Sunday, February 26, 2012

inspiration

A re-post from 2011

Today I just woke up, and went out to see how the weather was. It wasn't sunny at all, it was actually grey and raining. But after standing outside for a while, I could hear the birds chirping in the trees and fluttering around the house. I was surprised to see how this moved me, so much that I started to cry a bit. I had no idea how I have been longing for spring. And just this little preview of it made my eyes water with emotion.

There is something very special about spring. the time in year that comes after we have spent so long in cold and darkness. Spring is like a new hope,- snow melting to unveil flowers, a smile after sadness, seeing your loved ones after a long journey away, and I think that was also what touched me. I felt this new hope in my chest too - all the feelings that had been hid by the darkness of winter bubbling up and wanting to bee seen and acknowledged again,- to be set free and live. Spring is like falling in love. It melts the ice and old hurt from your heart and turns you to light and warmth.
I have never liked to favor anything, cause I don't like to treat things differently, (like they have different value). But in this case I must make an exception. Spring with all its signs of hope is definitely my favorite season.
I honestly think that if people just got some sun and hugs every day, the world would look very different :-)
Here is a beautiful song to enjoy while you are sitting in the sun


 

"Even if blame seems more than justified, as long as you blame others, you keep feeding your pain and get trapped in your own ego. There is only one perpatrator of evil on the planet - human unconsciousness. That realisation is true forgivness. With forgiveness your victim identity dissolves, and your true power emerges - the power of Presence. Instead of blaming the darkness, you bring in the light."
- Echart Tolle

Sunday, February 19, 2012

When love turns painful

Does love never work out for you or really last? Are you tired of the failed relationships but dont understand why they never work out? Do you want to connect with someone but at the same time feel ambivalence about it...maybe a feeling that they will take your freedom away or try to control you? Or do you always feel that those you love stay at a distance from you, that you never can get a truly satisfying relationship where your need for love and attention is met equally with what you yourself give out?
If you answer yes to any of these questions I think this artickle might be valuable to you...

Love addiction and love avoidance
- the dance of the vounded souls


Content of artickle:

Love Addiction
-What is Love Addiction?
-Am I a Love Addict?
-What Does the Love Addiction Relational Cycle Look Like?

Love Avoidance
-What is Love Avoidance?
-Am I a Love Avoidant?
-What Does the Love Avoidance Relational Cycle Look Like?

What is Love Addiction?

Love addicts have unmet emotional needs that they seek to fulfill with either romance or relationships. Love addicts tend to form relationships with individuals who are love avoidant. Love avoidants gain a sense of relationship control by avoiding intimacy and withholding love. Together, love avoidants and love addicts engage in a dysfunctional relationship pattern that is often called the 'distancer-pursuer' relationship. Because the love addict's primary emotional fear is of abandonment, she or he is typically the pursuer in an established relationship. The love avoidant, whose primary fear is of intimacy, responds by distancing.

Both love addicts and love avoidants also have secondary fears (the love addict's secondary fear is of intimacy; the love avoidant's secondary fear is of abandonment), which fuel temporary periods of role reversal in the distancer-pursuer pattern when those secondary fears are triggered. However, regardless of who is the distancer and who is the pursuer at any given time, the pattern in the relationship remains the same.

Am I a Love Addict?

This questionnaire is based on the work of Pia Mellody. If you can answer yes to more than a few of the following questions, love addiction may be a problem for you.

  • Your partner seemed too good or perfect to be true when you first met.
  • He or she seemed like the person you had always dreamed of.
  • Your partner seemed unusually charming and thoughtful when you first met, almost as if he or she could read your mind.
  • Within days of meeting your partner you felt like the two of you had been spiritually connected for years.
  • You were convinced you and your new partner were 'soul mates.'?
  • Your partner's interests and hobbies seem more important to him or her than you are.
  • You've started cutting activities and people out of your life because you don't want to make your partner jealous.
  • You have been so obsessed with another person before that you gave up everything (e.g., job, friends, family, etc.) to be with that person.
  • You have put your partner on a pedestal before.
  • Your partner went from being romantic to cold and distant.
  • You have said to friends before, 'He/She was so charming and thoughtful in the beginning; I don't understand why he/she changed'?
  • You have tried unsuccessfully to be romantic and make things like they were in the beginning.
  • Your partner seems to spend less and less time with you.
  • You have been with a partner who was verbally or physically abusive.
  • You have blamed yourself or made excuses for your partner's abuse.
  • After long periods of unhappiness and progressively worse abuse, you still hang onto the belief that one day things will change.
  • You believe if you just hang in there long enough, you can love your partner into being who he or she really is.
  • You have been asked by a family member or close friend why you stay.
  • You feel abandoned when a relationship breaks up, even if you were the one who ended the relationship.
  • You have been in so much pain after an unhappy, troubled relationship has ended that you go back when your partner promises to change.
  • After a relationship has ended, your feelings of abandonment, pain, and fear seem so severe that you think you might die.
  • When you were a child, you often felt as though you were invisible.
  • A parent or major caregiver died, moved away or got divorced when you were a child.
  • As a child, you thought your parents or major caregivers didn't really know what was happening to you or what was going on inside of you.
  • You feel like your father neglected and/or abandoned you during your childhood.
  • You feel like your mother neglected and/or abandoned you during your childhood.

