Today I want to talk to you about the reason why people start relationships, and how to start a relationship for the right reasons…
Rather than start a relationship that is doomed to fail from its onset.
So what is the #1 reason why people get into relationships that are doomed to fail?
To avoid the pain and fear of their own self.
This pain and fear could be a variety of things, such as:
I don’t feel happy in my own company,
How can I exist on my own?
How am I going to secure a future for myself?
Or, the big one…
I don’t feel worthy, loveable or ‘enough’ unless someone is in my life is showing me that I am.
Starting a relationship when feeling needy or lonely ultimately leads to ‘multiplication’ – which is:
More fear, discomfort and loneliness than was experienced whilst single.
So how do we make sure we don’t enter into a relationship that is doomed from the onset?
Pretence as Opposed to Getting Real
Where our inner being is ‘at’ is the true determinant of the life we are unfolding for ourself. Therefore a ‘mask’ of pretence is not going to hide the facts, or create a different reality from what is really going on inside of us.
People may pretend they are happy, emotionally ‘full’ and self-contained. They may purposefully cultivate the illusion that they know how to be their own source of fulfilment, happiness and joy – but the very opposite may be true.
There are many people who feel miserable on their own, and people who simply can’t bear the thought of not having a partner.
Some of these people (as is the case with narcissists) may even stoop to the level of lying to other people about their intentions and feelings in order to secure the use of these people within sexual hookups and relationships, as objects, to avoid themselves.
There are also people who couldn’t purposefully hurt others, who are so depressed as a result of being by themselves, that they can barely walk out the front door. These people hang on to the hope that someone will turn up in their life magically to love them, take away the pain and get them back out into life.
The cold hard facts are this. If you are not happy being by yourself, a relationship is not going to take your pain away. The relationship will bring you additional unhappiness.
Spending Time Alone is Vital
It is incredibly important to not enter relationships with people who don’t spend time alone, and who don’t take responsibility to heal and create healthy fulfilment in their own skin.
There are people who are serial attachment people – who need to create hook-ups and relationships constantly in try to avoid their own inner wounds.
These are the people who do not heal, do not reconcile their inner being and simply take their unhealed fearful and painful parts forward into the next relationship, and the next and the next.
It is very important to not be one of these people.
Loving Life – and ‘Like Attracts Like’
The Law of Life is – like attracts like.
This Law known as Law of Attraction is as powerful as gravity.
It creates everything in our life, often unconsciously (until we become conscious), and it has everything to do with the relationship we create with ourself, with life and with everyone in our life.
There is no way to beat this Law, just as there is no way to beat the Law of gravity.
How do we create a healthy life with ourself, life and others?
It’s always about becoming who and what you want to experience.
So let’s have a look at ‘Who’ you wish to become.
You want to love life without fear. You want to be engaged in life, and you want to be able to wake up every day looking forward to another special day.
How incredible would it be to not need anyone to feel great? How freeing would it be to know you can feel amazing now regardless of whether or not you have anyone in your life, or even a current love interest?
Do you really believe that your life and good feelings should conditionally be controlled by whether or not you have a partner?
Any attachment to conditions in your life in order to experience the true radiance of yourself is dependency. Dependency means you are the victim of conditions of your life, instead of being the creator of your life.
What state of yourself do you believe would be a great foundation to start a healthy relationship from?
Who Do You Wish to Attract?
Absolutely you want to enter into a relationship with another person who loves life, and who is incredibly happy to allow you to have your own life, as well as sharing loving time together.
Healthy emotionally solid adults are not threatened by you having your own identity and independence. They are not so needy that they need to own you or control you.
Love is freedom and trust.
Love means loving someone enough that their fulfilment means the world to you – and that fulfilment does not always have to be provided by you. Trust means that if they do their own thing it doesn’t mean they will lose interest in you or leave you for someone or something better.
We can’t love and trust others, until we love and trust ourself.
Healthy emotionally mature adults allow love partners to be independent in their own right, and in fact they encourage and empower their partners. They do not try to take their power away.
Loving, healthy partners recognise that the more empowered someone is, the more they have to share healthily and happily within a relationship. They know the fuller and emotionally healthier an individual is the more love they have to give.
Attachment is Not Love
Let’s get very clear on this – love is not attachment.
Attachment is dependency, and dependency creates toxicity in relationships. It manifests neediness, expectations, angst, and control and manipulation. It creates lack of personal growth because personal responsibility is not taken.
