This is Part Two of this series, and I really hope Part One helped you understand why it is so much healthier to not rush into dating after suffering an abusive relationship – ensuring that we create a healthy relationship with ourselves first.
Part One, fundamentally was about self-partnering and mating our own soul, so that we could show up healthily as “love” within the creation of another relationship, rather than attempting to get “love” by seeking another person to grant us ourselves.
Many people have hidden this under the guise of “but I was / am so loving” … and that was discussed in last week’s article – that if we are trying to create love from inner wounded parts we can easily think we are “being loving” but it may really be about “giving love to try to ensure we are loved in return”. This is love emanating from fear … it’s not genuine love.
As a summary, let’s re-hash the understandings of last week’s article.
- We are attracting people at the same vibration of self-love and self-acceptance.
- We will accept love that matches our own levels of self-love.
- If we are trying to force people to love us better we are not granting ourselves the essential love and self-partnering we need.
- If we don’t become conscious and take time out of relationships to self-partner and heal our previous painful inner programs, we stay locked into repeat patterns of the same disappointing relationships experiences – it’s just they have a different “face” each time.
Why We Need to Take a Break From Relationships
Many people don’t want to take a break from relationships because they don’t want to be alone. What they don’t realise is that even within relationships they are still “alone” because people are simply reflecting back the emptiness and disconnect they experience with themselves – their own lack of self-partnering (the pain of loneliness) that they are not wanting to meet and heal.
I remember being 19 years of age and becoming newly single and thinking that my life was over! I really thought that my worth and my value meant “belonging to some man”, and that there was no way to love myself unless a man was reflecting back to me that I was attractive, or loveable and desirable.
The terrible gnawing emptiness of being alone, was of course because I did not somatically feel in my body that I was whole, or lovable or worthy as I was. I didn’t believe that about myself – hence the relentless demands to always improve, always be better … and really that was all about, “Then I will be chosen by someone and loved.”
The painful responsible beliefs for all these skewered thoughts, self-judgements and conditions placed on myself were the beliefs which plague so many of us … “You will never be acceptable enough to be loved.”
Of course this modelled our childhoods – having critical, judgemental parents who we were always trying to earn love and approval from.
Many parents were not necessarily narcissistic, they just believed that “criticism” was the way to motivate children – after all that was the way they were parented. They didn’t want us to get too “soft” or “complacent” or “lazy”, and little did they know that guilting and applying criticism is incredibly damaging to a child’s subconscious programming – as are any fear-based “motivators”.
So … this was our model to go by … hence why we took on being so critical, shaming and damning of ourselves. Our relationship with ourselves did not feel loving – so WHY on earth would we want to “be” with ourselves to get love? That was the last place we wanted to be – alone with ourselves!
So of course we tried desperately to get love in all the wrong places, with people who showed up originally as seeming to love us like no other (finally), and who then turned out to be our worst persecutors instead.
All to bring home the evolutionary truth – go inwards and heal the essential relationship with self.
The bottom line is this: if we don’t do time purposefully alone we will not find ourselves and we will not heal. And like all quick fixes, if we get into another relationship to avoid ourselves, we end up at the same point time and time again.
More effort, time and Life down the drain … and back to square one. Usually with more damage, more fear and more pain … because if we don’t sort it out, life turns up the volume and keeps delivering the message – usually with greater ferocity – all for the soul reason of hoping we will finally have had enough and wake up to the truth and do something about it.
It’s Not About “Who Can I Trust”
When we have a Thriver Orientation we wake up to certain facts – such as “the outside has no power” … and what is really determining my Life is the inside power I have or haven’t created within myself.
It’s perfectly understandable after narcissistic abuse to feel diminished and afraid that “narcissists are about” and that you could be tricked and abused again. It’s normal – but it’s not healthy.
The reason why it is not healthy is because of this evolutionary truth – if we are not growing and releasing ourselves into our highest and truest self (letting go of pain, fear and judgement and moving into love and authenticity) than life will come to us and smash us open – literally.
It is not organic to be living in diminishment and contraction, and it hurts and attracts exactly what we are trying to protect ourselves from, and exactly what we are judging. Whatever we judge persists in our experience; if we judge parts of ourselves, those parts will persist and we will not move beyond them. If we judge other people and certain things about humanity they will keep turning up in our experience.
We are all evolving towards the understanding that love heals, compassion heals, Oneness heals, and that separation, judgement and damnation doesn’t.
The pain of this unnatural state of being (Creation is expansion not contraction) means that pain keeps coming at us, certainly from Life outside of us, and even if we try to hide out and stay safe and don’t connect with Life, then the pain inside of us will become so unbearable we will have no choice other than to self-medicate it away if we want to cope.