You can learn more about different types of love addiction from Love Addicts Anonymous.

What Does the Love Addiction Relational Cycle Look Like?

The love addict:

  1. Is attracted to a person who is walled in and appears powerful.
  2. Creates a fantasy about the other person as the relationship begins. The fantasy leads to feelings of euphoria for the love addict, who then becomes obsessed with the partner.
  3. Uses denial to protect the fantasy. This allows the love addict to ignore the avoidant's walls and the distance in the relationship.
  4. Some event occurs that bursts the denial and results in the love addict going into emotional withdrawal from the fantasy.
  5. Uses strategies to either return to the fantasy, medicates the emotional distress and/or becomes obsessed with revenge.
  6. Returns to the fantasy or finds a replacement partner and creates a new fantasy.
The Relational Recovery: Healing from Sex, Love and Relationship Trauma Group offers a healing community for women hurt by love addiction.

What is Love Avoidance?

Love avoidance is the systematic putting up of walls in a relationship to prevent feeling emotionally overwhelmed by another person. Consequently, it prevents true intimacy. It can be described as a form of emotional anorexia. The love avoidant perceives love as being an obligation or duty, so relationships are experienced as an emotional drain. The love avoidant tends to become involved with love addicts, and puts up walls to decrease the intensity within the relationship. However, the more the avoidant distances, the more the love addict pursues. The avoidant often responds by a pattern of deprivation within the primary relationship, while acting in ways that create intensity outside of that relationship (e.g., work, pursuing other relationships or sexual encounters, addictions, etc.). At the more extreme range of love avoidance, the love avoidant may also be intimacy anorexic.

Am I a Love Avoidant?

This questionnaire is based on the work of Pia Mellody. If you can answer yes to more than a few of the following questions, love avoidance may be a problem for you.

  • You think taking care of your partner is sufficient proof that you love him or her.
  • You find yourself often critical of your partner.
  • You believe it is your duty to take care of your partner.
  • You have a secret life away from your partner.
  • You keep important information about your thoughts or feelings from your partner.
  • You withhold information about yourself (at work or play) so that your partner will not get upset.
  • You find yourself needing to manage and be in control of the relationship.
  • You have frequently done things for your partner and then later had the sense that no matter what you did it was never enough for your partner.
  • You feel frustrated because your partner doesn't understand that you've spent time with him or her and now you need time for yourself.
  • You feel smothered by your partner when he or she wants to have you around so much.
  • Your partner complains that he or she doesn't really know you.
  • You find yourself overly critical of your partner.
  • You withhold praise or appreciation from your partner.
  • You feel resentful of your partner's neediness.
  • You have had one or more relationships in which you felt smothered and needed to escape.
  • You find yourself needing to control your partner because you know better what should and shouldn't be done.
  • You control your primary relationship by silence and anger.
  • When you're with your partner you feel like you're not getting your needs met.
  • You feel your partner doesn't appreciate all that you do for him or her.
  • You frequently feel the need to escape the relationship.
  • You often feel the need to go some place where you can get attention without always having to assure the other person that you love them.
  • You are spending more time at work in order to be away from you partner.
  • You stay so busy that you have little to no relational time for your partner.
  • You feel a sense of relief when you leave the house.
  • Your drinking, drug use, or other addictive behaviors increase while you are in a primary relationship.
  • You've had an affair or one-night-stand in order to get away from your relationship, have some fun, and get some attention.
  • You use porn to escape from the pressure in your relationship.
  • You withhold sex from your partner.
  • You have become involved in relationships because you couldn't say "no" or you didn't want to hurt the other person's feelings.
  • You have stayed in relationships longer than you wanted because you would have felt guilty if you ended it.
  • Your relationships have often begun with you rescuing your partner from another bad relationship, poor health, financial difficulties, emotional distress, legal problems or some other difficulty.
  • It is important to you that your partner thinks of you as her 'Knight in Shining Armor' or his 'Wonder Woman.'
  • As a child, you sometimes thought you were taking care of mom or dad more than they were parenting you.
  • As a child, you felt like mom or dad was smothering.

