True Love or Fatal Attraction
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| Thu, 11-18-2010 - 10:38pm |
I was just reading this article (posted it in Healing Library) but I REALLY think it's a CRITICAL read - for all of us who've been INSISTING we're in Love (me included!) I challenge everyone to lay up their beliefs about their affairs...missing...loving...soul mating...against this article (me included) and see what kind of light bulbs go off in reaction.
What do you think? Do we see ourselves as beings with wounds & holes to fill? MAN I DO! more than ever! I really understand how I tried to fill myself with this other person which is straight up UNHEALTHY.
Any responses? Thoughts? Lightbulbs?
Much Love,
michelle
True Love or Fatal Attraction?
Posted Wed, 11/17/2010 - 16:05
http://www.intent.com/christinearylo/blog/true-love-or-fatal-attraction
Attraction -- physical, emotional, intellectual, spiritual --
is important, really important. None of us wants to hang out
with a person who makes our stars fizzle or our minds yawn, but
attraction must be healthy to create a great, or even a good, relationship.
And the only way to determine if your attraction is of the
healthy variety is to get downright honest about what inspired the connection. Of course no person wants to jump up and down
exclaiming, "Look at me over here! I am dying to expose my
messed up relationship!" but if we don't get real about the health
of our attractions, we risk losing what's more important than
anything else -- our selves.
One reason we often mistake unhealthy attraction for the
healthy connections found in authentic partnerships is that most
of us have never thought about it. When was the last time you sat
down for a cup of tea and said, "I think I'll define what 'authentic
connection' means to me today"? Even among those who have
considered the source of their connection, most haven't been
truthful about how healthy their attraction is or isn't.

BINGO!!!!
We only miss what could have been. I know I don't miss what it really was.
Yo Soy EL Capitan de Mi Vida
You know I blogged about this not too long ago - I'll share my thoughts here tho....
It has been a very long week. Emotional and Frustrating, and filled with down moments – at one point I gave in and bottomed out with sadness, a low point that I haven’t hit in a very long, long time. I bawled my eyes out – I put on my pajamas, I climbed in bed and I stayed there.
I miss someone being there to make me feel better, fill the emo tanks, reassure me that all will work itself out. I pouted a lot.
I even stamped my feet.
and then, in the very quiet hours of a very dark night for me I got emails from two very good online friends. They will never know how much those simple notes meant to me this week – So why am I sharing this? Because they reminded me that the credit I had given to others in the past (that others knew how to make me feel better, to fill my emo tanks, to balance things out) – had NOTHING to do with them, they was simply filling a need that I can legitimately fill myself.
I see so many stuck in the mode of renting headspace to the affair – to the old relationships. It made me think a bit about the way we interpret and digest stress – typically we rely on others (spouses, friends, and others) to boost us when we are low – they remind us that we are important and fill the emo/ego tanks. And now, in the chaos that ensues after the separation, there is no one to fill those tanks, and since we often beat ourselves up after we part ways – well, the tanks get lower and lower and lower. and i think that is what happened to me this week. All of my own guilt, coupled with giving myself a good emotional beating, and the emotional turmoil and grief surrounding the loss of my job and marriage and the affair, well, it emptied my own tanks but good.
Every single person who has successfully moved on from an affair can relate to needing the approval, wanting the validation, craving the ego boost from another person – BUT they can also all say, that they had to figure out how to do it themselves. They had to rework, change up and clear out everything and anything that contributed to toxicity in their lives. And then, and only then, free from the smoke and mirrors, they could learn how to find power within themselves. I think the reality is that we don’t heal from the affair and walk away without memory. We heal from the affair by growing thick callouses over the wounds and they continue to heal from the inside out for the rest of our lives.
I am guilty of pulling off the scabs of my affair multiple times. All I am doing is scarring myself. Eventually if I leave it alone, if I just leave it be, don’t cover it up with any bandaids, the fresh, red wound stops throbbing so much. It doesn’t bleed anymore. It is tender, that skin is so thin and so pink in it’s healing. Pretty soon, I forget that it’s there (unless of course I am careless and I bump it and it cracks a little), but eventually it will heal. It will stop hurting so much. The scars that remain will someday be my war wounds that show the world that I survived. They will be proof to ME, that in time, everything heals.
I just have to resist the temptation to pull off that scab again.
We heal from the affair by growing thick callouses over the wounds and they continue to heal from the inside out for the rest of our lives.
TRUE GRIT.
I am feeling what youre saying here so Profoundly.
I hope I didnt embarrass you when I called you out in appreciation :) It just seemed so appropriate to me after I'd read on one of your replies to Always about the things you've faced this 2010. Very admirable.
Really touched me today with how solid you are, Lolly.
:)
LOL no embarassment (I didn't know you had called me out!) - but it is how I feel - and it's taken me a while to understand it all.