Osho, one of my newest favourite authors (I love his material), states this:
“Loneliness is beggarly, in fact it is ugly. If you move into a relationship when you are feeling lonely you will exploit the other. The other will become a means to satisfy you.
Nobody is here to fulfil anybody else’s expectations. Everyone is here to just be himself or herself. Whenever you move into a relationship out of loneliness the relationship is already on the rocks. It is going to create more misery for you.
When you move according to your loneliness you will fall into a relationship with someone who is in the same plight. Two beggars will meet, two miserable people will meet. And remember – when two miserable people meet, it is not a simple addition, it is a multiplication. They create much more misery for each other than they could have created in their own loneliness.”
We don’t have to go very far to see that all the personal development / spiritual teachers – who have transformed their own lives and the lives of millions of others – all pass on the same message. Love begins with Self.
This message is consistent from Louise Hay to Neale Donald Walsch, to Gary Zukav, to Don Miguel Ruiz – in fact anywhere you look.
Loneliness Versus Aloneness
Osho creates wonderful distinctions between ‘loneliness’ and ‘aloneness’.
"Loneliness is a state of mind when you are missing the other.
Aloneness is the state of mind where you are constantly delighted in yourself. Loneliness is miserable. Aloneness is blissful. In loneliness you are off centre. In aloneness you are centred and rooted. Aloneness is beautiful. It has an elegance about it, a grace, a climate of tremendous satisfaction. “
Relationships created from a base of loneliness are after ‘happiness’. The happiness which has not been established within.
It becomes a huge disappointment and shock when the other person does not fix the inner unhappiness.
This always ends up looking like this – “I still feel unhappy, and why don’t you make me happy!”
Let’s explore what seeking ‘happiness’ means.
It means you are in fact ‘unhappy’. It means you are trying to gain something outside of yourself to feel better about yourself. It means that you are not an independent source of inner fulfilment in your own right.
If we are trying to get happiness, we are dependent, and we are attached to people unhealthily whilst trying to get it.
The symptoms of seeking happiness go like this.
“I’ll be happy when I secure that perfect partner.”
Then after securing someone…
“I’ll be happy when he or she does this.”
“I’ll be happy when he or she stops doing that”.
“I’ll be happy when he or she provides me with that.”
Can you see how dependent, conditional and powerless your happiness can be when you are not the person providing it for yourself?
How can love and sharing flow in this formula?
The truth is it can’t.
How did we get into situations like this? How did we attract and create relationships with people where we experienced happiness, and also regularly experienced bouts of extreme misery.
Why didn’t we realise that seeking happiness was always going to flip to the other side of the coin – unhappiness?
The truth was we had not learnt how to be a source of genuine happiness to ourself.
What is Authentic Happiness?
Authentic happiness is a quality which is produced from within. It needs to be cultivated purposefully as a state of being that is not dependent on other people.
It is the ability to feel whole, fulfilled and blissful for absolutely no reason at all.
You can’t ‘get’ happiness; you can only ‘be’ happiness.
Authentic happiness is a quality that emanates from within. It is an inner platform of peace and contentment from where joy naturally bursts forth.
It is a quality of the soul and NOT of the mind.
The mind, which is your ego, can NEVER be authentically happy – it will always find a reason to think ‘unhappy’ and ‘not enough’ thoughts.
The expectations of your mind can never be appeased.
The Narcissistic Reality
As we know, a great deal of this community has been involved in narcissistic relationships. These relationships are the ultimate in pretence, an egoic mind and a mask covering up the true inner state of the person we met.
The narcissist is terrified of the mask dropping and the true disordered, shameful self being exposed – and will say and do anything to try to cover up who he or she really is.
Of course this strategy didn’t work. Those disordered parts were always going to erupt, because whatever painful unhealed parts a person has will always sooner or later appear and play out.
Especially in intimate relationships where they get triggered the most.
That is what shadow (disowned / unhealed) parts do. They keep asserting themselves over and over and over again.
The narcissist as a ‘no-self’ has no ability to be his or her own source of inner bliss and fulfilment. The False Self (accentuated ego) has no ability to provide inner peace and wellbeing. Therefore he or she frenetically needs to create hook-ups and relationships to secure the feeding back to the narcissist that he or she exists.
For the narcissist, it is emotional annihilation if narcissistic supply (attention) is not forthcoming. Hence the conscienceless ‘unhuman’ behaviour used in order to keep securing narcissistic supply.
