Sleeping in the same bed with her partner Damien at night could be ‘heavenly’ or ‘beastly’ for thirty-seven-year-old florist, Annabel. Sometimes she wanted to mold her body around his, but at other times she felt suffocated by his very presence in the bed. At those times turning her back on him was the only way she could doze off.
Are you frustrated with having good people in your life but no one that sparks that romantic fire? Do you find yourself irresistibly attracted to someone who is hot and steamy, but does nothing for you in the friendship department? Perhaps you wonder whether you will ever find a person whom you could trust and rely on while also having good sex. It's probable that you are keeping these two needs so separate that you have to split yourself in half in order to satisfy both parts. But it doesn't have to be that way - if you figure out what purpose it serves to tear yourself into two pieces.
Do you have specific criteria for what you accept as a loving act, a loving word or stance? If so you may be excluding a whole host of interactions that are loving but that don't fall within your parameters. You end up feeling left out, empty, not valued and bitter. This video tells the story of just such a man for whom the only genuine love was pity, putting him permanently in the victim role.
If you spend much of your life waiting for that fairy godmother to come and wave her magic wand, to make you happy, BUT go to bed each night angry that you got left out again, THEN You'll probably find yourself envying other people who are smiling, happy and satisfied with their relationships. And it's all because you have an unconscious rule about who, what, when, and how you ought to be happy. The one missing ingredient is what role you play in that combination of factors.
If you are struggling with finding a lasting relationship that you can enjoy no matter how stressful the ups and downs, it's likely that you have some deep and powerful unconscious rules about what makes people stick together. You may think that love and attraction are enough to maintain commitment and loyalty but underneath you probably believe that you have to be a certain way, act and think in a specific fashion AND MOST OF ALL that your partner has to do the same. These rules prevent you from giving the relationship a chance to find it's feet. You can't even get to first base because your unconscious relationship rules make you heightened to WHAT IS ABSENT rather than build and shape healthy intimacy, trust and security.
Are you in a constant state of anxiety about not being good enough for your partner? Do you find yourself alert to everything and anything that may make your partner upset and then try and fix it right away? Then your unconscious rule about relationships being based on rescuing your partner from every tiny negative feeling or experience will sour the connections.
Imagine your excitement planning the best celebration ever for your spouse on a big occasion. Everything is perfect and you have spent days and tons of money that you saved up for this event. You have been imagining the delight and joy on your partner's face. You looked forward to eternal gratitude, great sex, and your virtues being praised to all the family, friends and colleagues around. But your vision is destroyed when your spouse says thank you a few times and leaves it at that. Your disappointment that your partner is tired and doesn't want to keep celebrating is huge. You get angry that your partner is ungrateful and didn't show enough pleasure and for long enough to make your efforts and kind heart worthwhile. You start to show your resentment and your partner is at a loss as to why you are wanting more. The relationship gets tense, stressful and conflict is now the name of the game. And it's all because you had an unconscious rule about how your spouse should respond to your goodness.
If you have a rule about not being needy in your relationship then you are likely to set up tension, cause arguments and wear the relationship down to the bone. That's what happened to one man who ended up frustrating his wife to such an extent that she avoided being in the same room as him when they were at home. Learn how this one very common rule about pretending not to be needy drove the couple to marriage counseling and finally got discovered, unraveled and discarded for more flexible and joint rules that reunited the couple.
Do you feel that all your efforts to get close to your partner fail because you can't synchronize your times to communicate? If you get mad that your partner isn't ready to share and iron out stuff between you at exactly the same time as you are, you may feel unequal and rejected. But, you may have an unwritten rule that says that relationships are supposed to work both people feel the same way at the same time which leads to massive disappointments and fear that the marriage is going down the drain.
“I want to feel like we are together!” is the most frequent goal I hear from partners when they come for couples therapy. But invariably each person has a totally different view and expectation of what it means to be ‘together.’ By the time they get into my office they are both exhausted, having tried and failed to convince each other that their version of togetherness is the one to aim for. They hoped that relationship counseling would prove one or other of them right and the other wro
