SEVEN GUIDE LINES
1. UNDERSTAND THE MEANING AND IMPORTANCE OF UNCONDITIONAL LOVE. (This provides an environment where miracles can occur.)
2. DEVELOP A RELATIONSHIP WITH YOURSELF BEFORE GETTING DEEPLY INVOLVED WITH ANYONE ELSE. (If you don’t want to spend an evening alone with yourself, why would anyone else want to?)
3. LEARN HOW YOUR DEMANDS AND PREFERENCES CREATE YOUR WORLD.
4. BE AWARE THAT FALLING IN LOVE IS NOT THE BASIS FOR A MARRIAGE. (Relationships are assignments, we should love everyone but we should not marry everyone)
5. BE SURE THAT YOU CAN SHARE A LIFE TOGETHER IN A WAY THAT CONTRIBUTES TO YOUR MUTUAL WELL-BEING.
6. HONOR YOUR DIFFERENCES.
7. DON’T EXPECT THE RELATIONSHIP TO MAKE YOU HAPPY.
KEEPING THE RELATIONSHIP HEALTHY
1. Communicate deeper and deeper levels of honesty.
2. Ask for what you want, but don’t be addicted to getting it.
3. Work on your personal growth, not your partners.
4. Notice that both you and your partner always have a beneficial, positive intention.
5. Give all the gifts you can emotionally afford to give.
6. Discover how your relationship is perfect for your enjoyment or your growth
7. Enrich your relationship by giving to others.
YOUR EGO OFTEN CHOOSES TO FORGET THAT YOUR HAPPINESS DEPENDS ENTIRELY ON YOUR GROWTH. IT IS ALWAYS EASIER TO RECOGNIZE THE AREAS IN OUR PARTNER THAT NEED HEALING.
CONSCIOUS LOVING - BECOMING CO-COMMITTED by Gay Hendricks
We all want our relationships to be springboards to higher consciousness and enhanced creative expression. Unconscious loving turns relationships into ENTANGLEMENTS, which bring out and actually require the destructive habits of each participant. Unconscious loving saps our energy and creativity. (Entanglements would be defined as a “special relationship, a relationship created by the weakness of the ego. The ego’s biggest weapon used to keep us from healing our separation from God.
There is possible, a state of well being which enhances the energy and creativity of each person, it is called CO-COMMITMENT. A CO-CREATIVE relationship is passionate, productive and a harmonious. We turn the energy that would have been wasted through conflict into creativity and growth.
Why are close relationships, which are supposed to be about love, often so painful? What are we doing that causes the pain? What are we overlooking? How can we have more love and less pain?
Love is a powerful force. If we do not know how to handle its power, we slip very quickly into its painful distortions, such as, conflict and co-dependency. It is resistance to love that causes the problems. Love brings to the surface the parts of ourselves that we most desperately try to keep hidden. When they emerge, we often retreat, blaming love and those who have loved us.
Codependency is an agreement between people to stay locked in unconscious patterns. Co-commitment is an agreement to become more conscious. Relationships can exist only between equals; inequality is a hallmark of codependency. Entanglements are what we participate in when we are codependent, not relationships. Entanglement is a snare, and a complication; a net, from which escape is difficult. Two people intertwined in such a way that the freedom of each is limited.
Codependents often are not addicted to substances but to something much subtler, CONTROL and APPROVAL. When you break through your approval and control programming, there is a natural Spiritual essence that can be consciously experienced. Notice how you are controlling and jockeying for approval, then GIVE IT UP!!!
WHAT IS COMMITMENT?
A co-committed relationship cultivates enhanced energy that enables both partners to make a greater contribution than either could make alone.
CLOSENESS AND SPACE
In close relationships, we all have two distinct needs, closeness and independence. Co-committed relationships acknowledged and celebrate both of these needs. You get close, and when it’s time, you separate for a while. A good relationship is a pulsation of closeness and independence. Both parts are essential.
DYNAMICS OF NEW RELATIONSHIP
1. Two people get CLOSE.
2. Out of closeness comes FEAR.
3. Out of fear comes EXPECTATION OF PAIN.
4. Out of expectations they WITHDRAW from each other.
5. Often they blame each other for their pain. (PROJECTION)
6. END of relationship
REPEAT . . .
The real need here is to communicate about these issues. Tell the truth about what they are experiencing, and take some space to allow themselves to become comfortable.