One of the main reasons that narcissists insist on becoming the centre of your universe, apart from needing to secure narcissistic supply, is because he or she is acutely paranoid.
Narcissists don’t trust anyone. They know the adulterous and pathological acts they are capable of doing when you are out of sight, and sadly believe, as per their version of a ‘dog eat dog’ world, that everyone else is capable of the same atrocities.
Be very aware that people who profess and sprout undying love for you are highly suspect – and it is NOT normal behaviour. It is love-bombing.
This ‘movie type romance’ is a drug that the narcissist is using to escape his or her tortured self. Narcissists know how they need the drug of adoration – and know it captivates people when they dispense it. They manipulate people by feeding their egos.
Make no bones that the same ‘adoring’ narcissist is just as likely to finish off his or her call, text or email to you with over-the-top love gestures, and be straight on to their next sexual hookup without batting an eyelid (sound familiar?).
The more regularly romantically demonstrative a person is (heavy focus on attachment), the more likely they are to be adulterous and pathological – because mature, healthy adults simply do not behave like this.
Healthy love has substance – it is not idealised fantasies.
Naturally illusions crack and fall apart. There is not a person who has been swept off their feet by a narcissist, who has not experienced malicious devalue and discard – and often evidence of adultery, or the narcissist moving to the next source of supply overnight as if a relationship with you never existed.
Of course you were not the magical pill to relieve the narcissist from his or her inner demons.
No-one ever will be or can be.
You were always going to be the next ‘wonderful’ person who became ‘not good enough’ – as will be the next, and the next and the next.
Your Self-Reflection and Responsibility
We need to take responsibility for our unhealed parts that led us into being the other half of these disastrous relationships.
Healthy people with full lives and their own source of independence do not fall for the narcissist’s engulfing and insistence on wrapped you up in fairy-tale love. These people have a love and connection for life as a single person, and realise that something is not right when the narcissist starts love-bombing and then demanding, manipulating and taking umbrage about them getting fulfilment and joy from other areas of their life apart from the narcissist.
No narcissist will permit you having regular fulfilment and joy apart from him or her – it isn’t possible.
I promise you there are people who reject narcissists quickly. I have friends who have never had narcissistic relationships, and I know they never would. I have also received many emails from people who break it off with narcissists as soon as the controlling and childish behaviour starts.
If you don’t have your own sense of fulfilment and love for life, you are highly susceptible to enabling dependent, unhealthy and even abusive relationships.
We have to get really straight with ourself, and we have to change at our own deep inner level if we want to heal this pattern of relationships based on enmeshment, unhealthy attachment, dependency, control and abuse.
We need to learn to truly love ourself, and we need to make the moves to be in life and love life in our own right.
We need to firmly understand that we have to be ‘full’ on our own, and if we are not then we will base our ‘self’ on another person defining us.
If we don’t it is a recipe for heartbreak and loss on so many levels.
It is a recipe for the destruction of being in narcissistically abusive relationships.
My Determination to Heal This Pattern
I have stated this before, and I will again – my levels of co-dependency and inner brokenness were extreme. Extreme enough that I have been through two very painful narcissistic abuse experiences.
I am so grateful for the lessons I have had in life at this level, because they have given me the opportunity to truly come home to myself. This is the only way I was ever going to exorcise these patterns of painful love from my life.
I had to get very clear and honest with myself about where I had gone wrong.
Amongst many other things, I had to look at the formula of successful relationships.
A vital part of these functional relationships clearly was – healthy people conjoining and being happy, supportive and trusting of each other’s healthy interests outside of the relationship.
I realised that outside of relationships and work I did not have my own fulfilment. I had suffered the loneliness and emptiness of being on my own, and had then used work and other addictions to avoid that pain.
The truth was I did not feel ‘happy’ in life unless I was with a man. I had been brought up with the programming and conditioning from my mother that you didn’t do social things without a man. My mother has never had a life separate from my father. In fact she frowned upon women doing their own thing.
I also had my own fearful beliefs that I wasn’t safe in life without a man. The levels of these fears and beliefs were intense and incredible painful. They were generational, DNA based, belief system based, and also conditioned as a result of previous trauma.
These fears were holding me prisoner hoping that a big, strong protective man would save me from these fears and escort me out safely into life.
Of course the men I was attracting and accepting were not ‘rocks’ – they were in fact ‘hammers’ delivering more of my greatest fears.