What Does the Love Avoidance Relational Cycle Look Like?

The love avoidant:

  1. Feels compelled to take care of needy people.
  2. Hides behind a wall of seduction or romance to satisfy the needs of relationship partner while avoiding being vulnerable or feeling controlled.
  3. Begins to resent the other person he or she feels duty bound to take care of and moves behind a wall of anger.
  4. Communicates anger in either a passive-aggressive or overtly aggressive way. Uses anger to justify a break froLinkm relationship duties.
  5. Sees self as a victim of relationship partner and rationalizes seeking intensity outside of primary relationship (e.g., overworking, drugs or alcohol, compulsive eating, sexually acting out, financial risk taking, thrill seeking, etc.).
  6. Either returns to relationship out of guilt or fear of abandonment, or finds a replacement relationship.

LINKS:Link

Building healthy relationships

Vulnerability and gentleness

Emotions and personal growth

Fear of true intimacy and being seen for who you really are at the core

Intimicy anorexia

The dance of the vounded souls

Co-dependency (
Or the difference in being responsible for others and being responsible to others)
The Casanova complex

The high flyer

The Phantom / The Dracul / The shadow

Manipulative people

Freud's Psychosexual Stages of Development

Personal blog: A typical example of love avoidance behavoir

Personal blog: Typical love avoidance reasons

Vulnerability and gentleness

"I praise what is truly alive
what longs to be burned to death
And so long as you haven`t experienced
this: to die and so to grow,
you are only a troubeled guest
on this dark earth"

-
Goethe


- A text about personal transformation, and relating to others. How can gentleness and feeling pain really be a powerful strength?


When we first open to our pain, it often feels as though we are bleeding. yet this kind of emotinal bleeding helps awaken the heart, allowing vital energies in us that have become coagulated to circle again. To let our pain move in this healing way requires awareness, courage, and gentleness--being present with the pain instead of believing scare stories in our mind about where it might take us, opening ourselves to the place where we hurt inside, bringing caring presence to it, and letting those we love see it as well. In this way, helping us connect with our warrior spirit, pain can become a friend and ally.

A close friend, Tracy, has told me about some of her struggles, and transformation, relating to exactly these issues, and her partner Mark. She had a long time been feeling very resentful about her partner, but during a process where she allowed her pain about it to flow, finally accepted the situation. Thus when she felt her disappointment that Mark wasn't everything she would like him to be, and let this touch her, she realized, and expressed;
"We each have differences and imperfections that hurt each other. Yet there is nothing wrong with feeling that pain. it makes me feel my heart`s blood--my openness to myself, to him, and to love itself." In proclaiming her vulnerability this way, she was stepping beyond her fear of pain and heartbreak.

Unfortunately, the word vulnerability has pejorative meaning in our culture. Associating it with weakness and powerlessness, we often think of a vulnerable person as someone who is overly sensitive to being hurt or offended. Yet sensitivity to offense is something quite different from the genuine vulnerability of letting our heart be exposed. The ego is always fragile and easily wounded. It is a brittle shell or facade, a pretense that "we are in charge", that "no one can get to us" that we are "captains of our own fate". It is fragile because life is always threatening to expose our pretense of having power over life. By contrast, acknowledging our basic, human vulnerability--our openness to reality--is a source of real power. In fearlessly allowing our-selves to be vulnerable, we embody the bravery and gentleness of a true warrior.

Tracy confessed and described, that always before, she had tried to make her partners meet her emotional needs in devious, indirect ways. She would avoid stating he real feelings and needs openly because she did not like to feel exposed. It was much safer to manipulate her partner into blaming him when he failed to do so, or just withdraw.
In every relationship, there are times when one partner wants to connect more deeply, but that other is not as emotionally available at the same moment. At first when Tracy experienced this with Mark, she would feel hurt, and then contract, protect herself, attack, or hold it against him. Then, as her hurt and resentment built up, she would start to think about leaving him. Yet in learning to be compassionate toward the vulnerable part of herself, where she felt hurt by Mark`s unavailability, Tracy could let these hard, defensive edges fall away. When she softened to her pain, she could simply tell Mark about it, instead of holding it against him or shutting down her love. Expressing her needs more openly, rather than manipulating or accusing him, allowed her love to keep flowing. And she expressed that she felt stronger: no longer did she have to live in fear of pain or feel victimized when she got hurt. In this way, thorough making friends with our vulnerability, we discover a new kind of flexibility and power.

