In our culture we are conditioned to believe that if we didn’t get the unconditional love we deserved as children we can have a “do over” and get it in a romantic relationship. No one was trying to trick you. Every behavior has a positive intent in a matter what the outcome is. The positive intent in this hypnotic message was to give you the hope that you could feel lovable and worthy even if your parents didn’t create these feelings and you. Your parents didn’t have the ability to give you unconditional love because they didn’t have it either as is the case with the vast majority of the people you know.
To complicate things even further nature has been very clever because in order for our species to survive we had to procreate. So we evolved to produce a cascade of feel-good chemicals that would lead to more sexual activity and bonding to your sexual partner. But I imagine nobody told you this and so that when you fall in love or even think you are falling in love you become euphoric. You feel lovable in the way you’ve always longed to. If you’re a woman you produce more of the bonding hormone oxytocin, and may have a tendency to become quickly attached to your partner. You didn’t know that these chemicals would wane and when they do then you might feel rejected-angry or profoundly disappointed.
The stress you are feeling is triggering the fear part of your brain causing you to overreact. But no one taught you that your feelings can be misleading and often when you feel stressed, the stress signals can be misread as danger and hijacked to the fear centers of your brain. This is where your childhood fears and traumas got hardwired in and you can be triggered into irrational fear reactions. One of the biggest problems in human existence is that when you have a feeling in your body it often has nothing to do with objective reality. When stress triggers fear, you are living like a young child trapped in the past and will react in ways that are the opposite of what you really need.
You might even have had the subconscious or conscious feeling that your partner is deliberately withdrawing their love and hurting you. This can result in your feeling angry at your partner, hopeless about ever getting the love you need or just milder feelings of frustration or sadness. You were hypnotized into thinking that love is magical and when it turns out not to be, you suffer. It doesn’t matter if you’re dating or in a committed relationship unrealistic expectations lead to pain. Romantic love can’t redeem us and yet that’s what the hypnosis tells us all the songs movies etc.
As a result you may have become vigilant for rejection and often see it when it really doesn’t exist. Your partner is tired and becomes withdrawn or your partner is stressed and forgets something that you wanted them to do. Your misinterpretation of their behavior becomes stressful for you and that signal goes to the fear part of your brain because your brain hasn’t evolved to tell the difference between stress and danger. You were not deliberately trying to misinterpret your partner’s behavior, you did have a positive intent when you were projecting or distorting your partner’s behavior. You didn’t want to be caught off guard and get that sucker punch to the gut.
You also probably didn’t know that our brains read each other in a millisecond. If you’ve ever seen a nature program were a prayer comes into a herd of animals you would see how quickly they signal each other to flee. This is a survival mechanism but it works the same when our brains are mistakenly misreading stress for danger. Your partner will pick up this fear signal and it will trigger their fear response but without proper emotional education neither one of you really knows that this is happening. When stress triggers fear all of our responses are irrational and stimulate the painful or traumatic patterns that we learned as children.
So what can you do about this? First of all just knowing this information will help you recognize what is happening you can begin the process of not blaming yourself for the suffering you have experienced in your relationships. I can’t stress this enough because you will feel disempowered if you blame yourself for these biological survival mechanisms. If you have blamed your partner for having similar responses you have inadvertently pushed them away. We all didn’t learn what we needed to have good relationships and end the suffering that has led to the statistics that 50% of 1st marriages fail, 60% of 2nd marriages fail in 70% of 3rd marriages fail and think of all the relationships that never lead to marriage. How could this be your fault or your partner’s fault?
I know the profound feelings that can be realized when we have the tools to create and maintain the deep intimacy that is possible for us all. I invite you to watch the videos on my channel because each one will give you that will allow you to be truly loving, to yourself and to others. There is no greater joy than living in love. If there is any way that I can for you on this journey please feel free to contact me at helen@helenkramer.com.