As I look back on my own relationship history, initially in my twenties, I left relationships too soon.  Once the romance died down and the conflicts took off, I found that I didn’t have the ability to ‘work it through.’  So due to my own lacks, and perhaps also because it simply wasn’t time for me to ‘settle down,’ as well as due to the lacks of my partner, I moved on without fully resolving what was happening in that relationship.  I didn’t know how, and was both uninterested in being stuck, and too hungry to be nurtured, to stay put.  Because I became aware that I would ‘jump ship’ into a new romantic situation too easily (at least in my mind), I made a decision (over 20 years ago) that I would not do that again.  And I didn’t.  I closed the relational back door that I had always left open before and faced some parts of myself that I could not have conquered any other way.

While on one hand, because I didn’t know that I could say, “This isn’t enough, I need more,” I accepted behavior that I would never put up with now, on the other, I learned about letting go, patience, picking battles, talking about my feelings and a multitude of other skills.  I learned that I was okay without the new bloom of infatuation.  I learned that no matter how perfect the other seemed, there were things I needed that were absolutely not negotiable.  Ultimately I learned both relational skills and I learned about my own value.  Had I not done the work of those relationships, I would not know what I know today.  It is because of what I have lived through that I know the difference between love as learning without the ‘forever after’ and love as a sustainable and continuous life enhancing process.  I developed the relational qualities in myself that I needed, and know what qualities the other must have to make it worthwhile for me. So for anybody who is on the edge of ‘do I stay or do I go,’ this is what I would ask.

If you want to continue, the first question is: Is your partner accountable? Meaning do they recognize that they have issues that have an impact on you and do they have a willingness to look at and deal with those issues? If not, you’ll be doing all the work to keep this relationship going.  Of course the converse is also true if your relationship is going to function.

Next, are you learning as a result of this relationship?  If so, what?  There are many different things to learn.  There is learning that involves some level of disappointment or deprivation, like perseverance and being happy without always getting what you need emotionally.  There are empowerment lessons like learning to take care of ourselves instead of sacrificing our needs to our partner’s, or getting to the point where you can say, “I want more, this isn’t working for me.”  There is learning how to put someone else first, like putting our partner’s needs ahead of our own, our parents’ or friends’.  Or we might have to learn to be bigger, to conquer our fears or jealousies – to trust.  If the relationship is to be satisfying long term, often what we are learning is to be vulnerable and communicate with more honesty.

There are many possibilities.  Trying to figure it out can become a morass that you can quickly get lost in.  Ask yourself what your life has been teaching you.  Are you learning how to be with somebody, to get quiet and hear another point of view? Are you learning to ask for more out of your life – to not hold yourself back?  And is what you are learning in your life in alignment with what you are doing in your relationship?  If you are on a big self-empowerment path and your relationship keeps you small, what is going on? If you are in a relationship that you cannot leave, that is an entirely different lesson. What we are learning in relationships is often complex and not easily known without a great deal of self-knowledge, soul searching or perhaps help from someone else.

If you are  ‘hooked’ and think you want to leave, but can’t, what is the hook?  If you think you want to stay, but keep ‘running away’ what is the fear?  Are you somebody who makes too many sacrifices?  Or not enough?  Are you somebody who thinks it is all the other person, or do you see your part?  A big thing I frequently run into is people not really understanding how they get triggered by their partners and how they behave when they get triggered.  For example, if I get upset with you, do I get mean or act as if only my side of the story is accurate?  Or can I have empathy for both my own vulnerabilities and yours?  After all, life and relationships are often not easy.  If we are struggling, the other person is too. Can we recognize this and behave with as much love as possible?

For me, much earlier in my life, I had a significant amount of depression and anxiety.  I had to learn to become more self sufficient and empowered, as well as learn how to stay in and work with a relationship when the ‘easy in love’ stage was gone.  I had to learn what my triggers were and what baggage I had to let go of because it was mine and getting in the way.  I had to learn when to hold the other person accountable, because what he was doing wasn’t okay.  Ultimately, you want to be in a relationship where you can be loving and kind towards your partner’s wounds without diminishing yourself.  It is a problem if you have to diminish yourself to make the relationship work.  Can you put each other first, because your relationship is a priority?  Can you can be open and vulnerable with each other, because without that kind of intimacy, sooner or later the whole thing will crash and burn or get distant and die.  Eventually, that early bloom of love changes into something less exciting, but with great richness and nourishment.

