Why self love and care is the most powerful healer when you have wounds?

The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.” — Carl Jung

While the soul’s first experience in this lifetime is coming into the body, its second experience is forming its first relationships. 

This happens when we’re very young, infants in fact, and we meet our primary caregivers for the first time. 

We’re too young to comprehend it as it’s happening, but our interactions with these caregivers shape our lives and set the template for the way we develop and participate in relationships throughout our life.

Research by Dr. John Bowlby in psychiatry and Dr. Mary Ainsworth in psychology suggests that the dynamics of our future relationships depend on the attachments we form with our primary caregivers.

There are several ways we learn to react in relationships and each is influenced by how attuned our caregivers were to our needs. Our initial interpersonal interactions caused us to develop certain traits.

For instance, if a mother responds appropriately, promptly, and consistently to her child’s needs, the child is likely to form a secure attachment.

The less secure the relationship attachments in our first two years, the harder it is to have good relationships throughout our lives.

Little or no response to a distressed child from a caregiver may result in the child developing an avoidant behavior pattern, and low self-esteem.

When a caregiver is inconsistent in response to the child’s needs, the child will likely form ambivalent relationship patterns, anxiously uncertain about whether they can trust people.

Finally, frightening behavior, intrusiveness, withdrawal, negativity, role confusion, and maltreatment lead to a disorganised attachment, and cause a child to feel dazed and confused. This child dissociates and compartmentalises the traumatic experiences as a coping mechanism.

We can still achieve great heights in the face of challenges; this theory simply helps us to understand our patterns of behavior.

 When you live as me in a dysfunctional family (domestic violence), you know those feelings and what I talk about...

Awareness is the first step to empowerment.

When it boils down to it, relationships are the basis of everything. We have relationships with ourselves, with others, and with a higher power. All of these relationships comprise what we know as life.

For many people, relationships can be the biggest challenges encountered. Just think, all kinds of things happen in relationships like healing, heartbreak, and disease. These and other things happen, not just in relationships with other people, but sometimes within the relationship we have with ourselves.

In my work and in my own life, I’ve observed certain relationship patterns. The biggest affliction I’ve seen has been people dealing with low self-esteem, which manifests in their lives and in their relationships (and I’ve been one of them too).

Often, when we have low self-esteem, we reach for love outside of ourselves instead of being a vessel for love.

And, more often than not, the person to whom we grasp does not have much to offer. Two people with low self-esteem, or unmet needs, can come together through chemistry. But they might mistake this connection for love, which can play out dramatically as a mutual attempt to resolve unmet childhood needs.

A response pattern and negative association (which is often deeply ingrained in our psyche) might be triggered and bring to the surface old pain and wounds. Then, the climax occurs. There’s a grand explosion, hearts are broken, and the show is over, only to be re-enacted in a new relationship.

People sometimes mistakenly associate love with drama and broken hearts, and so we shut down our hearts and hide our love, as if love needs protecting. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

Love does not need protection; love is the protector!

Love is the most powerful force of all, my friend. 

What have been hurt are our pride, our faith, our trust, our egos, and our dreams, all of which are within our minds. Our thoughts, then, stir up emotions, and before we know it, we’ve constructed an entire tragic story, ourselves as the lead character, around love.

If you open your heart, you will find that love is precisely what heals. Love equals God almighty. There’s no comparison between love and emotional baggage. 

Emotional baggage is a teaching tool in the human experience designed to bring you closer to love, if you allow it. 

Believe it or not, emotional baggage is the fuel for greater love. As you unravel your story and see it for what it is, you become less attached and more closely connected to your essence of love.

There are many other relationship patterns and adaptive behaviors that we can fall into.

Some people join forces to survive a crisis (without much discrimination in choosing a partner), while some unite to heal and learn a new way of being treated. 

Meanwhile, some people get in relationships seeking approval from their mate, and some chose partners because they want familial and societal approval. 

Others are avoiding deep intimacy and so they get in relationships where they can avoid truth and vulnerability, and instead participate superficially.

There’s also a phenomenon where people, commonly women, get into relationships with partners who are incapable of intimacy. 

When the love interest is finally ready to engage in the relationship, the woman is no longer interested. She’s replaying the pattern of chasing someone unavailable with the deep belief that she is unworthy.

Maggie Scarf’s book, Intimate Partners, Patterns in Love and Marriage, describes the inner workings of intimate attachments. She describes the patterns that couples follow when choosing partners and moving through the cycles of their relationships. She also illuminates the games of power and control, intimacy, and autonomy that each partner will bring into the relationship. Most people go through a series of relationships that meet different needs, at different times.

She describes the common adaptive behaviors. While these behaviors may have helped us as children, they often no longer serve us as adults. Fisher also sheds light in his book on the fact that when we are unhealed and not fully healthy, we choose partners who embody the opposite of our adaptive behavior.

 

Subconsciously, we deny that opposite behavior in ourselves and seek balance through another person.

For example, I have been with someone controlling, abusive, selfish, arrogant with a very dark side energy. My friends and family could not understand what I saw in this person. No one understood around me why I was attracted to him! He couldn’t have been any more my opposite.

The reason for the attraction, which was unconscious at the time, of course, is that I did not feel justified in expressing my own anger and my desire to believe in myself, in my own assets and that person pushed my boundaries to a level that I could only see the worst in me.

Once I began allowing myself the space to express that anger and to include more light in my life, I was no longer attracted to him and left him (I made the mistake to think that leaving him was my healing but I was wrong!). People hook up with each other unconsciously for reasons like these all the time.

Some other adaptive behaviors are exhibited in caregivers who attract the wounded, aggressors who attract the passive, blamers who attract self-blamers, straight-laced who attract artists, and enablers who attract addicts. The list goes on and on.

The more that you can allow yourself to be whole and complete, without denying different aspects of your humanity, the more likely you will attract someone who is also whole and balanced. 

Recently, I have been grateful to have experienced a very special soul connection (I met my twin flame) and this person shows me how my healing was necessary because my wounds were not completely healed…. I did not realise my insecurities were still there. Today we separated for good… I heal and give myself all the love I need to recover properly to not having the wrong persons again in my life… It is a long process but I know I eventually will get there… 

If you come, like me, from a dysfunctional family environment and you have serious wounds to heal from that period, do not be stubborn start to heal now and do not find excuse and blame others… (as I did almost all my life) what matters is YOU not the others!

Sending you all my love!

Laura💓💓💓