A discussion of relationships of how they change and change us.
There are questions about our relationships to ourselves, others, community, and planet. Some folks note stay, go, or cut your losses… and others note change. But change what? Of course, when one changes themselves, their world changes and their tribe changes… hopefully supporting more change. We know relationships happen to us (karma), for us (lessons) and through us. That is, we are the opportunities of and for changing ourselves, others, and our communities.
Two posts came across my feed that were inspiration for this week’s post. It is timely because of all the changes occurring. Sophia Andreeva’s two posts are great. Directly copied and pasted (italics). Relationships are both life and the connection to it. Despite one’s choosing or determination of the type relationship. Whether it applies to mates, partners, parenting, as an employee/employer, friends, and to one’s community.
The first blog post of Sophia Andreeva is a list of “get to know” or interview questions to ask both oneself and the other to help determine if a relationship might be a good fit.
(How to Love a Woman’ by Dr. Clarissa Pinkola-Estes, 1991)
- Choose someone as though you are blind. Close your eyes and see what you can feel of that person, of their kindness, loyalty, insight, devotion, their ability to be concerned with you, their ability to care for themselves as an independent being. It is more important what we “see” with our eyes closed when it comes to the object of our love.
- Choose a person who has the ability to learn. Those who are unable to learn are intolerant. Choose a person who is curious about the world and how people work, a person who is gradually learning and evolving.
- Choose someone who is willing to be both strong and sensitive. Choose a person who has the strength of a tree which is flexible in the wind and does not break when blasted with powerful, gale force winds. Choose a person who has the ability to see and be alert to things around him or her.
- Choose someone who, when you hurt them, they feel pain, and they are willing to show it, and vice versa, when they hurt you, they see your pain, and they feel sorry.
- Choose a person who has an inner life: woodworking, drawing, writing, meditation … something that they love. Choose someone who is on their own journey and sees you as a partner and fellow traveler on that journey. Choose a person who is capable of being merged AND separate with a bond between you, which can stretch over distance and time without breaking.
- Choose someone who has similar passions in life to your own. A relationship is for making memories together.
- Choose someone who has similar values about having children, about childbearing, about family members, about roots and roles for women and men, and kinds of marriage and money and religion. This is about the pragmatics of decreasing the friction in the relationship, and if there are differences, they should be worked out before there is a long term commitment to the relationship.
- Choose someone who is compassionate, who is able to listen, someone who gives equal time.
- Choose someone who can laugh at themselves and who knows how to stop an argument in mid-sentence.
- Choose someone who is able to overlook certain faults or characteristics and know what you can live with. This is important because the things that are so cute and charming in the beginning, symbiotic stage of a relationship will drive you insane later. Several things that are intolerable and unacceptable in a lifelong relationship:
- Alcoholism
- Substance abuse
- Gambling
- Criminal activity
- Anything that takes a person away from their true soul life
- A person who cannot tell the truth
- A person who cannot give
- A person who cannot face you after they have made a mistake and who tries to cover it over in a dramatic and large way instead of owning up and showing humble remorse. Accepting any of these would be like starting a relationship on swamp ground.
- Choose someone with whom you can be friends, not just lovers. Are you willing to do for your partner what you are willing to do for your girlfriend or your guy friend? Are you willing to sit and listen in minute detail to how that person thinks and to do what they would like to do? Is that person able and willing to do the same for you?
- This is the most important. Make sure that when you choose, you are choosing someone who makes your life bigger rather than smaller. That will tell you all you need to know.
The second post also by Sophia is about the progression and dynamics in relationships.
Three Stages of a Relationship
The reason you’re attracted to someone is not what you think~~ the 3 stages of a relationship!!
You see a woman or man in a crowded room and it feels like an uncontrollable energy is drawing you to them. You’ve met your “soul mate” and you instinctively feel it – your gut, your insides, your mind formally explode with Amor’s phenylethylamine-tipped arrows as they strike your skin. You think that this feeling of “love” is so real and pure that nothing can keep up with it, and although you’re partly right, there’s a lot more behind the story of human attraction.
