“The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.” ~ Thomas Merton
“The fewer clear facts you have in support of an opinion, the stronger your emotional attachment to that opinion.” ~ Anonymous
Up until now, I’ve avoided talking about dating– actually, I’m not really going to talk about it now; it’s just that there may be no better way to illustrate the impact our internal pictures have on our outer world experience…
So bear with me here!
Once upon a time, I spent some time with a guy who kinda blew the doors off the limited possibilities I held for myself about relationship.
He was a bohemian of the business world; for him, numbers were like clay – something to build great works of art from. A seeker, he climbed mountains, jet-setted all over the globe, read constantly. He was charismatic, charming, humble, and he had an accent to die for.
Our first date was epic… coffee in the afternoon turned into dinner and drinks and closing the restaurant – we talked nonstop for hours. At some point, he told me that, after all the years he’d spent rootless, he was finally ready to settle down with a strong, smart woman and have a family.
I was gone – I felt like Cinderella meeting the prince. I imagined the stories we would tell our children. I glowed.
But then there was the business that took him out of town and around the world. Periodically, I got texts and emails from amazing places, telling me he was thinking of me, missing me. And I went on with my life, all the while holding safe space for him to come home to, doing my part to help him feel rooted in something that had more meaning than the endless wining and dining of investors that were part of his job.
Romantically, I saw myself as one of those old New England sailor’s wives, walking the widow’s walk and holding the family together until the Captain returned safely home.
Now, you, reading this from the outside, know exactly where this is going. Is there really any doubt? It’s so very obvious, isn’t it?
But I was attached to the picture of him that I’d formed on that first date. I took all the perfect things he’d said to me, and I held them before me like a talisman. Like a woman with a map through the desert, I ignored all the other signs and kept walking towards my Mecca.
So when the whole house of cards fell – which you know it did – I felt angry, hurt, ashamed, confused…
What did it mean if a man like him could reject me? How could he do this to me?
But it wasn’t “him” doing it to me- not the man that I’d fallen for, because that man didn’t exist. “He” was a mirage, a picture in my head that I attached to this particular name, in this particular body… but it had nothing to do with the man he actually was… a man I wouldn’t have wanted…
All the pain I experienced throughout the whole “relationship” was a product of the disconnect between my internal picture and his behavior…
I couldn’t reconcile his actions with the man I thought him to be, and because I didn’t want to lose my Prince Charming, I chose (yup, chose) to believe that there was something wrong with me instead…
Pictures are POWERFUL, and if we don’t spend time working out which ones we’re holding, we are powerless against them and we suffer needlessly.
No more suffering!
“Realizing that our actions, feelings and behavior are the result of our own images and beliefs gives us the level that psychology has always needed for changing personality.” ~ Maxwell Maltz
“Nothing we do, think or feel is caused by what happens outside of us. If we believe that what we do is caused by forces outside of us, we are acting like dead machines, not living people.” – William Glasser
That said, the choices we make in the moment are the best we can make as we attempt to match the picture that will satisfy the particular need we are controlling for. They may prove to be ineffective choices five seconds, or five months later, but in the moment, it is the best we can do, so it would make sense to not beat ourselves up after the fact for ‘doing our best’.
Then, as you did, we can check the pictures in our Quality World, that container of all the pictures that we believe will satisfy our needs for survival, love, belonging, power, fun and freedom, for accuracy. Some do this systematically, but for most of us, the reality check occurs when we are feeling misery, anger, depression, etc. Those feelings indicate a gap between how our pictures say it ‘should be’ (I will not ‘should’ on myself today!- Albert Ellis), and how it really is out there in the external world. The bigger the gap, the less the external reality matches our picture, the bigger the total behaviors (thoughts, feelings, actions and physiology) we employ in an attempt to narrow the gap and ‘make’ the external world comply with our internal picture. We want what we (think) want.
It is that gap that gives us the chance to choose misery…and we all do choose our misery…and happiness
What power, eh?