The ongoing pain is telling us – this is NOT Who We Are.
It is really common to hear in Abuse Forums statements like, “I doubt I can ever trust again” …
Yes, narcissistic abuse smashed us to pieces, but we either decide to merely go through narcissistic abuse, or we have done the work inside ourselves to grow through narcissistic abuse. As a result of doing the inner work we discover some pretty profound things, and we up-level certain things which means we are not the same person as the one who was abused.
And I mean we are not the same person in a positive way.
We are more anchored in our body, we have worked at coming home and repairing the relationship with ourselves – which means we love and accept ourselves now and feel the incredible comfort and solidness of that. We feel more whole and self-partnered that what we ever did before being abused (even if abuse is all we have ever known).
And our new “safety” and solid feelings have nothing to do with being guarded, defensive or better armoured up.
In stark contrast we are actually more open-hearted, more expansive, more exposed and “out there” and more joyful than before. We have less fear of abusive people and not more – despite knowing what narcissists are and that they exist now.
The reason is because we know there is absolutely NO requirement to trust others – all we need to do is be in our own bodies trusting, self-partnered and backing ourselves. And we become this higher state of True Self when we are free of the emotional shackles that used to derail us.
No longer are we trying to seek self outside of self and handing our power over trying to be approved of and loved. No longer do we NOT speak up because of the fear of criticism, punishment or abandonment. No longer are we like a starving shopper choosing “love” like junk food to try to fill the emptiness inside.
And we don’t believe in powerlessness or lack; we don’t believe that “another option may not turn up” and hang on to an option that doesn’t feel right, or starts to treat us unhealthily like a drowning person would cling to a life-raft.
Because we are not scared to be alone.
Most importantly, we no longer have the inner wounds inside us trying to fulfil their self-fulfilling prophecies of repeat painful patterns by justifying away our inner truths. We listen to our gut, we honour our feelings and we no longer make excuses to avoid them. There is no longer the confusion of second-guessing ourselves.
But it’s important to realise these are not just logical concepts that we can “learn” and assimilate. These are ways of somatically being as real in our bodies.
This takes development, this takes inner work on our emotional programs. Unless you feel states in your body as organically and somatically real – you are not there. You are simply trying to pretend you are there and then finding out the hard way that emotional reprogramming does not happen “logically”.
A really good way to understand if you are logically trying to create something instead of experiencing it as your solid truth, is if you have to keep reminding yourself over and over. Is the state you need to become natural for you – or is it something that you continually have to try to re-learn, re-cement or re-mind yourself of?
These are only some of the distinct differences between “informational healing” (sourcing information logically) and “transformational healing” (working directly on your subconscious) which are Universe’s apart.
To have states as your organic truth requires inner work.
And when we do that – we know our life has nothing to do with who we can or can’t trust – it is about trusting ourselves. And the more self-partnered and resolved we are in our bodies, the more we can be fully in Life as our radiant selves safely.
We are in fact safer than we have ever been.
Let’s look at two women to make the comparison clear between two ladies dating – one from a self-partnered perspective and the other from one that is not …
How We Show Up Healthily
Lets’ start with Claudia …
Claudia is on a date with Mark. She has no expectations, and she knows that whatever unfolds is for her higher development, and that all of Life is granting her evidence of “where she is at”, and helping her evolve – so the experience will be wonderful no matter how it turns out.
So she meets Mark, without any expectations or neediness. Claudia is simply in her body, present, and going through the experience.
She finds him aesthetically attractive and is aware that he is also attracted to her. She likes this, because she certainly wants to partner with someone who she is attracted to.
But that’s only a very raw starting point – because Claudia is very interested in who he is as a human being. She knows chemical attraction is not everything – and what is vitally important is they share the same values. What is important to Claudia needs to be important to him.
She’s into fitness and health – is that his life orientation? If he eats junk food and doesn’t care about himself that would never work.
Claudia is very spiritual and into self-development. What are his views on this? Is he that way inclined, or at the very least open-minded, and able to move into personal growth. Is “growing” and “improving his character” something that he wants and does? Or is he a person who has no aspirations to expand his own consciousness? If not then Claudia and him are going to struggle to grow together, and in fact they are more likely to grow apart.
Is Mark family orientated? Claudia spends a lot of time with her parents and children, and dearly would love a partner to love her family. If Mark was more inclined to want her all to himself, or not join in with family time, that would not satisfy Claudia.
Claudia has learnt so much through her own self-development and inner work; she realises that not only was her previous levels of self-love responsible for making poor decisions with men, but also the men she used to connect to did not have the same values as her, and this is where so many of her relationships fell apart.