We usually think of vulnerability and gentleness as the opposite of power. Yet the softening that happens when we work with our pain can be quite compelling and influential. We become like water, which can generate electric power precisely because it flows so willingly, without resisting gravity or the contours of the land. Water is extremely vulnerable, in a sense. It is soft, it does not resist the touch, it can be molded into any shape, and it receives whatever we put into it. Yet for wearing down what is hard and tough, nothing surpasses it. Just as water, which is so soft, and accommodating, can reduce the hardest of rocks to sand, similarly gentleness is one of the most irresistible human qualities and can penetrate even the hardest of hearts. Whereas hardness stirs up aggression, gentleness provides nothing to resist.
So when Tracy show her vulnerability by saying, "I want to feel close to you right now", or "I just need to feel your love", Mark could not resist her. Because she was so appealing at the moment, he would often want to put aside his self-involvement and give her what she asked for. And when she could expose her pain-"It really hurts me when you get so tight"-instead of trying to get him to change, this usally made him soften. No longer was she the fussy princess expecting him to be a perfect prince.

In learning to appreciate and trust her broken-open heart Tracy says she felt more connected with life than ever before, and more capable of handling the challenges of an ongoing relationship. This was a tremendous victory, which only made her stronger and more attractive.
Men can particularly have a hard time seeing that their willingness to be vulnerable is often what touches women the most. They imagine that it is a sign of weakness, and that it will lead to scorn or rejection, or that they will loose control and disappear in the feeling. However, as one woman friend of mine put it,"I find it quite magnetic, when a man lets me see his vulnerability. It only turns me off if he tries to get me to reassure him about feeling that way. If he just presents it openly, I find that courageous and admire him for it." What she is saying is that ego fragility-trying to cover up the rawness of one`s heart-is unattractive, while fearlessly revealing it can be most appealing.

Thus the rawness of the broke-open heart, which being in moments of disillusion, is the transmuting force in the alchemy of love. When we let our heart break open, a certain sweetness starts to flow from us like nectar. As the Sufi teacher Hazrat Inayat khan put it,"The warmth of the lover`s atmosphere, the piercing effect of his voice, the appeal of his words, all come from the pain in his heart." This is one of the great secrets of love. Instead of trying to ward off his pain, which is futile anyway, the lover can use it to transform himself, to develop invincible tenderness and compassion, and as the troubadours discovered, become a "gentle man" as well as a heroic warrior in the service of love.

Letting the heart break open awakens us to the mystery of love-that we can`t help loving others, in spite of the pain they cause us, for no other reason than that they move and touch us. in ways that we can never fully comprehend. Indeed, if those we love perfectly matched our ideal dreams, they would not touch us so deeply. What we love is just not their pure being, but also their heart`s struggle with all the obstacles in the way of its full, radiant expression. Although their imperfections cause us pain, they also give our love a greater purchase, a foothold, something to work with. It is as though our heart wants to ally itself with the hearts in those we love and lend them strength in their struggle to realize the magnificence of their being, beyond all their perceived shortcomings.
So, just as rocks in a stream accentuate the force of the water rising against them, the obstacles to perfect romance can help us realize the power of our capacity to love and who we truly are and what we are made of. - They force the heart to stretch so that it can embrace all of what we are.
This, more than finding the prefect relationship or having someone give us everything we want, is what can heal us.
Emotions and personal growth

"As one lamp serves to dispel a thousand years of darkness, so one flash of wisdom destroys ten thousand years of ignorance."
- Zen quote

I do not subscribe to certain popular beliefs that some feelings and emotions are negative. I believe that none of them are "negative"; they are all part of you; they are life expressing itself through you, also giving you important messages of who you are and who you were.

During the process of growing up almost all of us will
have found the need to hide are true feelings and who we felt we were for real. In order to gain self knowledge and relate in a healthy way with others and ourselves, we need to get out of such destructive cycles. They maybe helped us survive in difficult times in our past, but now they hider us in relating truly to others, and in achieving inner peace and happiness. So we need to get in touch again with our emotions. Part of this is to be honest about what we feel without judging or labeling the emotion itself. We need to let the experience of the emotion flow freely through us, without resistance. In this way, the emotions are released, which means that we do not end up clinging to them, or making them part of who we are, of our own identity.
Every human being has a right to be open and to feel the emotions that enter their body. The thing we do not have a right to is to blame others for those emotions. If you want to gain your own autonomy, strength, inner wisdom, and continue on our personal growth, this is a very important step to realize. To deeply understand that you are the one who is producing your emotions, and to take responsibility for those feelings. This way you will own your feelings as your own.
Our feelings can be our very best friends,  guiding us towards our deeper self. 
Letting your heart be open to both pain and love, two feelings which are highly intertwined.
How can you feel love, without being open to the pain it also brings? How can you feel happiness without sorrow? Or put even better in the words of Kahlil Gibrans book, "The prophet":

On Joy and Sorrow
"Your joy is your sorrow unmasked. And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears. And how else can it be? The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain. Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter's oven? And is not the lute that soothes your spirit, the very wood that was hollowed with knives? When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy. When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.

