Читать книгу Are You the One for Me? - Barbara Angelis De - Страница 33

We’ve been following Ann throughout this chapter. Ann is a thirty-nine-year-old woman with a history of attracting irresponsible, emotionally distant men. Ann is now happily married to Adam, but still finds herself afraid to trust completely because of her past experiences. Reading Ann’s emotional programming list, you can see how she went ‘home’ in most of her relationships with men. When I asked Ann to write down her negative associations with home, here is what she came up with:

HOME = Disappointment

Denial

Lack of communication about feelings

Betrayal

Inadequacy

Dishonesty

Abandonment

Substitute the word love for home, and you see Ann’s unconscious associations regarding love:

LOVE = Disappointment

Denial

Lack of communication about feelings

Betrayal

Inadequacy

Dishonesty

Abandonment

Ann was amazed at how similar her negative description of her childhood was to her negative description of her adult relationships. All of her love affairs included the same emotions she felt as a little girl. Ann had left home physically, but she hadn’t left home emotionally. She continued to recreate the same emotional circumstances, because, as unpleasant as they might have been, they were what she was used to. The good news was that in her marriage to Adam, Ann felt very few of those old, familiar feelings. Unlike Ann’s previous partners, Adam was responsible, successful, and emotionally open. ‘It looks like I’m finally leaving home!’ she remarked. ‘Adam is helping me change many of the negative decisions I’d made about love. Even though there are times when Adam reminds me of my father, we can talk about my reactions together, which allows me to heal.’

I asked Ann to redefine her concepts of home and love by turning each negative quality into its opposite and adding others.

Ann’s new list:

HOME & LOVE = Trust

Honesty

Communication about feelings

Fidelity

Reliability

Consistency

Safety

Support