Читать книгу The 100 Most Asked Questions About Love, Sex and Relationships - Barbara Angelis De - Страница 18

Even though I know that many of the problems in my relationship are caused or aggravated by some past hurts from my childhood and from painful love affairs, I still can’t figure out how to let go of the past. My husband has his own issues, and between the two of us, I wonder how we’ve survived this long! Is there a way to heal the past so it doesn’t sabotage our relationship?

This is one of the most important questions any of us can ask ourselves: How can I identify and heal any unhealthy emotional patterns formed in my past so they don’t sabotage my adult relationships? In fact, you’ve just taken the first step in healing yourself: acknowledging the existence of your emotional baggage and expressing a willingness to get rid of it! Sadly, most people in the world will never even admit that their past experiences are emotionally handicapping them in their present lives, and therefore will never have the opportunity to experience what I call “true emotional freedom.” I define emotional freedom as the freedom to live as the person you want to be, and love as much as you want to love. It’s freedom from the past to be all you can in the present.

In order to heal the past, you have to understand what I call your “emotional programming.” Your emotional programming is simply a set of decisions you made about yourself, others, and the world in general when you were growing up. As an infant, you came into the world like a blank slate. Even though you were born with a certain set of genetic predispositions, you had no experiences yet to affect you either negatively or positively. But each day that you are alive, you collect experiences, and each one teaches you something about yourself and other people. You are either treated well, or treated harshly; you are either loved or neglected; you are either praised or put down.

Each of these experiences helps you form a decision about yourself, about people, and about life. For instance, if your parents had an unhappy, turbulent relationship, and as an infant or small child you heard constant fighting, you might have unconsciously decided: “I have to always be good, so I don’t make people I love unhappy,” or “It’s not safe for me to express angry feelings.” Here’s another example. Let’s say your father was emotionally distant and not there for you. You may have unconsciously decided “I can’t count on the people I love,” or “People who love me abandon me.” Each experience you have as a child helps you make certain decisions, until you have a collection of decisions you have made about life. This collection of decisions or beliefs is called your emotional programming. In the same way you would program a computer with basic information, and the computer would use that information to do tasks or solve problems, so you program your mind with this emotional programming. For the rest of your life, this “program” affects how you think, how you behave, and especially, how you react to circumstances that remind you of your painful childhood experiences.

The majority of this emotional programming occurs when you are still very young. Psychologists estimate that:

 Between the ages of 0-5 years old you receive 50% of your emotional programming

 Between the ages of 5-8 years old you receive 30% of your emotional programming

That means, by the age of 8 you are 80% programmed psychologically. In other words, 80% of the decisions about yourself and others have already been made.

 Between the ages of 8-18 years old you receive 15% more of your emotional programming

So by the time you are eighteen years old, you’re 95 percent complete! That leaves 5 percent for the rest of your life. This may not seem like much, but it’s that 5 percent that I work with when I help people make changes in their lives. And the good news is that you can use that 5 percent to understand and change the other 95 percent!

Perhaps now you can better understand why it’s easy to be so unaware of what motivates you in your relationships. The 5 percent of your mind that is conscious says “I want to be a loving husband to my wife” but the 95 percent of your mind that is unconscious may be programmed to avoid intimacy and keep a wall around your heart.

In my Making Love Work at-home video and audio seminar, I talk about a three-step healing process that you can use to eliminate your emotional programming:

1. Identify, feel, and express the old, unresolved emotions that are trapped inside your heart so that you can “Work them out, not act them out.”

2. Understand your old, unhealthy love choices, and then make new, healthy love choices which will heal your old fear and build new trust.

3. Open up to new, positive experiences of love that will heal the old pain which was caused by some lack of love.

I strongly suggest that you find a system of emotional healing that incorporates both experiential work in releasing old emotions and practical, action-oriented behavioral changes to build healthy new habits.

Now I’ll bet you’re thinking, “Boy, this sounds like a lot of work.” And it can be. But the rewards are worth it—the freedom to give and receive the kind of love you’ve always wanted!