Love, Intimacy and Relationship cont...

Fundamentally our difficulties in relationship come because our trust was damaged and has not been revived or restored. It is hard to trust and it really does take time and commitment.  And unless we have the understanding of the mistrust that we carry from our pasts we will constantly repeat old negative patterns, which hurt and sabotage our relationships.

Unconsciously we will repeatedly choose unavailable or demanding partners although in our rational mind we know that is not what we really want. We don’t realise it but we are often looking to work through unresolved parental relationships. Freud called this repetition compulsion, and it takes a lot of compassionate awareness to come to grips with this.
Having attracted these scenarios, we either mistrust when there is no reason for it, or we trust naively.
 
Mistrust is our protection from being hurt again as we were in the past. Sometimes it engenders suspicion and jealousy and other times makes us massively controlling. Once it takes hold of us you can be sure your relationship dynamic  is hell. We begin reacting to real or imagined ‘hurts’ with hypersensitivity and this can lead to retaliation at the other for the perceived wounding. A cycle of mistrust, retaliation and vindictiveness gets hold of us and it is difficult to break the momentum. This is because it is seductively addictive to stay with the false sense of power and protection rather than feel our vulnerability.
 
This might sound very gloomy and yet it is not.  Everything can be healed and growth is always possible. One of the first things to do is to acknowledge our mistrust and fear and our need for security and safety. Then we need to develop the capacity to be comfortable with these feelings. In our work we help build this through a type of meditation. In the past meditation was often used as a way of escaping from emotional wounds. But a more effective way is to learn to embrace and accept emotional vulnerability and combine this with the centred-ness and containment of meditation. Meditation is an essential resource, because it allows us to ‘own’ and take responsibility for our feelings, instead of blaming each other when things go wrong or we don’t get what we want. This can bring a serene and calm equanimity to the perils of intimacy.


Another aspect of our childhood conditioning that surfaces in our relationships is called Shame and shame is the perfect ground for co dependency and addiction to take root. Shame is this feeling deep down inside that you are just not ok the way you are, and that you are not worthy of  love and happiness. Our shaming culture and parents invalidated us and made us either lose confidence in ourselves and feel inherently wrong and defective. The end result of this is that we have lost contact with ourselves and our natural feelings, making us emotionally distant, numb or overly anxious to please, perform and get things right.
 
This has a damaging effect on our adult relationships.  Many of us are not yet aware of our shame, as we are constantly trying to compensate for it by acting ’more than human’.  Alternatively we may have blocked things out so much that we now live in depression.