Some of you say, "Joy is greater thar sorrow," and others say, "Nay, sorrow is the greater."But I say unto you, they are inseparable. Together they come, and when one sits, alone with you at your board, remember that the other is asleep upon your bed.
Verily you are suspended like scales between your sorrow and your joy. Only when you are empty are you at standstill and balanced. When the treasure-keeper lifts you to weigh his gold and his silver, needs must your joy or your sorrow rise or fall."
Link: Read more from this book

And so it is, that without joy, there can be no sorrow, and without sorrow there can be no joy. So if you look at it, there might be no need to judge them as good or bad, but take them as they are: Two shades of the same color.
But there are also other ways of taking responsibility for your emotions. We need to see how we are making ourselves feel the different things we are feeling. they are not just something that is throw down on our heads, like snow from a full roof in wintertime. We react to a situation with thoughts, our thoughts then again creates emotional responses, and then we feel them. Some thoughts and emotions stay with us though, and gets stuck in our bodies and thought-patterns as belief-systems. Sometimes consciously, and sometimes we are totally unaware that they are there. This is why we need to find them, feel them, and let them free. It is also important then to redefine the thought-patterns they are stuck to, to make us react, think and feel in a new and healthy way, instead of the old pattern we have identified with.
Taking responsibility in this way, is also withdrawing the thought of an other person or situation "making you feel this" and taking the focus back to yourself:

If you want to express your emotion and talk it out with somebody, you might say"My feelings got triggered and felt angry when you did x" . This clearly shows you taking responsibility for the feeling, and is not blaming the other person, but is merely an expression of the situation. This allows you to work and improve to not let this situation arise again.
The opposite example would be if you said: "You made me angry when you did x" With this sentence you create blame and guilt. Emotions which often are just meant to hurt the other person deliberately, as a revenge for them maybe unwillingly hurting you. Don't get me wrong, to have a conscience is always helpful and also very valuable.
It makes you take healthy choices and consider others peoples feeling. Guilt is never healthy, for either part of a situation.
An other aspect of this situation is that the other person actually never made you angry. You made yourself angry. We need rather to look at our anger, or whichever feeling or emotion that is surfacing and see why it is making us angry, be aware of what it is saying to us. In this way we can gain in self knowledge and become the directors of our own lives! We can understand ourselves deeper and also heal old wounds from the past that complicates our lives and makes us miserable.

To be happy is not just something that happens to you when the right circumstances are there. To have a happy life is hard work; hard work of awareness!

A way to get better in touch with your emotions is meditation. It helps you to get in touch with your genuine feeling self, your intrinsic being. Counselling can help to get things off your chest and give you support to move through difficult situations. Journal writing is another excellent way to stay in touch with yourself.
Rome was not built in a day; and personal growth is a task of a lifetime. But no matter what, each step brings you closer to you, and who you really are. And each step that makes you get stronger in touch with your feelings and emotions, will allow you to feel more alive within each moment. And this is a wonderful experience. But that doesn't mean that this will be pleasant all the way, but rather the opposite.

To face yourself and all the difficult emotions you have suppressed can be quite demanding and hard. but the more you can stay open to them and let them flow, the less it will hurt you. Most feelings and emotions when accepted, even sadness end up feeling quite comfortable. If you "take the whole package" as we say; the "good" with the "bad", stay awake and accepting to what is happening, no feeling really feels negative, but flows through you sometimes almost pleasurably.

There is also something about facing emotions and letting them free, that gives us a healthier life in general. For instance, if you do not show your anger you might think that no one will know you are angry, and you avoid a difficult confrontation. Thing is; people who do not genuinely express themselves when they are angry tend either to find themselves from time to time exploding in arage or maybe expressing this rage thought passive aggression instead. Both reactions that are more difficult for both parts than the original display of anger.

Working out feelings and emotions and getting in touch with your genuine felt self offers an inner richness which is totally independent to any material wealth.