It helps to understand what you are learning, to be able to decide if it is time to leave or not. I knew in one of my last relationships, that I had stopped learning and because my partner wasn’t interested in making any more changes, and because I needed someone more responsive to me, it was simply time to end it.  That didn’t make the ending of it any easier, but it meant that it made sense. I knew what I was doing and why I was doing it.  Isn’t that what we all really want – to know that we are making the right choice? To know that we are leaving not because we didn’t try hard enough, but because we did? To know that we aren’t missing something big, that it isn’t our fault, and we aren’t making a mistake?  And if we stay, don’t we need to know that it is worth it? That our partner values us, and we value them? That doing what it takes to make this relationship work is exactly what we want to be doing and a reward in and of itself?

Healing Tip Audio Version: When to Hold and When to Fold

We all have what could be called ‘default places.’  These are emotional and visceral experiences we have when we get triggered.  There are default emotions, default actions and default beliefs; for some a default emotion might be a strong sense numbness or aloneness accompanied by sadness.  It might be a sense of panic, an out of control desperate feeling or a sense of being trapped.  Our default actions might be an internal dialogue where we tell ourselves something about ourselves, or a move to have a drink when we feel stressed.  A default belief often drives these emotions and actions.  Whatever it is, it is a ‘place’ we ‘fall’ into. It is an experience where we lose perspective. I tend to have the default belief that I cannot waste time: that I have to be productive.  I also have the default belief that help is not readily available. So if I am in over my head with something I am working on, I can get triggered and move into feelings of overwhelm.

What drives my default place has a lot to do with how I was raised.  One of the family beliefs that existed as an underground current in my childhood, was that all of us didn’t intrinsically deserve to be here, but had to earn our keep, or prove our value.  I was raised to believe that productivity was god.  Yet there was no assistance in this. For example, when I was applying to art school and needed to put together a portfolio, my father, who was a very successful illustrator, promised he would help me do that.  But he didn’t want to let me use his brushes, his paint, or spend his time teaching me.  So he dragged his feet.  And I waited and waited and waited, as time ticked by. I wanted to get out of the house.  I needed to get the portfolio done, and all the help was there, but just out of reach. I couldn’t do it by myself, and the person who was capable of helping me, and said he would, kept putting my needs on the back burner.  I felt trapped. Consequently, I learned to strive endlessly, while also ending up in situations where the support I needed wasn’t there.

My ‘falling’ into a default place also has a lot to do with current triggers in my life.  I’m working on a project so huge, that I cannot see the entire thing at once, a project that continually tests the limits of what I am capable of.  And I need help with it.  But because I grew up in a family where the help was not there, where promises were made that were not kept, and I was left stranded and without support, I tend to be very sensitive to this kind of ‘abandonment.’  The recapitulation of this triggers a variety of feelings. I am off to the races, doing my default behaviors, because of my default beliefs and feeling my default emotions, and none of this serves me or anybody else.

As I was talking to my friend, in addition to talking about me, we discussed his struggles, his therapy, and his wife’s difficulty with going to therapy.  He said to me, “she doesn’t really want to go, she thinks it is all me.” Unfortunately, that is a really common attitude. I’ve been there myself.  I asked more questions and found that this person’s wife claims, “My childhood was fine.”  Oh boy – that opens a can of worms. Many of us had ‘fine’ childhoods and most of us had parents who loved us – at least to the best of their ability, and yet many of us had times as children when we wished we could be adopted, or suspected that the stork dropped us off at the wrong house. Or where we cried ourselves to sleep because we didn’t feel understood or we hid in a closet because we were scared.  It doesn’t matter exactly what. What matters is that this world, and life is a place where difficult and painful things happen, and as children we absolutely do not have the skills to deal with them alone, and yet, we often have to.  This matters because once we decide that our childhoods were ‘fine,’ we have nothing to look at and aren’t taking responsibility for our complexity. We don’t have the opportunity to do what I depicted above, that is to look at our default places and link them to past events thereby creating the ability to ‘unhook’ them.  This means saying, ‘when I was little I was raised to believe this, and to not expect help, and these are the feelings I fall into as a consequence given this situation, but I can now recognize what is happening. I can change that belief and ask for help now, or walk away from a situation that isn’t going to support me.’  Instead of being able to do that, the past forever colors our perceptions.  We remain trapped in a default place.