When I was in relationships I was long past jealousy or possessiveness, I was a big advocate of trusting and being trustworthy and believed in allowing ‘space’ and ‘interests’, yet I was attracting relationships of intense attachment and dependency.
The men I was partnering were very needy, engulfing and wanted to spend every spare minute they could with me.
Of course this was allowed by me, because I did not have my own established independence, and I also carried the deep terror of abandonment, as well as the fear that I couldn’t survive on my own.
So I enabled the unhealthy attachments to take place.
I then felt guilty if I wanted to do anything outside of the relationship, and I would be met with umbrage if I pushed myself to do things like having dinner with a girlfriend. My partners would tell me they were jealous of the attention they weren’t getting.
So I decided to not continue doing this.
This was my level of ‘normal’. Now I know how incredibly abnormal and unhealthy this is. I know I had to take full responsibility for how I was co-creating this disastrous, engulfed, co-dependent pattern in my life with abusers.
This is what life looks like for me now…
I do lovely things for myself every day.
As I write this article I am sitting in one of my favourite cafes drinking coffee, enjoying the sea view.
Every morning I walk in nature, I love that. I also do a yoga DVD every morning, I love that too.
I hang out with friends and family regularly.
I dance, I sing, I play music every day. I make sure every day has something blissful and joyful within it. I drink green smoothies in the morning, which are not only delicious but are packed full of super foods, organic produce and supplements that grant me good health and lots of energy.
I meditate daily, and regularly connect with my inner self. The more I do, the more it glows out and extends into every area of my life.
I decide on great things to do at the weekend, and look forward to new adventures, hobbies, experiences and events.
I have never felt more whole or happy in my entire life – authentically.
Did I just decide and start doing these things?
The answer is ‘No’ because I couldn’t.
Initially they felt too painful – I had far too many fearful, painful and triggered inner programs that made ‘doing things’ way too painful to achieve.
It was a step-by-step process. It was a determined plan that required letting go of pain every day.
To create my New Self, I had to clear out enough pain from my Old Self to make space for a new way of being in life.
This meant doing Quanta Freedom Healing on myself every day.
Whatever ‘hurt’ that came up was the next step, the next dysfunction part of my shadow self to be released – and I honoured my body, soul and mind enough to release these hurts and deep dysfunctional inner programs determinedly, one by one.
I was way past trying to fight with myself mentally to overcome the inner pain and fear. I know that to change your mind means changing inner subconscious programs first, and then the mind automatically shifts to follow the new state of inner being.
As the space started opening in my body, soul and mind, I added a new dimension to my life every week.
Walking was first. Then yoga. Then meditation. Then a focused determination of health improvement. Then music and dance. Then pleasurable and lovely activities.
It was tough – absolutely.
To face, meet and release our inner self is the ultimate act of courage. It is what we have spent our entire life avoiding. It is what many people never have the courage to face, and never do. They never free themself from themself.
I can’t tell you how many tissue boxes I went through firmly meeting myself and healing within. And it was (and still is) incredibly worth it – on every level. Each day more and more space, beauty, and life enters my experience. Any day if a new hurt surfaces I keep letting go. I keep making more space and freedom within for the good stuff.
By becoming an inner being more aligned with the joy and expansiveness of the network of life, everything I need to keep expanding continues to show up – in abundance.
No longer am I pinched off from the wellbeing of life.
The truth is – no longer am I pinched off from the wellbeing of myself.
In Conclusion
We need to understand this firmly – relationships are a powerful force of like attracts like.
The relationships in our life, whether it be friends, business associates, acquaintances, love partners and even family truly reflect ourself.
The parts of these relationships we like are the parts of ourself which are healthy, and the parts we don’t like are the parts of ourself which are unhealed.
I really hope you can deeply feel this article, and be inspired to let go and expand no matter how hard it may feel right now.
I hope with all of my heart that you too will determinedly break through into the free, open, joyful, life loving being you were born to be.
When you love life, you love yourself.
When you love yourself, life is an infinite co-creator with you.
When you finally set yourself free, your life will open up, and take off in ways beyond your fondest dreams.
The best part is – you will know what it is to be authentically happy.
I would love to leave you with this mantra:
“I release all disconnections from myself and life, and become the healed and whole being I was born to be. Life supports me and adores me abundantly. I love my life.”
I look forward to responding to your comments.
