Question:
I have read so many books…many of them yours. All say that relationships are your Self reflecting back to you. I have never had a healthy relationship with a man. I had a childhood that seems to have left me feeling unlovable. Abuse and no real concern expressed for its impact upon me. I have a turbulent, very one sided relationship with my husband. I stay because I keep reading that he is only reflecting back to me my own self and convince myself that maybe he is normal and I am the one that is totally messed up inside. Other days I am convinced he is a full blown narcissist. I try to change myself but it is very difficult with him continuing to be hurtful, impossible to please, and chronically dissatisfied with me on some level. Yet, he tells me that I am actually the one who is hurtful, impossible to please and chronically dissatisfied. I have spent so much time trying to diffuse and avoid conflict with him that I no longer even know what the truth is anymore.
How do I come to terms with the idea he is only reflecting back to me the most awful parts of me? Doesn’t he have to face his own dysfunctions as well? Could it be that I am reflecting HIM back at him and feeling out of balance constantly because he brings me to that level of dissatisfaction and misery with criticism and constant focus and discussion about HIS needs and wants and upsets?
I have relatively healthy and supportive relationships with others but people are tiring of listening to my pain and frustration and my unwillingness to act decisively on my own behalf. I stay because I keep reading it is only myself reflecting back to me. Change me and the relationship with change…but so far it isn’t working. I have become very angry and otherwise numb and this is making the idea I am causing all of this all the more plausible to me.
Please help me sort out this spiritual teaching. I don’t think I am a bad person. I do my best. But the men in my life have always been awful to me. I don’t understand how these mean men, some of them physically abusive, have for my entire life been there because there is something bad in me. I self reflect, read books, try to be aware, “in the moment” – let go of the past -it does not exist, reflect on what I am grateful for and give thanks to all the abundance I do have. I don’t understand what I am doing (or not doing) to cause all of this. Thank you for any advice you can give on this.
Answer:
You have said that your childhood that left you feeling unlovable. The idea that relationships are reflections of yourself is simply that the feelings that get triggered in you by your partner –that you are unlovable—are precisely the unhealed feelings you harbor inside your own heart already. The idea of the mirror of relationships doesn’t always mean that if your partner is hard to please, mean, and messed up, that you are all those things and he isn’t. You both might be or possible neither. But what is certain beyond the theatrics and recriminations is that your partner will unerringly and usually unconsciously awaken all the old hurts in you that you need healing, time after time after time until it is healed.
The relationship will continuously bring it to your attention, and then it is up to you to do the work on yourself to heal it. That takes persistence, honesty, diligence and hard work. It requires more than reading books and practicing gratitude and living in the moment. You will likely need a regular spiritual practice to cultivate and reconnect you to your essential lovability. You may want to incorporate asanas, pranayama, massage, counseling, exercise, a cleansing diet, journaling, finding an artistic outlet, and using affirmations to engage the full range of healing so that you can establish a new sense of self and lovability inside you. When that shifts, it will invariably change the way you relate to men.
Love,
Deepak
I think that all relationships are our Selfs reflecting back to us.
I am no expert, but I wanted to share my experience, maybe it will be
of some help.
I, also have never had a healthy relationship with a man.
Never had many healthy relationships, full stop. All
because of the bad relationship I have with my self. I know I do
have a bad relationship with myself, because of the reflections in
my relations with others. I also felt unlovable as a child. As an adult,
in theory, I have a sophisticated sense of right and wrong, but
when faced with a real live interaction, I seem to lose contact with this
sophisticated and sensitive perception.
I would not beat yourself up about this reflective fact.
Your husband may well be, a full blown narcissist. I
don’t know him, though.
No one can change another person, only themselves.
All we can do is change our feelings about the interactions.
We can identify negative and wrong beliefs we formed, which are
why we are reflecting out abusive treatment in others. We can
come to realise they were wrong, and why they were wrong.
The good thing about realisations like this, is that once
we become aware of something for the first time, there
is a dissolving of confusion that came before it.
