If you are not my everything, what’s the point in being together?
“What’s the point of being together, if they cannot be everything I need?”
“What’s the point of being together, if I’m responsible for my own needs?”
“What’s the point of being together, If I cannot share my emotions when I need to?”
“What does it mean to build a partnership that is not based on taking care of each other’s needs?”
These are some of the questions that came up during last week’s session of Be Your #1 – the month-long Self-Love Intensive that I am currently leading.
And these questions really show how our relationships are based on a lot of assumption and expectation regarding what other people can and ‘should’ do for us.
Whereas the work of emotional maturity and self-responsibility that I promote forces us to face a truth that is often uncomfortable and sometimes scary:
If other people cannot make me feel a specific way (because no one can actually give us a feeling), then I am the one who needs to understand the origin of my own feelings.
If I am responsible for my own needs and for my life satisfaction, then I have no one to blame for my lack of fulfillment.
That’s right.
It means each of us has to take a good look at ourselves, begin to take care of our own needs, and become responsible for the direction of own life.
And I know how scary that is. I’ve been there: I was confronted with those same realizations in 2013.
Becoming responsible for my life was highly uncomfortable. I really did not want the responsibility.
I used to find comfort in the belief that someone else was at fault for my predicament, for what I viewed as my problems.
But even when we become ready to take charge of our lives – as the participants in my programs are – we bump up against another uncomfortable truth: I do not know what that looks like.
For example, in our group, as we discuss reparenting of our inner child as a pathway to healing our relationship with our selves and with others, we hit the realization that we don’t actually know what healthy parenting looks or sounds like.
If it hasn’t been modeled, how do we know what healthy relating even means?
What is validation?
What to do with guilt and shame?
How to recognize my needs underneath the cluster of old, distorted and over-coupled beliefs and emotions?
How to be there for our partners without losing ourselves?
What is love outside of the inherited definitions based on transaction and self-sacrifice?
How to know where the other person’s needs end and mine begin, when we’ve been suppressing our needs through people-pleasing for decades?
And then, of course, is the ultimate question: If being a mature adult means I am responsible for my self and my life, then what is the purpose of relationships?
The relating paradigm we’ve inherited is all about survival and scarcity, and manipulating others to meet our needs.
The more equitable and healthy relating paradigm that I promote is focused on showing up for ourselves AND for our loved ones, so that we ALL can thrive in our relationships.
It takes dedication, courage, and stamina to unlearn the dysfunctional relating patterns we’ve inherited and adapted.
When we view another as a need-fulfilling machine, while we depend on them for our wellbeing, there is no room for seeing us or them as sovereign beings – with our own unique baggage, traumas, needs, thoughts, wishes, preferences, perspectives and desires.
Of course, children are completely powerless and helpless and require parental love and protection to survive.
Adults – contrary to popular belief – don’t require the love and protection of any particular adult to survive, because we have more power and agency.
As adults, we have the power to choose our relationships, and we also have the capacity to care for ourselves and meet our own needs in ways that we couldn’t as children.
The confusion arises from the fact that many of us, survivors of developmental trauma, continue to feel helpless and powerless in adulthood, in a way that does not accurately reflect the level of choice and power we actually have.
The work I promote helps people complete their emotional development that was interrupted in childhood, so they can access their own power and become responsible for their own wellbeing.
Because if I believe and expect that my wellbeing can and will be delivered from outside, I disconnect from my own wholeness, the source of my power.
That expectation that others are responsible for my needs and wellbeing will push me to control and manipulate them into complying with my preferences, thus stripping them of their power. I then expect them to live according to my idea of happiness, instead of their own, and that can lead to oppression.
When I live at the mercy of someone else’s capacity or lack of capacity to give me what I want, I start blaming them for neglecting me, while I leave my own needs unattended, essentially neglecting myself. In that self-abandoned state, I lose connection to knowing what I can actually do for my own happiness.
A healthy, loving, consistent relationship with another person can only be the byproduct of a healthy, loving and constant connection with myself.