The way we change is to get to know ourselves.  Ask yourself, where the feeling places are that you get stuck in.  What do they feel like?  Examples could be, “I feel like I am down a well,” or “I feel as if I can’t breath.” What are some of the thoughts?  How about, “The world is passing me by,” or “Nobody cares about me,” or “I hate myself.” Do you know what the underlying beliefs are?  Some could be, “I’m not capable of a relationship,” or “I don’t have a right to put myself first,” or “I don’t deserve to be here.” Do you know what your triggers are? Maybe, “I feel like you never put me first.” Can you recognize your underlying feelings, thoughts and beliefs and how they influence each other?

Where did that default place come from in your history?  How did it develop?  Default places are emotional and experiential places we fall into over and over again.  They are familiar. Often they interact (usually badly) with our partner’s default place.  They came into being because they are a response to not feeling supported, to feeling alone, abandoned or disappointed.  If you tell yourself that your past was ‘fine’, then you will never start to unwind this in yourself.  You will never have the ability to say, “Gee, I fell into my default place. What is going on? What do I need right now? How much of this is about now and how much of this is about my past? Who am I impacting?  Can I get the support I need now?”

Do you work with, or defend against your default places?  Freedom isn’t an absence of limitations. It is what we do with our limitations; how we come to understand them and the dialogue we develop with ourselves about them and with them. Rather than creating an internal cut off, we can really get to know our own complexity and use that to create more personal awareness and freedom.

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One way around this is to prevent ourselves from having feelings.  When I run into this in my practice, I generally refer to the ‘basement’ with all the feelings that are locked in and can’t get out.  You have to disconnect from yourself to do this.  You may feel more in control, but it is a disastrous state for a human being who has to know his or herself and relate to others.  We end up depressed, or detached and shut down, or having reactions way out of proportion to events that jump out and ambush whoever is unlucky enough to trigger us.

Recently for me, I had some very large feelings come up. They just pushed their way through and I let myself experience them. Meanwhile I felt confused, ashamed, and small, wondering what was wrong with me.  Pretty interesting as I’m somebody who is extremely good at unearthing and processing the hard stuff.  It made me realize how primal these feelings were and how hard it is for all of us as emotional beings to let the emotions take over and just experience them without judgment and without control.

The fear I think, is that either we are crazy, or that these feelings will pummel us for the rest of our lives and we won’t be able to live with ourselves, be adult, logical, and rational.  And yes, this can be part of the process of somebody with a major mood disorder, but that means they don’t have the other piece of solid ground they can hold onto and use as an anchor.  Instead it is a place they live in.  But this isn’t true for most of us.

I realized something else too.  The only way I was going to transcend what I was struggling with was by allowing the feelings to come through.  So, lying on my yoga mat during savasana, I just let the tears come up and I let myself completely feel the shame and grief that was moving though me.  Then it got clearer.  I could see a piece of my past differently than ever before.  I could see a very specific negative message I had gotten and how it had hindered me.  And I could see that by allowing myself to feel, I was processing and letting go of this belief.  I couldn’t change the belief until I experienced and released all the feelings that were connected to it. I couldn’t transcend the old me until I let myself go and really experienced what these feelings were.  This type of change is not a mental decision, but an emotional process.

This is the part of therapy that people who haven’t had therapy don’t understand. Yes, we talk about things and make sense of them, but often, for many of us, there is a very emotional piece that must occur.  It is like a tidal wave coming through, taking whatever is not solid with it, so that after it retracts the landscape is different.  Who we are has been changed permanently.

Yes, it is scary to descend into the depths of our feelings where the logical rational world isn’t present.  But it is also a very important aspect of healing.   We do survive these lapses.  And we have to tell ourselves, “these are just feelings”. “I am not crazy.”  Experiencing feelings in this way is important. They are telling us something we need to know, something about how our reality has been constructed. This is the releasing process that occurs when we are making big changes in who we are.  It is part of what must happen when we have core beliefs that need to shift.

Experiencing feelings is part of being human.  It is also part of the process of healing.  Reacting out of our feelings is very different than feeling these feelings.  For instance, snapping at somebody and blaming him or her for something is very different than experiencing the grief of being disappointed and hurt.  Once you allow yourself to descend into the disappointment and hurt, you can find the part of you that wasn’t valued at another point in your life.  You can explore and come to understand how that has impacted you.  You can get to know that grief and then you can heal from it.

How do you deal with your feelings?

Do you recognize them as a valuable part of living?

Do you try to avoid them?

Do they jump out at inopportune moments and sabotage you?

Do you allow yourself to have them and process them?

Do you get stuck in them, or can you understand their message and release them?

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Guided Meditation

Audio version of blog post