This Excerpt: Why am I In Love?

© 2006 Richard, 21CP Author and Publisher

_http://tearsandhealing.com/_ (http://tearsandhealing.com/)

[You may know that I talk with people on the phone in personal consultation.
My objective in consulting is to get an understanding of the person's
situation and then share my knowledge and insight to help the person understand
the
illness they're facing and their own needs, so they can make choices to get
happier (there's a link on the right). Much of what I need to explain focuses
on understanding the partner's disease: the how and why of their behavior. I
distilled this advice into my newest book, Meaning from Madness. This short
but powerful book is the perfect compliment to Tears & Healing.


But for at least two thirds of those I talk to, love is still a major
stumbling block. The reality is that, when they finally reach the point where
they
say "No more!" to the abuse and the partner doing the abusing, many people
still have feelings of being in-love with that same person. And if you don't
have some understanding of the psychological dynamic of falling in love, this is
terribly painful and disheartening. This essay was one of my earliest
attempts to address this.

My thoughts on the subject of falling in love have expanded considerably
since this section was written several years ago. So much so, it led to my
second book, In Love and Loving It – Or Not! In that book, I explain in depth
the
reasons that we fall in love; how our minds go about that; what inner needs
are driving us; how we can make changes to help better things happen when fall
in love; and then contrast falling in love with love and loving relationships…
all the stuff we all struggle with. I also talk about falling in love,
love, and marriage and how they all work together. You can read more about it
at
In Love and Loving It - Web page.]

Why Am I In Love?

You know, this question is so important - because it cuts to the heart of
nearly all the issues that plague us in these relationships.

You are in love because you haven’t fulfilled yourself, and your unconscious
mind is trying to find someone else to make that happen. And it very often
doesn’t work. In fact, it often makes things worse.

Think about what you want from a relationship that is based on being in
love: I’ll call it an in-love relationship. By in-love I mean falling into
romantic love, head-over-heels, can’t live without her kind of stuff. What do
you
want? Sex and nurturing. Let’s think a minute about nurturing. What kind of
things do we do in these intimate, in-love relationships that we don’t do in
our
other relationships? We allow ourselves to be emotionally dependent on our
partner. We drop our strong, silent front, stop pretending we are everything,
and lean on our partner.

In a word, we act like children. We ask our partner to play a parenting role
with us. We push off responsibility for at least part of our well being, and
expect our partner to make things right. We accept ourselves as incomplete
and we seek to feel complete through another person.

The best explanation I have found for this is by Hendrix (p. 100). Hendrix
believes we have two ways we force ourselves to be incomplete. The first is
denying parts of ourselves, and the second is hiding parts of ourselves. Both
are aspects of our being, our spirit, that we refuse to express, the first
because we cannot accept that we have those traits, and the second because we
fear others’ reactions to those traits.

So again, why are you in love? To complete yourself by using another person
to provide the denied and hidden aspects of yourself. Don’t want to be in
love? Find your whole self. Love your whole self. I can’t say I’ve achieved
this, but I believe it is the path to emotional and spiritual health, and that
risk of falling in-love goes down as we move down that path.

Falling in love is an unconscious mechanism that tries to compensate for our
own failure to fully realize our full self. Accept yourself, know yourself,
love yourself. By this you can free yourself from the trap of falling in-love
yet again.

© 2006 Richard, 21CP Author and Publisher

_http://tearsandhealing.com/_ (http://tearsandhealing.com/)



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