According to research by Jung, Freud and other psychologists, you choose a partner based on the composite picture of your primary references when you were a small child. These were the people you depended on for everything. You were totally dependent on them and in their human weakness and ignorance they made mistakes in your upbringing. Maybe they were distancing, controlling, shameful or even cruel. In other cases, you may have had references who were loving, kind, patient, and supportive. You may have also experienced a combination of these traits from birth through the age of three to five. In that time your concept was shaped by the world and love.
The instinctual attraction you feel romantically towards another person as an adult is just a subconscious desire to heal the wounds your primary references inflicted. We consciously want euphoria and all the things that come with idealized romantic love – that love that we fall into so easily in the early stages of a relationship when we are idealized and fantasized and joyfully offer ourselves to our romantic partners.
Subconsciously, however, there are deeper needs that cry out for attention, and these play out through what has been described as an “Imago Match.” The image is the subconscious mind that behaves very much like the child that was present during his education.
The subconscious mind acts according to its wishes and emotions and nothing else. It ignores all sense. It does what it wants and leaves out societal norms, courtesy, compassion and other important developments in the human psyche. It acts like a bio-computer that stores all your memories, including things that happened to you when you were so small that they couldn’t be embedded in your conscious memory. Certain convictions you have about yourself that don’t seem to make sense are often formed in the subconscious mind due to these very early memories. Some say they have even been taken over by past lives.
1.
In the first stages of love, we feel like the “golden child” of our families, even if we weren’t treated the same way when we were little. Norepinephrine, dopamine, phenylethylamine, and other neurochemicals turn our bodies into a straight-up chemistry experiment when we are inundated with substances that make our hands sweat, butterflies appear in our bellies and make our hearts race. The “high feeling” we feel in the first stage of love is necessary in order to connect us with someone who can help us heal the deepest wounds we carry, and our subconscious knows exactly who that is.
When love starts to feel banal and exhausting, we have usually entered the second phase of romantic love, which turns into a “fight”. It’s important to understand that this phase is not meant to stop. If you’re dating someone who puts you down, ignores you, holds back love, isn’t really in love with you or treats you less than great, in five minutes another bus is coming. It’s time to move on. For some reason, they are not the person who is going to help you complete the healing you need to have fully functional, real love.
The first stage of love is full of passion, euphoria and lust.
They may have served the purpose of wounding you in the same way you were wounded before so that you’ll realize healing is necessary, but they won’t be the channel through which change ultimately happens.
In the first phase, however, love feels like an altered state of consciousness – the closest we know to spiritual happiness – and it can feel incredible!
2.
The second phase of love: The Power Struggle~
In the second phase of love, the signs are almost as universal as in the first. Instead of feeling excitement and euphoria, you’ll probably feel unwanted and unloved when you consciously realize that your partner doesn’t meet all of your emotional needs. Eventually, you’ll learn how to meet these needs in a more compassionate way, but during this phase it often looks like this:
The second phase is a power struggle:
He or she doesn’t feel loved, so they start withdrawing or being withdrawn
The other partner feels abandoned and acts impulsively
Someone cries a lot; someone screams a lot
Excuses and blame are the norm
We tend to see only the negatives in our partners and forget about all the positives
Frustration and despair take the place of enthusiasm and happiness
Every button we have feels like it’s being pushed or triggered (and that’s how it should be!) )
There is a missing real connection
There can be explosive quarrels and reconciliation
It is likely that both partners will constantly feel lower anxiety and pain when they repeat the emotional patterns of their childhood
It’s important to understand that this phase will end. Many partnerships do not survive this phase because they do not understand its importance and necessity. Here our higher selves will either do one of two things: end the relationship and break up, or grow over the relationship.
3.
3rd phase: True love~
As soon as we are exhausted from the struggles between our inner, wounded selves in communion with another person’s wounded self, we can decide to “give up.” We can also choose to take the relationship to a conscious level. Conscious love is not based on crazy chemistry or constant fighting. There is no emotional abandonment or constant back and forth to make someone else give us what we need to feel loved.
Instead, we learn to grow. We stretch ourselves into better ways to express our needs, our hearts, and our feelings of abandonment, rejection, or fear.
Both partners are beginning to see how they are self-creating behaviors and outcomes through their own actions within the relationship. They will become more open to giving their partners love the way they need to receive it, rather than using violence, manipulation, or retreat. They’re really interested in supporting the other person rather than just having their own needs met and that’s a big change happening.