She now understands that interests can be different, because that can grant healthy self-time, and even new experiences to share, but core values are non-negotiable in order for relationships to be successful.
So Claudia is doing her due-diligence; getting to know him, and taking her time to do so. No instant relationship. No succumbing to chemistry alone. No thinking that “words” alone are a recommendation, and making sure she spends time with him to see how he operates in life before taking on a relationship.
This means dating respectfully, whilst still retaining her own interests, and courting non-sexually – which is not what Claudia used to do in the past.
Claudia used to give up her own life immediately (not there was much of one because she was really not happy or fulfilled on her own) and jump straight in to escape her own loneliness.
Those days are gone – Claudia is fulfilled, she has great family and friends, her own interests and loves spending time in life doing the things she loves. Claudia also has personal goals and purpose in her life.
Within her dating experience Claudia was finding her levels of self-worth and self-love were being healthily reflected back to her. Rather than men wanting her to give up herself to be with them, they appreciated her having her own happiness and identity, and that she was not needy. They were very attracted to her now that she valued herself, and were much more likely to declare they wanted a relationship with her, than the men she used to sleep randomly with in the past.
She was attracting and connecting with men of a much higher and more mature vibration than previously.
For her this time, a repeat date with Mark was not about fulfilling some neediness within her. It was not about needing his attention, or to be told she was beautiful or having to have her ego fed with “a man is interested in me”. This gave her the freedom to “just see” without needing to cling on or “use” Mark to assuage her own insecurities.
It also left her open to the opportunity to date other men – which was totally healthy before making an exclusive commitment to a relationship.
In among all of this Claudia had NO hyper-vigilance regarding “Is he a narcissist or not?” She simply showed up and allowed him to be whatever and whoever he was being – fully knowing that if things started to feel “off” – she would feel it and would deal with it then.
Whether that be on the first date or the third, or never, she trusted herself … she knew all of Source had her back and wanted only the highest and the best for her – meaning if she needed to be warned her intuition would do so.
She trusted and backed her intuition now.
She also knew that at any point of the journey if she had to walk away, she was self-partnered enough to take the gift and the lesson, and would use it for continual growth. There would be no need to cling on to him.
How We Show Up Unhealthily
Now let’s investigate Margot …
Margot is going on a date with Brent, and whilst she is getting ready to meet him her head is spinning in many different directions. She is really worried that the date is going to be awful and a waste of time, and he could turn out to be like the other “losers” she has been meeting on dates.
She is really scared that if that happens she will miss the ex-narcissist even more – because it really seemed that no man can make her feel like he did – yet she keeps painfully trying to prove that wrong.
Whilst thinking about that … Margot then starts feeling terrified that Brent could be another narcissist. She starts replaying through her mind the emails they have exchanged, the phone call they had, and wonders if she could identify something letting her know she should pull out of the date … because what if he was attractive and charmed her, and swept her off her feet like the narcissist did?
She was terrified of that happening again, knowing that narcissists have the ability to do that.
Then Margot thinks what if he isn’t and I like him but he doesn’t like me. Margot doesn’t feel very loveable or attractive. In fact she still feels very discarded, unloved and abandoned by the ex-narc … and she has already changed her outfit four times and still didn’t feel happy with the way she looks.
The incessant chatter in Margot’s head continues all the way to her date, and she feels nearly sick by the time she gets there.
However these thoughts don’t last long, because Brent seems more pleasant than the other guys she has been dating recently. He compliments how she looks and Margot immediately feels like a woman in a desert getting a drink of water… Oh how long it has been since a man spoke to me like this! she thinks. She starts to have butterflies in her stomach and finds herself taking to him in animated ways.
She thinks, Okay this is a chance, maybe this is it, because I’m not even thinking about my ex … I really want to make sure he likes me.
So Margot starts flirting, smiling at him with lingering looks and complimenting him a lot.
Brent tells her about the way women have treated him in the past … Margot feels for him, and starts “selling” to him that this is not the way she treats partners – in fact the exact opposite is the way she is in relationships.
Margot has already projected onto him the version of him she wants to believe in. Her brain is already organising itself to position him as “this person”. He has no kids, and Margot wants to start a family, he has a job, she likes his car, he makes her laugh, and he compliments her a lot and makes her feel special. As far as Margot is concerned this guy is right for her.
One wine turns into another, and Margot flirts more with Brent and he seems very happy with this. They both end up leaving their cars at the restaurant and getting a taxi back to Brent’s house. They have sex for hours; the passion and chemistry is unbelievable.
Margot feels liberated – she feels like she is over the hump of her ex and has found her new man.
In the morning Brent tells her he has to go in to work, and he will ring her later. They get a taxi back to their cars and he gives her a kiss goodbye.
