[2] Creating the Love You Want

One Line Summary: For sustainable love relationships we want to redesign relationships to heal our past wounds.

One Paragraph Summary: To create love relationships that we want, we want to became aware of why we do what we do and redesign our relationships to heal our past wounds. We want to change our focus to only ourselves, and to see love relationships as a “collaboration team” for emotional and spiritual healing and growth. For this, we want to create an environment between us of safety and trust and to communicate openly and effectively.

Newsletter [1]*:

To create love relationships that we want, the first step is to REDESIGN our relationships to HEAL our wounds.

To do this, we first build an atmosphere of SAFETY and TRUST. By closing our exits (behaviors that prevent intimacy), renewing our commitment to each other, and deliberately affirming each other, we create a safe and nurturing environment.

We create this feeling of safety and validation by learning to communicate openly and effectively. As we overcome our resistance to this new way of relating, we begin to see our partners with even more clarity.

We learn that they have Fears, Weaknesses and Desires that they have never shared with us. We then move into intentionally affirming our partners, flooding the Space Between with Caring Behaviors, Fun, and Surprises.

This continues building SAFETY and JOY into the relationship. We embrace the knowledge that affirmations and negativity cannot travel the same neural pathways at the same time. We then become more conscious of our old wounds. We look into the past for evidence of how we were denied adequate nurturing and how we repressed essential parts of our being.

We do this through Therapy, Mindfulness, Working on our EQ and by becoming more Astute Observers of everyday events. As we gather new insights, we share them with our partners, because we no longer assume they can read our minds. When our partners share their thoughts and feelings with us, we listen with UNDERSTANDING and COMPASSION, knowing that this SHARING is a sacred TRUST.

Gradually, we start to reimage our partners, to see them as they really are—wounded children seeking salvation (healing so they can be their true selves and getting unconditional love). We listen to and share with each other in order to illuminate our mutual darkness. Gradually, we come to ACCEPT the fullness, the dark and the light of our own being.

The next step in the healing process is perhaps the most difficult: we make a decision to act on the information we are acquiring about ourselves and our partners and become our partners’ healers. We go against our instinct to focus on our own needs and make a CONSCIOUS CHOICE to focus on theirs. To do this, we must Conquer our Fear of Change. As we respond to our partners’ needs, we are surprised to discover that, in healing our partners, we are slowly reclaiming parts of our own lost selves. We are integrating parts of our being that were cut off in childhood. We find ourselves:

“Regaining our capacity to THINK and to FEEL, to be SEXUALLY and SPIRITUALLY alive, and to EXPRESS ourselves in CREATIVE ways”

As we reflect on all that we are learning, we see that “the painful moments in life are in reality opportunities for growth”. Instead of blocking the pain, we ask ourselves:

“What TRUTH is trying to EMERGE at this moment?”

“What PRIMAL FEELINGS are HIDING beneath these feelings of sadness, anxiety, and frustration?”

We learn that the underlying feelings are Sorrow and the Fear of Death and that these feelings are common to us all. Finally, we find a safe and growth-producing way to transform these powerful emotions and no longer allow them to jeopardize our relationships. One by one, the elements of our partnership that were once unconscious—the fears, the childhood needs, the archaic pain—are brought to the surface, first to find acceptance, then, ultimately, to be resolved.

As our childhood wounds heal and as more hidden parts of ourselves come into our awareness, we have a:

NEW SENSE of our inherent UNITY and CONNECTEDNESS

References:

[1] Getting the Love You Want - Harville Hendrix PhD and Helen LaKelly Hunt PhD – *Most of the information presented in this newsletter is an extract from this book.