COMMON FEELINGS WE EXPERIENCE WHEN WE START GETTING CLOSE.
*I’m not worthy.
*I’m still angry and hurt from a past relationship.
*Something is basically wrong with me.
*If I get close, I’ll get swallowed up and lose myself.
When these feelings emerge, we often:
**Withdraw and pull back without telling the other person what is going on.
**We manufacture something wrong with the other person or the relationship to give us an excuse to pull back righteously.
**We numb out, losing touch with our feelings.
**Old tapes begin to play in our minds, memories of past situations and fantasies of the future. These take us out of the present reality.
**We get sick.
**We have an accident.
**We have an argument.
Individual development is crucial because humans are separate beings as well as beings who thrive on union with others.
ISSUES WE HAVE ABOUT GETTING CLOSE
1. When my partner goes away, I feel abandoned.
2. I’m afraid I can’t take care of myself.
3. I’m afraid of taking risks by myself.
4. If my partner really loved me, he’d want to be with me all the time.
CYCLES OF CLOSENESS AND SPACE OCCUR FREQUENTLY.
THE INEVITABLE: As a result of the closeness we experience in the romance phase of a relationship, unpleasant parts of our personality will begin to emerge. You learned certain problems and feelings and patterns in earlier close relationships and the closeness you are feeling now brings them to the surface.
PERSONALITY PROBLEMS THAT SURFACE WITH CLOSENESS
TRUST (We learn trust in our first year of life.)
We ask, “Is it safe here?” “Will he leave me?” “Can I trust my feelings?”
“Is he who he appears to be?”
AUTHORITY ISSUES
“Nobody is going to tell me what to do!” SELF-ESTEEM
Once we hand over our power to the other person, we are at their mercy. We ask ourselves “Am I really worthwhile?” “Does anybody love me for myself?” “Do I deserve to be here?” LONG
REPRESSED FEELINGS
“I never know that I was an angry person until I got into a relationship.”
SEXUAL ISSUES
“Will I ever be able to have a satisfying sexual connection with another person?” “Why can’t I ask for what I want sexually?”
THE CHOICE POINT
At this point when our fears surface, we determine whether the relationship will become co-committed or codependent.
CHOICE A - Co-commitment
You inquire into the source of those issues; you take full responsibility for them and tell the full truth about them to your partner. When you do this, you can see and Love the previously UNLOVED parts of yourself. With the liberated energy from seeing and communication the truth of your patterns and feelings, you will ride to a new, higher level of love and intimacy.
CHOICE B - Codependency
You keep your emerging issues secret. You don’t look at them and you don’t tell the truth about them. You withhold. You keep inside things that need to be expressed. You swallow your anger. You what something and fail to ask.
You withdraw. You pull back contact and quit reaching out. You are lonely, but you turn down invitations to go out.
You project. You attribute to another something that is actually going on at an unconscious level within yourself.
OUTCOME OF CHOICE B
You both agree not to look into certain areas of your lives (Ostrich option)
If you don’t change, I won’t either.
We focus our attention on alcohol, food, drugs, sex or work instead of solving our problems.
If you do all the thinking, I’ll do all the feeling.
PAYOFFS OF CHOICE A
*You move closer to each other.
*You move to a higher level of intimacy.
*You open the possibility of more creativity.
RELATIONSHIP TRAPS
*Letting people get away with killing themselves.
*Seeking friends who support your self-destruction.
*You replay your parents’ dysfunctional patterns.
*Addiction to conflict.
*The agreement to mess up (You mess up and I’ll fix it.)
ESSENTIAL CO-COMMITMENTS
1. I commit myself to being close, and I commit myself to clearing up anything in theway of my ability to do so.
2. I commit to reveal myself fully in my relationships, not to conceal myself.
3. I commit myself to my own complete development as an individual.
4. I commit myself to the full empowerment of people around me.
5. I commit to acting from the awareness that I am 100% the creator of my reality.
6. I commit myself to having a good time in my close relationships.
FUNDAMENTAL REQUIREMENTS
1. FEEL ALL YOU FEELINGS
2. TELL THE MICROSCOPIC TRUTH
3. KEEP YOU AGREEMENTS.
CORE FEELINGS
By getting in touch with our core feelings, we can communicate them better. Core feelings are sadness, fear, anger, joy and excitement. Love is the deepest core feeling it embraces all feelings. If we persist, we can find LOVE behind every feeling.