Later that day there is no message from Brent.
Or the next day or the next.
At first Margot makes excuses for him, but now she is panicking. She rings three girlfriends and asks them what they think. One tells her to ring him and ask him what is happening. Reluctantly Margot does, and it goes through to voice message. Margot, then has a horrible feeling, and she goes on-line and she sees Brent’s dating profile is active. He is on-line talking to other women.
Reality hits home, and Margot is devastated …
She feels abandoned again, dramatically. The same wound has been ripped open again. Margot now decides all men are monsters and she has no idea how on earth she can recover. She was taken in again obviously by some guy who must be a narcissist.
Margot then declares she is going to stop caring – she will use and abuse men from now on, because real love doesn’t exist and men deserve what they dish out.
The Differences
I have used two extreme examples to really help you understand the difference.
Please understand these examples exist – in the Thriver Community there are many up-levelled people like Claudia, as well as people purposefully evolving themselves to get to that level.
Within the victimised community there are many, many people who I have met like Margot.
And none of this is about judgement or shaming anyone, I am just sharing with you these profound differences to illustrate what this article is all about.
Let’s look at the differences and why these women were having totally different dating experiences that had NOTHING to do with the men, and EVERYTHING to do with themselves.
- Claudia had done the work on her inner childhood wounds, and was therefore showing up with men as a mature adult no longer driven by the neediness of childhood unhealed wounds, unlike Margot.
- Margot was chemically attracted to her old unhealed childhood program “abandonment” that she had replayed with the narcissist and was now repeating with this man. She mistook this as “this guy is right for me” … and predictably her mind organised around “the story of him being right for her”, all to replay her unresolved wounds. In contrast Claudia enjoyed the chemical attraction, with hope that she had done the inner work to be “unwounded” and therefore attracted to healthy men, yet was still prepared to take her time to get to know if vital levels of character and compatibility were present.
- Claudia was in her body – calm, connected and non-conditional – in control of herself being self-loving no matter what would turn up. Margot, however, was not self-partnered; she was in her head, suffering PTSD (because of being disconnected from herself) and then trying to use “analysis paralysis” to control her life – which was rendering her totally out of control in her life.
- Margot was after quick fixes to try to fill her inner emptiness and self-medicate away her emotional pain with Brent. Claudia was able to wait, have delayed gratification and make healthy choices because of feeling emotionally whole within herself.
- Claudia was in no way concerned over “who Mark was or wasn’t” – she was simply taking full responsibility to navigate her life and make healthy choices accordingly. Who he ultimately turned out to be had no bearing on her being the Creator of her own healthy and happy life. In stark contrast Margot had placed all her neediness on Brent to provide her with relief from her pain, and when he failed to do that she demonised him, and held him responsible and felt even more justified in her victimhood of “being treated badly by men.”
In Conclusion
I really want you to understand that this article series is not “anti-relationship” … and this can be an argument that people who are determined to never be alone may push …
Nothing could be further from the truth!
This article series is in regard to mega-relationship creation, and with everything not just intimate relationships.
Every relationship begins with self-partnering. If we are not self-partnered then we are showing up in The Field in maladapted and unwholesome ways.
This means we are trying to “get” love and wholeness instead of being it, sharing and spreading it. It means that we are not showing up authentically – we are in fact wearing a mask and “being” a certain way so that people love and approve of us rather than simply being a non-conditional, non-judgemental radiant self.
(And please do not confuse that for lack of healthy discernment!)
If we are not self-partnered then Life becomes a tactical affair rather than a flowing symphony – because we will only align ourselves with people and situations where we think we will “get something.”
Things like approval, compliments, attention, betterment or accolades – and we won’t be bothered with people who we think we won’t get these things from.
And we may think “love” can only come from an intimate partner … and we may not realise that “love” is in fact everywhere overflowing in abundance.
It is in the smile exchanged with the old lady you pass in the street. It is everywhere in nature. It is felt every time you pat your pet … the love you share with your family and children, and the deep intimate conversations of realness you share with your true evolutionary friends.
Most of all it Love is ever-present each time you support and speak to yourself lovingly and accept yourself flaws and all – knowing that “self-improvement” is an expansion, it is NOT a requirement to be worthy of your own love.
Love is unconditional. Love is limitless. Love is everywhere …
Every relationship including intimate is not for you to “get” love – that is impossible. It is for you to be and share and generate love. If we don’t realise that, then every intimate relationship we enter will end up being a reflection back of all the parts of ourselves that we don’t love.
That’s why true connected relationships are Unity Consciousness, which requires your own self-partnering first.
Then you will be a soul-mate with yourself, others and Life itself.
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