I was speaking to a lady who told me she had lost her feelings for her husband and she was considering leaving him because of this.
As so much was riding on her statement I wondered if she knew how her feelings had been created.
She told me she didn’t know.
So challenged her.
I wanted to know how does she know if she can trust the feelings she is experiencing if she doesn’t know how they were created?
Anyone that loses feelings of love or passion could be in danger of concluding the relationship is wrong for them.
But what if it’s not that simple.
As you can imagine she went silent and looked confused at my questions.
Like many people she didn’t question her thinking, she just responded to it as if it was fact.
What she had never considered before was if she could trust the feelings her mind was creating, where they really came from and what meanings she should put to them.
You see we can all create very different feelings based on many influencers some listed below.
Each one has the power to change how we feel in most cases almost all are foundational in a person emotional experience.
- Our focus
- Our values
- Our rules
- Our needs
- Our beliefs
- Our meanings
- Our internal dialogue
- Our personal histories
- What we delete that we don’t think we need
- Our assumptions
- The distortion all the above can create
- Our quick thinking reactive brain
There are so many factors that can influence how we think and the feelings that creates.
So how do we know the feelings are ones we can trust, if we are not connected to the construct(s) that creates the feelings in the first place.
To expand on this topic did she know…
- How her brain creates attraction?
- How her brain falls in love?
- How her brain falls out of love?
- How her brain self-protects?
- How her brain creates a behavioural patterns?
- How her brain creates her happiness?
Isn’t this important to know when so much is riding on it?
You see with so many unanswered questions about how a feeling is created in so many critical areas of relationship building how does a person know which part is the problem and what really needs to change?
Loss of love may not mean the relationship is the problem. What if something else is causing the real issue that leading her to a loss of feelings?
- I feel bad so you are the problem?
- I feel bad so I’m my problem?
- I feel bad because my thinking is the problem?
- I feel bad because your thinking is the problem?
Which is it and what is it really connected to? In most cases the problem is likely to be all four statements above.
No one is helped to understand relationships and so everyone does their best to muddle through and this is never enough especially when problems strike.
Everyone will find a happy relationship easy, but when problems strike very few handle this well and this leads couples to assume they are a miss-match.
When all they need is help in dealing with their challenges and differences of thinking and approaches to relationship problems.
For a person to change their whole life without understanding why their thinking has happened will mean the person is in danger of making the same mistakes again and again.
What so many don’t see is when they leave their partner they are actually escaping the thinking they are creating when they are around their partner.
They think it’s their partner making them feel bad, when in reality their partner can only trigger them, the rest of the bad thinking is of their own creation.
What the triggered person is not seeing is the trigger can take a person in a 1000 directions, but most keep choosing the same direction and they then become unhappy with that one.
Without understand there is choice they feel they have to leave their partner to escape the pain they are feeling/creating.
Of course they don’t see it that way. They have the illusion that “you” make me feel this way which is of course impossible.
Remember we are not questioning if the person is feeling bad or not. We are challenging what is really creating those bad feelings?
When unhappy people leave their partner they do feel better initially, that’s because the painful thinking they were creating has stopped so most people feel relieved.
For some the problem comes when the guard of protection they kept alive with their partner is no longer needed and by dropping their guard their true feelings can now start to return.
At that point for many they have left and it’s too late.
So what was once a focus on everything that was wrong can now shift to new thinking connected to everything that was good.
Many notice their discomfort will have stopped until the next relationship goes wrong and those familiar feelings come back and yet again their out of control thinking leads them to think yet another person is making “me” feel bad.
A persons thinking is complex and reactive thinkers are constantly creating thinking that leads them to out of control feelings.
So a person must learn how they work and how to control their thinking so it can lead them to feelings of their choosing.
If thinking is one of the the foundation to a persons feelings then in a relationship they must create the correct translation for what is really happening in their marriage.
Many people in their marriage make the wrong assumptions, create the wrong expectations and this leads them to destructive thinking that helps them leave perfectly good relationships.
“I made myself feel so bad I had to leave you” no one says this of course, but for many this is a truth of what is driving their actions.
By understanding the correct influencers the decision making becomes significantly safer and healthier lives and relationships can result.
The first step with many of my clients is helping them to get this part right before we run couples sessions.