Part III of the series on Love:
Loving Others in Intimate Relationship
“Everyone comes with baggage. Find someone who loves you enough to help you unpack.” – Unknown
I run into the this quote often around the internet, browsing various articles, blogs and books about relationship. It seems to sum up pretty well one of the most important things we need to be aware of when we are navigating the often difficult waters of intimate relationship: that we all have histories that shape how we feel about ourselves and our lives, and how we interact with others. Rather than try to avoid this reality, we must be prepared to face it, both with regards to ourselves, and to our partners!
As I touched on in my two earlier posts on Love of Self, our most important “love” relationship we have is the one we have with ourselves; our ability to build a loving relationship with another person is rooted in our ability to love and care for ourselves. As I often tell my clients, our partners are mirrors of how we feel about ourselves; if you have any questions about where you are at in your ability to love yourself, look at your relationship (or your lack of one, as the case may be)!
Even though this idea can seem confusing, because it can take a while, and require “work”, to truly understand how our surrounding reality is indeed a reflection of our own stories, of our beliefs and convictions about life and ourselves, it is an awareness that can bring us a new ability to make choices in our lives, and grow ever more into a “reality” that brings us the love and fulfillment we all long so much for.
It truly is an “unpacking” that we have to do – because nothing more than a love relationship forces us to look at the relationship patterns and “set points” that we carry deep within us. Many of these patterns were established in our earliest moments, even before we have coherent, visual memory, because they came to be during our life in the womb – that most delicate and formative time, when we are in deep symbiotic relationship with our mothers, even though we are not aware of it in a conscious way.
Even more than being psychological or emotional “habits”, they are biochemical pathways within us, as research over the last few decades has shown (and those of us who are trained in Existential Personalistic Anthropology pay specific attention to intrauterine conditioning and work on breaking free of it, in ourselves and with our clients); we are not aware that we are conditioned in this manner, as they dictate our likes and dislikes, our reactions and decisions, at a level that is below our daily consciousness, but indeed we are, as any more careful examination of our lives can help us see.
If you have ever found yourself in a relationship situation where you find yourself thinking , “oh no! I have done it again!!!” or “oh no! This person/situation is exactly like the last one!”, you know exactly what I am talking about 😕 On a conscious level, we think we “know” what we want when it comes to our lives and our relationships, but it often requires some digging to go into our existential unconscious (a part of the unconscious that A. Mercurio identified as containing our earliest traumas and our reactions to them) and discover the true weight that our difficult experiences have had on our ability to achieve it, and begin to transform them so we can achieve the connection we long for.
Even the most apparently “ideal” intrauterine and early childhood situations can leave scars; none of us come into the world without some form of struggle, due to the simple reality that our mothers and fathers are human beings themselves, and have experienced their own conditioning, for good or bad.
Does that mean that we are all doomed to never experience the love we are longing for?
Absolutely not. To the contrary, it indicates a simple truth that can be somewhat uncomfortable for us to recognize and embrace, but that actually brings with it a lot of promise: trauma and pain are a part of life, but they can become “motors” that drive us to find ways of transforming them into new ways of living and of loving; ways that are more deeply aligned with our authentic Selves, and that contribute to the greater good.
We have a choice as to how we deal with our “baggage”. We can pretend we don’t have any, and point our fingers at others’ defects, putting all the blame for our difficulties on to them; we can consider our problems, our pain and illness and loneliness impossible to overcome, and abandon ourselves to feeling we are unfortunate victims, unique in our misery; or, we can decide to look at our difficulties straight in the eye, and ask them to help us see where it is we need to unpack our baggage, really see what it is that we are carrying around with us, and begin to decide what to do with it.
The questions we must ask ourselves are:
What is it that we must discard and free ourselves of?
What is it that we must transform?
Who must we forgive, so we can lighten our load and learn to let go?
Who can we ask to teach us the things we might not have yet been able to learn, such as new definitions of love, healthy boundaries, and all the rest?
The journey is not necessarily an easy one, to become truly present in partnership and to see our partner in their wholeness – baggage included. But it is well worth the effort.
