Have you ever had the experience of just not being able to let go of someone, even though you knew they weren’t good for you? Maybe you just started dating someone, and you’re interested in seeing where it goes. Still, you’re feeling forward movement is blocked somehow—maybe the frequency of their communication is less than you’d like, or you have an emotional connection, but you’re not feeling is reciprocated. Or perhaps you’ve been in a relationship with this person and you’ve noticed that it’s taken a turn and has become toxic. It can be incredibly frustrating when you know someone’s not good for you, but somehow you’re just stuck on them. It’s easy to start making up stories in your head about what’s going on. Often these stories are destructive to your self-esteem. What I see with my coaching clients is they get stuck in a loop with this that they can’t get out of. This loop colors their perspective so that they can’t see the truth of what’s really happening in the relationship. This pattern is one where they are constantly flipping between two polarities – feeling either GUILTY or INNOCENT in the relationship, and it looks something like this: Perhaps you start out taking the blame for all the faults of why the relationship/connection is not working—” If I were a better communicator, or younger, or prettier, or fill-in-the-blank, then maybe this would work.” But at some point, the weight of all that self-blame gets to be too heavy and you have to absolve yourself of it, so you then flip your perspective to the opposite side of the same coin, which is innocence. You make yourself innocent and demonize the other person: “Let me list all the terrible things they've done, the ways they disrespected me, hasn’t lived up to his promises, etc.” Ultimately, if you’re switching between these two positions, it becomes insanely difficult to let go of the person, and you can’t see what’s TRUE in the situation.And worse, you’re actually turning against yourself in both instances. You’re either creating a schism within your psyche about a lack of your own integrity or ability to have made the relationship work, “Why couldn’t I have been good enough to make this work?” “I made a mistake and now I’m paying for it!” “What’s wrong with me? Do I even know how to create a relationship that lasts?” OR you’re turning against yourself by making them the guilty party. How? By making them guilty, you are implicitly telling yourself you have poor judgment in choosing them: “How could I have missed the red flags?” “How was I so blind?” “Can I really trust myself? Did that relationship mean anything!?” As you can see on either side of the coin, you can get trapped under vicious self-judgment that prevents this connection from being fully put to rest. So how do we get ourselves out of this oh-so-common pattern? It’s actually quite simple. But at the same time, it’s quite profound. Watch this video I made this video for you here: In it, you'll discover a straightforward sentence that when you fully embody it, you'll be set free. |