if it’s healthy?”

Just as physical health is on a continuum, emotional health and relationship health are also on a continuum. And, like physical health, each person may have different criteria regarding what constitutes health. For example, some people say they are very healthy if they get a cold or flu a few times a year, while others’ health criteria is that they never get sick at all.

For some, a healthy relationship is two people who never fight or argue, or who take care of each other and basically agree on everything, or are very easy-going and give in to each other.

For others, a healthy relationship is a relationship filled with sexual passion, while others believe that a healthy relationship is when two people can talk things out in ways that reach resolution and have emotional intimacy. 

It’s important for you to ask yourself what you want in a relationship. Rather than looking for an external definition of a healthy relationship, I suggest that you look inside and define for yourself what is very important to you in a relationship. While your relationship may have all the traditional characteristics of a healthy relationship, if it isn’t what you want, then it may not be a healthy relationship for you.

My client Glenn, in his early thirties, was ready to get married and start a family. He had been in a number of long-term relationships that had ended for various reasons. When he consulted with me, he had been in a relationship with Katherine for 3 years. She was pushing to get married, and he was resisting, but not understanding why.

Glenn and Katherine had much in common. Both were intelligent, emotionally open people, and they both wanted children. They had similar spiritual beliefs, handled money in similar ways, and enjoyed the same activities. Their sex life was good. So what was in the way of Glenn wanting to marry Katherine?

“I don’t look forward to spending time with her,” he said. “We don’t seem to click when it comes to talking. I love to delve deeply into feelings and ideas. I love sitting at the kitchen table and talking for hours without knowing how late it is. With Katherine, conversation is difficult. Everyone thinks she is so perfect for me, but I don’t feel “in love” and I think it’s because we don’t play off each other with our humor and we can’t get into in-depth conversations.”

Glenn had never before articulated how important this was to him in a relationship. Without this, the relationship was flat.

It was hard for Glenn to end the relationship with Katherine, because even though he wasn’t in love with her, he did love her and didn’t want to hurt her. But he knew he was not going to marry her.

A year after ending his relationship with Katherine, Glenn met Liz at a party. From the moment they started to talk, Glenn felt that not only had he known Liz all his life, but that they could talk for hours. And talk for hours they did – and they still talk for hours after getting married and having children. Glenn says he is delighted with his healthy relationship.

So what does a healthy relationship mean to you? I’m going to list some things that might be important to you regarding what you really want in a relationship:

• We can talk about anything without fear of the other’s anger or withdrawal. We are both open to learning.
• We support each other in doing what makes each of us happy. We don’t try to control each other. We support each other’s freedom.
• We each take responsibility for our own feelings and are able to share love, rather than expecting the other to fill us up with love.
• We have a similar sense of humor. We laugh easily together and have a lot of fun with each other.
• We have similar interests and enjoy much companionship.
• We each contribute financially.
• We both want children, or we are both loving with each other’s children.
• We each contribute with household responsibilities and childcare.
• We find each other endlessly interesting and always look forward to spending time together talking and sharing ideas. We can talk for hours.
• We have deep trust, respect, and admiration for each other.
• We have a wonderful sex life.
• We are both very affectionate and love to hold, cuddle, and kiss.
• We feel very emotionally connected and emotionally intimate.
• We share common spiritual values.
• We have the same religion.
• We are politically on the same page.
• We see each other’s soul and deeply value who we each are.
• We have each other’s back. We can rely on each other.
• We are both devoted to learning and growing emotionally within ourselves and within our relationship.
• We both know that we are devoted to learning through conflict rather than giving up. 
• We let go of anger easily and forgive easily.
• We both are devoted to taking care of our physical health.
• We feel safe with each other.

What in this list is important to you, and what else is very important to you in a relationship?

While it’s likely unrealistic to find all you want in a relationship, if you are both open to learning and growing, you can get there.

We each have the right to decide what is most important to us in a relationship. If you find that you are not in a healthy relationship, don’t despair! By doing your own Inner Bonding work, there is a good possibility that you can heal your relationship.

We learn and grow the most when we feel safe. We need to feel a measure of safety to open our hearts, to be vulnerable and risk loving. Often, we find ourselves relying on other person to create this sense of safety – that is, if the other person is accepting, we feel safe. Yet this safety vanishes in a flash the moment someone becomes judgmental, unaccepting, or angry. Is our safety really such a fragile thing? The answer is, yes and no. This is because we need safety both within and without to create a healthy relationship.

Safety within is created when we practice Inner Bonding and develop a reliable loving adult who stands up for us, speaks our truth, sets appropriate inner and outer loving boundaries, helps us to not take rejection personally, and takes loving care of our bodies. We experience safety within when we stay connected with our spiritual guidance, bringing love and compassion to ourselves and when we act on the guidance we receive. Doing all this will make us feel safe to be spontaneously ourselves – except when we are in an intimate relationship that is very important to us. Then it takes both people to create the safe space to open and be vulnerable and spontaneous, emotionally and sexually.