We begin to lay down the defense mechanisms we developed as survival strategies when we were injured children and begin to open up to true intimacy – physically, emotionally, sexually, and spiritually.
We may be alive and fulfilled, but the same neuro-chemicals that were present in the early stages of love are being replaced by a chemical mixture similar to what advanced meditators experience in compassionate experiences – like a Buddhist monk, we start differently on the “blows of life” to react.
More plasticity is developing in the brain, and we even experience an increase in our immune system and relaxation of the nervous system. We’re not constantly in fight mode or flight mode, and while we’ll continue to have challenges, we take full responsibility for everything that happens in our lives – and that frees us to love in an elevated way.
Sophia in these two short posts presents a masterclass about relationships.
The Relationship of Change
Adding to Ms. Andreeva’s astute presentation is a slightly different perspective and to add a “fourth phase” of relationships. The point of this post is that “relationships matter.” The quality of relationships translates to the quality of life and being. Whether it is a romantic, family, work, political, metaphysical, planetary, or galactic… all parties involved are sovereign and yet entangled.
The Romance (phase 1)
Romance is sorting and navigating illusions. Which realizes who you are and how your past (childhood, programing, etc.) influences who you are and your needs, wants, and desires. If there is no self-examination and understanding of your needs, wants, and desires; these are potential illusions projected on to your sense of reality and what may be happening in the relationship.
The Rub (phase 2)
The rub is about the refinement, distillation or polishing yourself. Eventually, it dawns that your partner reflects yourself. And in that reflection, you notice things you don’t enjoy, like nor want. Hopefully realizing the genuine work is to focus on changing oneself. Initially, we discover many layers of who we thought we were. But the deeper we go, the more we discover who we really are. Some things are dreaded and others loved. By facing ourselves in the mirror of relationships, we can change who we are. By changing ourself we change our responses to our partner, and change the relationship. The rub is with yourself, for yourself and through yourself. It is not about changing your partner, but your partner will have the opportunity to change their responses to you because you have changed.
Initially, the rub is like cleaning the smudges of projected illusions on a mirror. The rub, i.e., the fight, determination, and distillation happen in this second phase. This is the grind, rub, and polishing of turning a lump of coal into a multifaceted diamond.
Grace (phase 3)
Grace is about the wonder filled experience. The magical experience of realizing that the experience is part you, but mostly about the grace and magic of the connection and interaction of the relationship. It is discovering that your being, space and dynamic flow of the interaction (connection) in and of the relationship is the real magic. Discovering romance redefined, refined and matured is open, free, and flowing.
The Change (phase 4)
The fourth phase is about transmutation (change). Knowing that it is not a matter of what happens… but your response to what happens. If we don’t recognize it is our response, we often feel pain, suffering and being a victim. Failing to recognize that the relationship is a lesson for us. And it is through us (our self-awareness), we are the experience of flow. The flow of joy, passion, bliss and change. That we are the flow, the expression, and the existence of change.
“All Things Must Pass,” is the flow. Knowing feelings of loss can change to feelings of being blessed. Being grateful for the opportunity to dance, sing, play silly shenanigans and love. Knowing that anxiety and dread of loss is also the excitement of the dance in discovering something new. The wonder, the wonder… surrender and release! It is not losing… (for nothing is lost) but all changes and flows. Love expands, changes, and flows. And fear likes to wallow in the death of the past… until it is time to go.
Relationships
Life does not have to be perfect to be wonderful. Perfection is an illusion. Wonder is being connected, in relationship, interacting, fully present with sovereignty, integrity, compassion, and grace. Loving the unknown wonder of the ever-emerging blessings inherent in chaos and order, yin and yang, darkness and light. For these polarities are known merely as different aspects of the flow of change.
Be grateful and graceful in interaction, the tension, and connection. What you share is what you get and more. It is the interaction that conceives what is birthed, a new being. Be aware, it will be beyond your imagination. It really does not take much effort, time, and space. Experience happens in the blink of an I. Change occurs in the blink of an I. Birth, life, and death occur in a blink of an I.
Be thankful for the relationships, lessons, and opportunities of sharing, giving, and being. Be blessed, be the blessings and bless… the harvest of thanksgivings.
Blessings
Tim