Maybe your husband is using projection, to project
uncomfortable aspects of his own self, that he does
not want to see. My parents convinced me that I was
selfish, and too mean to part with much.
Everyone outside of my family seems to think I am too soft
and giving. They think I give into bullies and persuasion.
The latter view is more accurate, my parents just
projected their own uncomfortable feelings onto me,
and I became convinced of this lie. A narcissistic type has
a very frightened and needy child hiding behind it.
The fortress of defense mechanisms is a barrier to protect
this child. Sadly, this sad, fearful child is the real
person.The narcissist is too afraid to be real, so fierecely
defends this child even from his own awareness, and anyone
who exposes it is attacked and abused, often with hurtful
projections if necessary. We become confused as to what the
truth is, as we are thrown off balance by people who use
toxic coping mechanisms in life.
He is not, in my view, reflecting back fierce, cruel,
and selfish, aspects of you, but maybe ask yourself
if the fragile child behind the angry narcisism
is a reflection of certain aspects of you.The fear felt.
Like abuse survivors, narcisists also have not formed a
healthy conception of what true love is, because they were,
for whatever reason, not given the chance.
It isnt possible to make him face his own dysfunctions as well?,
he must have that desire himself, for any change to be genuine.
You are reflecting HIM back at him, as we are all reflections of
each other.
You have no reason to beat up on yourself.
Meeting with abusive people does NOT mean we are bad people,
just that we have certain lessons to learn.
It can feel frustrating when we seem to repeat the same
patterns of abuse, but that is not to be confused with being
abusive ourselves. I am learning in a similar way myself,
and I find that faith in a positive outcome eases the
frustration. Like everything else though, faith has to be
felt by us personally. It involves more than just saying
we have faith, we must actually feel it.
Examine your beliefs about men in general. Wrong beliefs
can easily be identified by thier uncomfortable negative
feeling. Identify when we accuired this belief, and
understand how it is wrong. Immediately, the awarenesses
will gradually dissolve, and in their place will form positive
beliefs. The world reflects to us, our beliefs.
Negative and wrong beliefs show in the form of abusive
relationship manifestations. Ask yourself where you accuired
the belief that there is something bad in you. We often
form wrong beliefs in childhood, and when they surface
into awareness as an adult, the error can immediately be seen.
For instance, I am not an idiot after all.
I just believed I was because my mum and dad said I was.
The moment this awareness hit me, I realised the idiotic things
I do, all of us are capable of. To let go of the past we first
have to become aware of what we are letting go of.
We have to connect with emotions we hid from ourselves.
When these emotions feel safe enough to surface, they will
reveal themselves to us and immediately change into their loving
counterparts.
We push alot of our experiences out of our conscious awareness,
as youngsters in the family home, as a coping mechanism.
Patience and compassion with ourselves are needed at these times.
Once you pick out those errors in personal beliefs you have,
dissolutions will take place, and in their place, their polar
positive opposites. This goes for me too, I am heeding my
own advice. Abusive people, will no longer cross our path.
I am on the same journey as well and had experiences
that reflected back at me what I felt inside so with a poor self image I encountered abuse in my relationships as well and am still trying to resolve this dichotomy within myself. When you realize that you are worthy of love you will not tolerate anyone abusing you or treating you badly and will start standing up for yourself. The hard part of it all and the most difficult is dealing with your own loved one and relatives who for so long have been used to treating you a certain way and when you speak up for yourself they turn their back on you – I am still trying to
resolve this conflict and since set patterns of behaviour are hard to change in others, it is you who have to change and it can be very isolating and disillusioning but do not lost hope and keep on striving to give yourself the best that you deserve and not for it from others because a lot of them try to stifle a bright light that begins to shine and keep you down because they are afraid you will outshine them and it their own insecurities that make them abusive – not you.
Your part in it is that you allow it and when you stop allowing it you have reached awareness of your own self worth!