In an intimate relationship, it takes both partners committed to creating a safe environment for themselves and each other for both to feel safe to fully open. This means that each person not only takes full responsibility for his or her own feelings, but also for behaving in a way that does not deliberately violate the other. It means that each of us takes responsibility for staying open to learning with ourselves and with each other. It means that each of us sets inner boundaries on our own behavior when our issues are triggered. It means we do not indulge ourselves in yelling, blaming, shaming, threatening, physical violence, debating, explaining, smothering, resisting, demanding, or withdrawing. It means that we learn to truthfully tell each other, with an intent to learn about ourselves and the other, without blame, when we are afraid, when we feel rejected, unheard, unseen, engulfed, disrespected, misunderstood, or pulled at.

When we indulge ourselves in acting out our fears with our controlling behavior, we damage the safety of the relationship space. When one or both partners are afraid to speak their truth because the other generally reacts with controlling or resistant behavior rather than with an openness to learning, love diminishes and slowly dies. 

It takes both partners to create a safe environment for love and passion to flourish.

Most of the time, when people enter a relationship, they commit to each other. What happens to this commitment when people separate or divorce?

A deeper, more profound commitment, is to the process of learning about loving with each other. If more people made this commitment to themselves and each other, far fewer relationships would end up in divorce. If each person was committed to utilizing all conflicts as vehicles for learning about loving, then their relationship conflicts would move them closer together instead of further apart. A deep commitment to learning about and healing your wounded selves within the relationship is a very important aspect in creating a healthy relationship.

Another important aspect of creating a healthy relationship is being able to forgive each other for inevitably hurting each other by getting triggered into your wounded self. It’s the primary relationship with a partner that often triggers our deepest fears of losing the other and losing ourselves, and we each need to forgive ourselves and each other for our unloving behavior.

Forgiveness is a natural outcome of doing your inner work. Once you develop a loving adult who takes full responsibility for your own feelings and behavior in any situation, you stop blaming others for anything. The more healing you do and the more responsibility you take for yourself, the more you see others’ unloving behavior as coming from their wounded self. Once you can see that when your parents, partner, friends, or anyone else are being unloving and they are stuck in their wounded selves, you find yourself more able to forgive them for their woundedness. But it is never helpful to force forgiveness. A lack of forgiveness just indicates that you have more inner work to do regarding healing and taking personal responsibility.

Resentment destroys the love in a relationship, so learning to forgive yourself and your partner is vital for creating a healthy relationship.

Trust is also vital for a relationship to be healthy. Trust in a healthy relationship is as much about becoming a trustworthy person as it is about trusting your partner. Do you do what you say you will do? Do you tell the truth to your partner? Can you trust each other to be there for each other physically and emotionally? Can you trust each other to care about the effects your behavior has on each other?

The more you each do your inner work, the more trustworthy you each become with yourselves and with each other. The more you learn to reliably take loving care of yourselves, the more loving and trustworthy you become with each other. 

Telling the total truth in a healthy relationship really means that you are sharing with your partner the truth about yourself – your own feelings, thoughts, and behavior. To tell the truth to your partner, you must be willing for him or her to be upset with you rather than compromise yourself in an attempt to have control over how your partner feels about you.

Telling the truth does not mean telling your partner your opinion regarding things you think they need to change. In fact, I advise couples NOT to tell their partner these kinds of things unless invited to do so. Telling someone what you think is wrong with him or her is violating and invasive unless you are given permission to do so. Healthy relationships are not created by telling your partner your opinion of him or her. Intimacy is created by telling your partner your discoveries about yourself. 

Many people in relationships operate from a deep desire to protect themselves against both rejection and engulfment, rather than from a deep desire to learn about loving themselves and each other. The moment your desire is to protect against rejection and engulfment, you stop taking care of yourself and start attempting to control the other. This always leads to feeling alone and rejected within, since there is no loving adult taking care of you. These feelings may then be projected onto the other, and you end up feeling the very feelings you are trying to avoid.

Changing your intent from avoiding rejection and engulfment to learning about loving changes everything. 

Many people keep a check and balance system in their heads. This creates much tension as you are always feeling like either you owe your partner, or they owe you. Life is much more joyous when you give just for the joy of giving, with no agenda attached, and receive for the joy of receiving, knowing you owe nothing in return. Love flows freely when each person gives for the joy of it, with no strings attached.

When I work with couples, I often work with each individually until they are each taking loving care of themselves rather than having their eyes on their partner and blaming their partner for their problems. It’s amazing how easily long-standing issues get resolved when each person is open to learning about themselves and each other. 

We all bring baggage into our relationships, and if you are both open to learning, you will find that your relationship is the ideal arena for healing the fears and false beliefs of your wounded self. It’s being open to learning about yourself and your partner that creates a healthy relationship.

I invite you to join me for my bi-monthly masterclass and receive my live help, which you can learn about at https://innerbondinghub.com/membership.

Heal your relationships with my 30-Day online video relationship course: Wildly, Deeply, Joyously in Love.

 And you can learn so much about loving yourself and creating loving relationships from my new book, “Lonely No More: The Astonishing Power of Inner Bonding” and from our website at https://www.innerbonding.com.

I’m sending you my love and my blessings.

I’m sending you my love and my blessings.