Love is what makes you a better person. Nevertheless, sharing your life with another person can turn into a permanent struggle with your fears and most rigid beliefs, all of which impede you to love. When in a marriage or a relationship, we have to open up something found deep inside of us.
Without being aware of it, we often fall in love with a person that mobilizes in us our most profound conflicts, all that has remained unsolved in our personal history. These conflicts may lead to you having a tensioned relationship but, in cases like this, it is the very relationship that can help you solve them.
All persons develop a social personality. Within the relationship, your affective personality is involved, that which is mostly unseen in society. Rational connections help you solve social issues, but not those of a love relationship too. The lack of an affective connection can make the couple unstable or conflictive.
As early as childhood, we start by believing that we are not worthy to be loved as we are, and are thus driven to create an identity matching that which our parents want from us. When in a relationship, the other quickly realizes that we are how we pretend or show to be, and thus do not deserve their love. The solution out of this problem is to start abandoning our supposed identity, casting away from ourselves the desire of always fitting a certain model.
The moments of genuine surrender and frankness, in the case of mature and heartfelt relationships, will reward us with the discovery that we can be loved as we are, without a facade, deceptions and expectations.
The main obstacle in love is fear. The fear of turning vulnerable, of surrendering and, ultimately, of suffering. Affective dependence makes you vulnerable especially to suffering. What we should not forget is that pain is normal in a relationship. By shutting down your affective flow, you block both pain and love from reaching you. Pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional. The suffering is neurotic. It makes you not to accept the pain of life and forces you to do "something" to eliminate it: blame the partner, switch partners and so on. Guaranteed, none of these methods will succeed.
Except for the cases when a person cannot understand the real problem that the couple is confronted with, everybody ends a relationship with the illusion of turning their backs to falling in love and thus avoid pain. People prefer to believe that the problem was with the other one or precisely with the relationship they had. But many psychologists believe that the person could not solve their personal problems because of what is known as the "hurt child". This hurt child all of us carry inside stirs feelings of anger in us, because of the pain we were not able to express during our childhood, and which we now unload in our intimate relationships.
When your partner lashes out and unloads their pains on you, perhaps you should ask yourself what is the connection of their act with your personal history, with what you did not manage to solve – all things that precede your relationship. There are persons who always feel abandoned, unloved, neglected and not respected by the other. They are the typical possessive persons, with personalities marked by childhood traumas. If they want to develop their own personality, they have to revise that personal sensation of abandonment, to track other moments when they felt the same and to understand their experience beyond this relationship, which actualizes an ancient pain sensation. Not assuming this just leads to blaming the other and to perpetual suffering. Stop trying to find a person to blame.
The other issue is that of resignation and acceptance. It's the difference between what it should be and what it is. Resignation involves suffering because of the idea that things could be better for you. Acceptance means assuming that things cannot be different, but your personal attitude can be changed by learning something from the situation. This will make you grow up, increasing your consciousness and the capacity of being happy. Resignation involves the idea of an injustice ("this should not have happened to me"), that the subject or the partner failed you in something. What usually follows is eternal complaint, criticism and harsh judgment.
The idealized image we have of us prevents us from growing up. We are constantly trying to fit in already established models, or to rise to the standard of untouchable ideals. This has nothing to do with unconditioned love. The secret is in loving yourself and loving the other simply for how they are: increasing acceptance and decreasing the negative attitude. Look at it as daily training with your partner. Criticizing the other may force them to close their affective pathways from you.
Old wounds require time to cure and an adequate space to express pent up rage and pain, so that our partner is not the only receiver of these reactions. The main tool to achieve that is by determining the origin of your fears that unleash your rage as a defense mechanism. The transformation must be real, not induced by will or wishful thinking. Moments of anger and frustration only cause pain, as the person discovers that the reality is not how they had envisioned it.
The main issue is that we do not know how to listen each other. If the other is sad, in just a blink of an eye, you’re thinking you have done something and, what’s worse, that you have to do something to make the other not feel sad anymore. This is a typical attitude in men. In these situations, they often stand aloof and refuse want to listen to their wives, when in reality the women, who can easier express emotions, are not even asking for something to be done.
Women only want to be listened to with empathy. However, men were "built" for action and not for emotional contact. Men believe that a woman telling them something is actually asking for their help. Moreover, if they can’t solve the woman’s problem, then they must be clearly failing. That's why men don’t even bother listen in most cases.
The best part of being in a couple is when the partners manage to listen to each other without chipping in with their two cents, judging or attempting to change anything. Each one, with his/her personal history, must try to understand the other and respect the differences that make him/her so special in the first place.
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