In an awake and deliberately so-designed relationship, there lies the greatest opportunity for evolutionary leaps.  It is however, rigorous and demanding work to find the Self, especially in the mirror presented by the Lover.  The true Self got lost way back in the past when it was not honoured – or worse – deliberately defiled.  To go back and find it means facing all that stored pain again (something most of us have variously avoided all our lives).  Given that the Lover relationship is actually designed to bring that unconscious pain to our conscious attention, it takes guts to retain total self-responsibility and clarity and not blame the Lover.  And a lot of stamina to hold clear and steady as waves of pain it, APPARENTLY generated and directed at us by the Lover.

In an intimate relationship, ALL pain comes from trying to make the Lover do for us and to us what Mummy and Daddy failed to do, or from trying to enlist them to help us stop what Mummy and Daddy persistently did do.  The problem here is that whilst a kind and generous person might be willing to play out this rescue/pseudo-parent role for a brief time (often the Falling in Love period), no soul/being will “save” another soul/being.  Each being’s path is defined by his/her pain.  Their pain is their karma.  It is why they are here to DO, to learn about, to understand…sooner or later, the supporting person must step back and allow the suffering one to experience his/her pain and thereby uncover and heal a long-open wound.  THE ONLY PERSON WHO CAN HEAL YOUR PAST PAIN IS YOU!

The purpose of therapeutic work is to outline some useful models for finding your way back, for finding the lost and damaged children, and for finding the salve of love – YOUR love, from you to you – which is the ONLY cure for the pain that won’t stop.  A Lover could help you with adoration and care, and somewhere, there will still be a nagging emptiness, a feeling they should be doing something more.  And for any minor or major deprivation you feel is occurring in their interaction with you, you will be tempted to hate them.  This is what typically happens in most relationships because most people don’t know that the purpose of an intimate partnership is to REVEAL your pain, NOT TO HEAL your pain.  ONLY YOU CAN DO THAT.

If neither party comprehends what the partnership is REALLY doing, then resentment rises.  Each of the sufferers feel abandoned, vulnerable and betrayed (as they essentially were as children) and the relationship is over.  It may subsequently drag on for years being a relationship, but each of the desperate, hopeful partners internally has now realised that THIS lover is not THE ONE – the one who will rescue, and stop the pain.  The wise, health-oriented psyche keeps setting our lovers up to reveal our pain, but all the while the trapped (unresolved) children keep fantasizing that these kind, interested grown-ups are actually there to SAVE US from the same.

Unless each partner appreciates that even the purest of intentions, this is what they keep doing to each other, the relationship will ultimately become a festering wound of unforgiveable disappointments.

A truly loving soul in a committed relationship with another is not in the business of attachment and enchantment, but rather in the business of separation and DIS-illusionment.  The Lover is the mirror, the most immediate way to see the real SELF.  This means first of all seeing the ‘unlooked at’, the hidden: the damage and the shame.  It takes a courageous human to keep looking at that horror and not want to smash the mirror.  Even more distressingly revealing than the mirror, your Lover holds for you will be the mirror your children hold for you.  Which is why so many abused people go on to abuse their children….

….to be continued….