Written by: Jorinde Berben
Image credit: Pexels.com
Do you recognize that statement?
If not, what about this one: “I just always seem to fall for the wrong person“, or “Why is every person I fall in love with so unattainable?“, or how about “The spark was just gone, suddenly, and I don’t know why.“
I’ve used all of the above at various points in my life. Even with my current partner, there was a time where I could recognize all the potential of the relationship, and yet couldn’t feel what I was ‘supposed to feel‘.
For the record, this is no longer the case, and it’s because I worked at what was creating that recurring reality in my life.
We all have an idea of what the ‘spark‘ is. It’s like magic, right? It’s instant, and strong, and sure, and the same for everyone. Except that it isn’t. What makes you light up is not what makes someone else light up. We all have different spark-blueprints. And we don’t get them from movies or books or, God forbid, our own insight. No, like most of our personality blueprints, and this one, especially, we inherit from our parents. More specifically, we inherit the way we view love from the way we have experienced it as children in our relationship with our parents.
Knowing this, it can be interesting to look at different past and current relationships and see in what why they resemble the relationship you had with your parents when you were a child, or the relationship you have with them now, or the relationship they had with each other. Did you have a parent who criticized you a lot? You might once have had a partner who did the same. Did your parents shower you with gifts to show affection? You may have expected your partner to do the same in order for you to feel loved.
The spark we feel is not so much magic as it is recollection. We recognize love in this connection because we recognize the way the other person makes us feel, and equate it with love.
If your blueprint is flawed in some ways (and unless you had 100% perfect parents, there probably are some irregularities) you will carry it into your relationships until you’ve learned not to. The print is luckily still just a print. You still get to construct the actual building yourself. You still get to put the bricks together and choose, deliberately, if and/or where you want to diverge from the plans. But it takes effort.
How do you go about changing this pattern?
You go back in time, to where it started. You travel back to the child you were, and you look at the relationship closely. Where were you loved in a way you’d now label as healthy and constructive? What were the times you didn’t feel loved? What did you need then? What would have made you feel loved and cherished?
With inner child work you can start to heal those wounds by giving yourself what you were missing. You become your own parent. In forming a healthy relationship with yourself, you also learn to recognize which relationships in your life are healthy now, and which are still lacking in some way or another.
Meeting a potential partner who does not make you feel the way your parents made you feel, might feel uneasy at first. You’ll find you have to learn new ways of communicating. There are different patterns to create and there’s a new balance to be struck between the two of you. It’s new, and a bit scary and really exciting. And no, it’s not instant magic and happy ever after. It takes conscious effort and deliberate work (said no Disney princess ever).
What’s the pay-off? You’re no longer suprised by your own irrational behavior. You’ve learned to see the rationale behind it and you are finally free to choose how you want to deal with it. You finally recognize that freedom doesn’t lie in compulsively falling in and out of love, following your every whim, but in taking a step back, looking at your own life, and making the choice of how you want it to go from here on out.
Unscrewing Myself 