We have been programmed not to be with our feelings so we express them inappropriately, or eat, smoke, drink etc. to get rid of them. FEEL your feelings. Depression is anger repressed. The past has a way of cropping up if we don’t fully grieve it, deal with it, and finish it.
You can FEEL without acting on your feelings especially anger and sexual feelings. WE repress many sexual feelings we could actually enjoy. You can be with your feelings until they pass, as they always will if you let yourself feel then. WE can express these feelings in creative, healthy ways. Locate your feelings somewhere in your body. They are always located somewhere; tightness in the throat, quivering stomach, and stiffness in the shoulders etc. are some of the feelings that make us uncomfortable. These sensations seem less threatening than feelings. Feelings have cycles just like any other phenomena of nature. If we ride the wave, they will come and go. We often, however, interrupt our feelings mid-cycle. Interfering with the cycle throws our energy off as well as buries the unfinished feeling inside of us, where it could surface at any moment. We should not prevent others or ourselves from completing the feeling process.
By preventing others from feeling their feelings, we cheat them out of a profound human experience.
WHAT DO YOU WANT????
Beneath all our feelings and our complaints are things we want. People who know what they want are not easily manipulated. Learning to ask for what we want can be a powerful tool in all of our relationships.
CLAIMING CREATIVITY
Codependency is two people fighting over who are responsible. Co-commitment begins the moment one person says, “I’m willing to own how I helped to create this problem.” It is complete when the other is also willing to take responsibility for how they created it.
LEARNING TO TELL THE MICROSCOPIC TRUTH
Most of us have learned that truth equals pain. We’ve been laughed at, punished, censured and inconvenienced when we have told the truth in the past. Truth is that which cannot be argued about. “John is a jerk.” should be, “I am angry with John.” or even more microscopic, “I’m scared of that part of me that John represents.” In close relationships, truth is a clear statement of feelings, or body sensations, such as, “I’m scared, I’m hurt, My Shoulders feel tight when you talk.” or “When you told me about the other woman, I felt a wave of nausea and I’m still feeling it.”
DRAW A CLEAR, SHARP DISTINCTION BETWEEN TRUTH AND JUDGMENT.
Instead of, “You are so selfish.” Say, “I feel like my needs are being neglected. I need more of your time.”
MICROSCOPIC TRUTH IS NEVER RIGHTEOUS.
IT IS ALWAYS A CLEAR, SPECIFIC STATEMENT OF WHAT IS HAPPENING INSIDE, RIGHT HEAR AND NOW. Such as, “I’m more vulnerable with you than I’ve ever been before in my life, and this brings up more fear that something will go wrong.”
KEEP YOUR AGREEMENTS
Keeping agreements is essential to co-committed relationships. Each broken agreement leaches energy from within us and from the relationship itself. Breaking agreements is away of communicating hidden anger. If you cannot keep an agreement, tell the microscopic truth about it. “I’m late, I feel frustrated and scared that you might be mad at me.”
LEARN TO LIVE IN A STATE OF CONTINUOUS POSITIVE ENERGY
During our lifetime, we have been programmed to not let ourselves feel too good. We are always thinking that the other shoe is going to drop. We think if we feel good for too long, something bad will happen to us. In a co-committed relationship the central task is to learn to stay in positive energy for longer and longer periods of time. When we feel too good, we invoke some negative experience to bring us down. We have an old association between feeling good and pain. When we feel good for too long we find some way to create pain. Most of us can’t be close to others for very long without creating a problem to limit the positive energy.
THE ONLY PROBLEM WE HAVE TO SOLVE IS HOW TO EXTEND OURSELVES CONTINUOUSLY INTO MORE POSITIVE ENERGY.
We all have limits on how much positive energy we can tolerate. If we go past this limit, an alarm goes off in our unconscious mind. If we do not rest, at this point, allowing time to integrate the energy, our unconscious mind will find a way to stop the flow of positive energy. We are highly skilled at handling negative energy, now we need to create new channels in ourselves for experiencing positive energy. How to feel good naturally, without chemical assistance, is a new task in evolution. We can’t deal with our feelings so we retreat into our minds. Then we can’t deal with our thoughts, so we retreat further into an addiction, at the bottom of it all is that we don’t think we deserve to naturally feel good about ourselves.
HOW DO WE KEEP FROM FEELING GOOD???
