Each relationship you experience in life is meant to trigger your emotional response in some way. Why do you think families have so much drama? Your family of origin is a training ground to teach you how to respond emotionally to situations. Many of these emotional responses are learned unconsciously long before the age of three. Many more flow to you energetically and unconsciously (epigenetically) from other family members or ancestors. You may have difficulty understanding why you behave the way you do or why you feel the way you do. You might have trouble consciously shifting these patterns.
The use of systemic family constellations, body-focused therapy, and the creation of genosociograms for your family system help to access these deep unresolved emotional responses that may have an origin in childhood, ancestrally, or within past lives. We all experience emotional challenges in childhood. Emotional healing begins when we accept our childhood just the way it was. When we accept our parents and family system just the way they were. We can’t change the past. We can only shift our emotional response to the past.
Childhood Conflict
If you missed the opportunity for childhood training in healthy emotional responses when conflict arises in relationships, it might be a challenge to maintain a healthy relationship with another individual when you enter adulthood. I’m not saying it’s impossible to have a healthy relationship, but it could be challenging. If no one in your family of origin expressed their emotions, with all that emotional stuff being unceremoniously swept under the carpet, then you may be short one valuable and important spiritual and emotional lesson in life. But I encourage you not to despair.
Emotional Suppression
It’s never too late to pick up that lesson. Adulthood is the perfect opportunity. You will then get to practice emotional expression in situations of conflict through your adult relationships. You might find that your relationships keep ending at first, especially if you are seeking close intimacy. If you came out of no emotional expression in your family system then that is what you will likely attract to yourself. If mom and dad didn’t express their emotions when you were a child, then your partners won’t tend to either. The relationship with mom is your template for life. If mom suppressed all her emotions inside, then so will you.
Extreme Emotional Drama
Contrarily, you might attract individuals who continually get emotional about everything in a major dramatic way. You wanted emotional expression in your life so you went out to find it. The problem then becomes figuring out how to respond to it all the time. Depending on your emotional intelligence, endurance level, and patience, this relationship may or may not survive. Again the issue is not the other person, the issue is your own emotional woundedness. Once you do your own healing work and learn to express and feel your emotions openly, you will attract a different sort of partner because the old emotional patterns that don’t work for you any more won’t need to be placed in front of your face every day. If you have shifted in some way, you have already experienced awakening to your healing.
Healthy Adult Emotions
Emotional problems in your relationship(s) might make you feel really uncomfortable at first, especially if you grew up in a household that stifled all emotional outbursts related to conflict. You may have a tendency to withdraw from the conflict and from your partner. I encourage you to sit with the discomfort and work through the issue with your partner, unless it is physically and psychologically harmful to remain in the situation for you and/or any children you might have. In that situation it is best to seek help immediately.
Help your body and unconscious mind develop new ways of being and responding. We all come out of childhood with some inner woundedness unless we managed to work through everything with an awesome body-focused therapist before leaving childhood. I don’t think that happens all that often.
Emotional Wounds Pick the Partner
The issues you have between you and your partner are there for a reason and this goes for friendships as well. You are meant to trigger one another emotionally. Sometimes you match yourself with someone who will reflect the same or a somewhat similar emotional wound back and forth to you. This will continue until one of you realizes something has to change. Many relationships end at that point in time. Others drag out without resolution for the unresolved emotional issue for years and even decades. Others develop compassion for their partner and at the same time for themselves, and the relationship survives in some reasonably healthy manner. Some seek guidance as to how to heal their emotional woundedness and to end patterns that don’t serve their higher good any more. Sometimes a major life crisis shows up to trigger this search for help. Sometimes you pick a partner with an opposing but complementary wound to yours so that you can work out your healing together. Sometimes you select a partner who you unconsciously sense will hold a safe energetic space for you to work through your unresolved emotional baggage and vice versa.
What’s Wrong With My Relationship?
So you’ve found a best friend, that wonderful BFF, or a life partner, or a life partner who is your BFF, and that’s a bonus, and you’re feeling high with the perfection of the relationship. You are ready to begin the rest of your life and everything is rosy……….until suddenly it isn’t. What’s wrong with my perfect partner or friend? They’re making me crazy. They keep doing things that irritate me. The people closest to you are there to push your emotional buttons.
That’s what the human journey is all about. That individual might be your partner, friend, sibling, parent, child, co-worker, colleague, patient, client, your bank advisor, the grocery store clerk, or your favourite mentor. You thought you were all set to cruise through life happily ever after. Relationships are opportunities to live and learn healthy ways of responding to other individuals, situations, or events. They’re a way to expand your perceptions in life and to develop your feelings of love and compassion. If your soul had wanted to live happily ever after, it would have stayed in the realm of spirit. The human journey is not for the faint hearted!! We are here to be challenged.