8 Ways NOT to Spoil Your Love
+ the one thing you can ALWAYS rely on to orient you when you mess up
All of these seemed so reasonable at the time that I did them. Trust me, you do not want to repeat my mistakes.
I do things every wrong way possible until I do them right. I have messed up so many relationships in so many ways. Nonetheless, I am designed with a persistence and drive to derive my wisdom from the school of hard knocks.
My shiyazzz works.
I battled tested it eight ways from Sunday, as we say in the South. See for yourself the before and after of going to hell. I came out the other side a changed woman.
Without further ado – how not to screw up your relationships.
I had to learn to judge people by their actions, not their good intentions and words. I was so damn naive. When I look at photos of me even a few years ago, I now see that I looked like a child. Yes, a 41-year-old woman can look like a child. I look at pictures of my granny in her 80s, and she has the same naive eyes. She was a wonderful woman and generous in many ways. She didn’t, however, have a single deep friendship and, as you may remember from my earlier posts, her taste in husbands was HORRIBLE. I finally had to reparent the wounded child in me. This gave me the strength to hold people in my life to account. I stopped letting important things slide. Those who were up for it are now closer than ever, and the rest of them are gone. To say it was HARD is an understatement, but I was about to be swallowed by fatigue and illness if I didn’t get my act together to run my life like a grown person.
I forgot that joy is the point, the pathway, and the purpose. This is so crucial I’m going to say it again. Never forget your life is about joy. If you share a soul mission with your love partner, do not compromise the relationship for the sake of the mission. It’s so seductive to do so. When I founded an AI company in 2014, well before AI was the latest thing on the block, I did not know this. I lost my boyfriend at the time plus some business partners who are probably never going to speak to me again. Sometimes, no amount of apologizing can get someone back.
I stayed too long in relationships with people who neglected me. If you grew up, as I did, with a mostly or wholly absent parent or parents, I highly recommend Thais Gibson’s YouTube channel. She has the best teaching on healing from broken attachment I’ve found anywhere. When you’re putting your eggs in the wrong basket, you’re never going to get an omelette.
I unconsciously didn’t believe I deserved a partner who cares deeply for me. This is highly related to point 3. Those of us who didn’t have a parent to accurately mirror our emotions to us are highly likely to believe we will find a partner who has these skills either. Stan Tatkin’s books are excellent resources for building a solid foundation with someone who is committed to showing up for you.
I was self-centered for years on end. Oh man, is this a painful one to admit – I got deeply lost chasing what I thought would impress people. I thought I needed to be successful to have fulfilling relationships. It’s one thing to go through a phase where you focus on career and compromise on social relations for awhile, but when that stretches out to years, people lose interest in you. The irony was that the very thing I was working so hard at to earn friends and lovers actually caused me to lose them in the end. This unconscious drive to earn love and a good life inevitably causes exhaustion. This will be the focus of the upcoming course I’ll be doing in January.
I suppressed my anger. I thought I was doing such a good, responsible, spiritually mature thing by “working” with my anger. I wasn’t working with my anger, I was ignoring it. Guess what… it made me physically ill. I was so fatigued from middle of 2021 I had to lay off most of my clients for the better part of the year. Yah, I don’t recommend ignoring the part of you that’s screaming to set some serious boundaries and take care of yourself. When you habitually suppress your anger at one person, it sours your relationship with everyone else.
I repeated myself. Have you ever felt like you’re going crazy because you’ve had the same conversation five times, or is it closer to fifty times? When I get that dizzy feeling that I’m not being listened to, I dig deeper. Whatever I find, be that anger, despair, grief, embarrassment, shame… whatever, I trust that it’s telling me something urgent. I can’t sweep it under the rug one more day. Which leads me to our final point for today:
I tried to get it right. Previously, I wasn’t willing to make big messes. I avoided fighting at all costs. In short, I wasn’t willing to get messy. I wanted my words to be perfect enough so that I wouldn’t be misunderstood. This is pure poppycock, utterly impossible. You will always be misunderstood at least a little bit. This fear led to me not saying anything at all about what was really bugging me. Now I dash off a big treatise on Google Docs if necessary and make my requests known. I give deadlines. I press the issue. I make sure I get heard, even if that means being misunderstood at first. We stay with it until we get to brand new territory.
You can always orient by your heart.
I mean this literally. Put your hand on your heart. Breathe in. See what your heart needs. If you have the ability to do so, check in on your inner child and see if there’s any boo boo that needs a kiss, a bandage, and a hug.
When you’re freaking out, repeat this mantra “the heart is not afraid of fear.” Your heart always know how to steer you out of any blitz. You will make it through.
Love from Oaxaca,
Cris
Love this Cris. So true.