1. WE DEFLECT POSITIVE ENERGY -We reject compliments etc.
2. WORRY
3. ARGUMENTS
4. GOING UNCONSCIOUS -We run our old programming
5. WE CONCEAL OUR FEELINGS.
6. WE LIE OR BREAK AGREEMENTS
HOW DO WE KEEP POSITIVE ENERGY FLOWING CONTINUOUSLY?
1. MAKE AND TAKE SPACE - Take space for yourself and make space for your partner. It must be absolutely all right for you to take time off from closeness to allow yourself to integrate and proper to move to a higher level of intimacy.
2. TELL THE TRUTH - Not all of your negative patterns will go away with one application of microscopic truth, but by making it a lifestyle, you will have an easier time of confronting your blocks to intimacy. Seeing blocks and telling the truth about them is the most potent way to dissolve barriers.
3. NON-SEXUAL TOUCH - This is essential to our health, we have literal physical boundaries as well as psycho spiritual ones. By letting yourself be touched, you become more in touch with your feelings. It causes something to relax inside you, which allows more access to the self. Your physical skin becomes healthier and you get healthier in general.
4. TURN YOUR COMPLAINTS INTO REQUESTS - We have been programmed to swallow our wants, or express them with a whine or tantrum, or we rely on someone else to tell us what we want. Learning to ask for what we want at 100% is one of the most powerful skills we can learn.
ADOPT A HEALTHIER BELIEF SYSTEM
SPOT YOUR BARRIERS TO POSITIVE ENERGY
END POWER STRUGGLES - Much conflict is generated over who is right, who is wrong, and whose problem it is. When both are taking 100% responsibility for creating the conflict, no power struggle exists. We can solve problems without anyone being at fault.
BENEFICIAL POSITIVE INTENTIONS
No matter how big the battle with your partner, both of you have only been trying to achieve a positive experience; to feel more accepted, more acknowledged, more capable, more complete, more conflicted, more joyful, more relaxed, more satisfied, more secure, more sexy, more worthwhile, more loved etc. Exploring your partner’s possible positive intention can enable you to stay aware of the basic goodness of your partner and keep unconditional love alive in your heart.
PROBLEM STOPPERS
1. Identify and accept the problem.
2. Look for solutions that are in the best interest of the relationship.
3. be open to various solutions.
4. Learn to combine emotion with reason.
5. Don’t take problems and difference personally.
6. Don’t deny an adversarial reaction if it’s present, but don’t assume one either.
7. Learn to combine detachment with appropriate active steps.
8. Practice deliberate, time-limited patience.
9. be clear about what you want and need.
10 Separate issues from people.
11 Communicate
12 Healthy boundaries are crucial to conflict negotiations.
13 Consistently foregoing what you want and need isn’t conflict negotiation.
14 Avoid power plays
15 Save ultimatums for absolute non-negotiable or last stage negotiations.
16 Take full responsibility for your behavior
17 Always look for the gift or lesson.
THERE ARE GIFTS WITHIN EVERY CONFLICT. BOTH SIDES HAVE SOMETHING TO LEARN. WE ARE PERFECTLY MATCHED TO LEARN FROM AND TEACH EACH OTHER.
* Every upset we experience begins at the instant of self-betrayal. The moment we sell out, give in, swallow our feelings or deny our truth the upset begins.
* Both sides are right. Both have something to contribute something to teach.
* Both sides are “putting up with” something. Until you stop, you cannot move to higher ground, where what you REALLY want is waiting.
* The only way to receive the gift of the conflict is to be true to you. Ask for what you want at 100%. Be true to yourself in a win-win way.
* The conflict is a lesson. You always attract into your life someone whose personal insecurities are perfect for pushing your emotional buttons.
* EACH CONFLICT HAS A BOTTOM LINE. ONE PERSON WANTS THE OTHER TO SAY OR DO SOMETHING SPECIFIC. YOU CAN SHORTEN THE ENTIRE PROCESS IF YOU CAN DISCOVER AT THE ONSET WHAT EXACTLY THE PERSON IS ASKING FOR. ONCE YOU DISCOVER WHAT IT IS AND SAY OR DO WHAT THE OTHER WANTS, THE UPSET DISAPPEARS.
* Usually, each person wants a specific acknowledgement.
* Listening effectively and communicating efficiently can move a relationship forward and end conflict in less then minutes.
