G’day gorgeous!
In the last few weeks I’ve been talking about relationships, how our behaviour impacts our relationships, and not just intimate relationships, it’s also about friendships. I am talking to you about some really interesting things that come up when we have issues in relationships. One of the things that come up for me recently was my own sense of self and how I interact in relationships and bringing baggage into a relationship.
I’m amazed that even though I would consider myself to be reasonably self aware, when I’m in relationship there are still some underlying negative beliefs about myself that get triggered somehow making me think that this relationship is either not good for me or I’m going to screw it up somehow, perhaps I’m not as good as they think I am, and this is even though I’ve done some huge personal development work.
So I just want to share recent experience. I have a new partner we’ve been together now nearly six months and this relationship is amazingly transformational, quite different to anything I’ve ever had before and I’m aware that a huge part of this is because I became very clear with what I want in a partner and what I don’t want in a partner. I became very aware that my choice of partner had an awful lot to do with me feeling like I had to give a lot of myself to somebody else, my value to any relationship was actually about my ability to give.
I always end up with partners with issues and those issues strongly impact me and after a while even though you see somebody work through their issues, you become resentful with doing all of the work to support them and to resolve their issues. It seems like they’re not trying really hard to resolve their issues. Now that I find myself in a situation with somebody who doesn’t have any issues I’m finding certain things trigger issues I have within myself not the least of which is somehow I don’t deserve this, that its almost too good to be true. So classic example, couple of weeks ago, a girlfriend of mine lost a partner and I went to the funeral and number of my other friends were there and they were all talking about the fact that my current partner is just lovely. He is, but the issue for me was not so much that they were highlighting that he was lovely. They were asking where we met, questions about him to the point that I had told them a story about something nice that he did for me. They were asking where can we get a guy like that? I went home and I said “hey just so you know when you get sick of me there’s half a dozen woman lining up waiting for this spot to be vacant and they all think that you’re awesome, we had a laugh about it and at that time I didn’t think it affected me, but a couple times that night and then for the next couple of days, I was making the same negative comments “so when you get sick of me”, “when we’re done”, “when you’re over it,” “when you decide to turf me out”. To the point that after a couple of nights he said to me, what are you doing? Is this you trying to push me away? Why are you being negative?
I had to stop and think, step back and think about the language I was using and try to understand myself, why would I do that? The next morning I thought, you know what? It’s because when everybody says how nice he is, in my brain there’s some really doubtful part right at the very back or down in my gut that says he’s too good for you and you don’t deserve it.
My response to that is to start pushing him away. There’s something about this relationship that seems to have no issues, nothing that I can fix. I’m not doing anything or contributing a huge amount, the fact is I like to be with this person but somehow just being with them doesn’t seem enough to me. Why would he stay around? I really don’t quite understand what I think is wrong with just being myself in a relationship. It still is one of those things that even though I’ve learned to accept it at the top thinking level, I still feel somewhere inside that I don’t deserve love and a huge part of that is probably to do with the rejection from my father.
I just thought that you might find it interesting that even though I sit here and do these videos and I have a background in psychology and everybody thinks that I must have all my shit together that I’m just a normal ordinary everyday human being like everybody else and as I say to my clients I have issues too. I still consult somebody else to help me understand myself. Sometimes the perspective we get about people its not always correct but it’s about our ability to be able to learn from our experiences and be more self aware and the ability to share that in a way that my partner can understand.
So I hope that was useful gorgeous.
Have a great week and I’ll see you soon.