Many of us come to our relationships with intense hunger for love, showing up with a deep hole within, expecting (and often demanding) that others fill it.
From that empty cup, we cannot give to others without resentment or depletion or loss of self.
What I’ve learned over the last ten years is that when I lean out and take responsibility for the role I play in my own life and in the current relating dynamic, I own my power to create change.
When I change how I show up, my relationship adjusts in response to the changes I initiate.
When I take care of myself, I feel more satisfied. I can then bring this satisfaction – rather than frustration or resentment – into my relationship.
It’s quite incredible to see how much power I actually have to affect the degree of satisfaction I experience in my relationships.
Before we complete our emotional development, we tend to objectify our partners as deliverers of our bliss, essentially stuffing them into a box of our own idea of “happily ever after.”
I was at first shocked, and then angry when my husband broke out of the box into which I’ve reduced him.
Today, I reframe the whole experience as a gift. It is precisely my husband’s human limitation and incapacity at meeting some of my needs, which felt so frightening at first, that forced me to grow up and take radical responsibility for my own wellbeing and life path.
The fact is, if I do not take measures to “make myself happy,” no one can.
To me, the question of what happens to our relationships when we assume self-responsibility becomes about respect for our individual journeys.
Just as I am the main character in my life’s story, so is my partner in his.
This allows space for a deeper exploration of our essence, and frees up capacity for creative self-expression, accessing our tastes, proclivities, and gifts.
When I took my focus off of my husband and onto myself, I created spaciousness for self-redefinition and deeper self-exploration.
I accessed power and wisdom that I never knew I had. It led me to a complete reinvention of whom I thought myself to be.
I finally asked myself questions I never did when I was newly married and singularly focused on pleasing others:
Who do I want to be in my life?
Who do I want to be in this relationship?
How do I want to show up in my marriage?
How do I want to treat myself and the person with whom I share my life?
Radical self-responsibility for my life means I’m fully committed to my thriving.
Not surprisingly, the more I give myself permission to self-care and pursue my interests, the more I feel seen and respected by my husband.
The less I nag him and tell him what to do, the more he has an opportunity to show up for himself and for me in a way that feels good to both of us.
After three decades of relating, I am discovering what it actually means to love my husband.
I am not obsessed with him.
I am not flooded with stress hormones we call infatuation.
At times, the absence of chemical high has felt like boredom for my post-trauma nervous system.
But as I learn to live in a healthy body and regulated nervous system, I have freed up lots of capacity for life.
Since I no longer spend hours wondering where I stand in my relationship, or obsess whether to stay or to go, I’ve freed up so much energy and creativity that in the past six years I was able to build a viable business based on passion, where I get paid for being myself. And in the last year, I had the capacity to let go of some of my addictions and completely change my life.
I no longer seek passion delivered to me from a romantic partner.
I try to live with passion in every aspect of my life.
I see that when I live in integrity with my values and in alignment with my soul’s calling, I am full of that feeling so many of us crave when we look for that elusive One.
No longer looking outside for excitement or soothing, I was able to develop consistent and healthy intimacy with myself.
And now I can bring that intimacy, self-knowledge, and ability to self-regulate to all of my other relationships, including the relationship with my own husband.
So what’s the point of relationships when we become responsible for our own needs?
When our relationships are no longer focused on meeting other people’s needs, there is space for self-actualization and thriving. Each partner is respected to pursue activities that feel good and make us come alive.
The focus of healthy relationship is to be a safe space for growth and daring. So we can learn who we are through the mirror of each other. So we can use our triggers to understand ourselves. So we can come into our gifts and share them with the world.
It is time to dismantle generations of internalized oppression we’ve inherited.
When we shed the outdated programming, learn to release shame and guilt, and liberate ourselves from the cult of familial, cultural, and societal imprint, we can step into our power and reconnect with our values. We then free up the capacity to create changes that are desperately needed, without which we keep pushing our collective to the brink of disaster.