A Breakdown of the Concepts of Love19:47 Nov 18 2024
Times Read: 88
Posted by Sirilak Colon;
The reason you're attracted to someone is not what you think~~ the 3 stages of a relationship!!
You see a woman or man in a crowded room and it feels like an uncontrollable energy is drawing you to them. You've met your "soul mate" and you instinctively feel it - your gut, your insides, your mind formally explode with Amor's phenylethylamine-tipped arrows as they strike your skin. You think that this feeling of "love" is so real and pure that nothing can keep up with it, and although you're partly right, there's a lot more behind the story of human attraction.
According to research by Jung, Freud and other psychologists, you choose a partner based on the composite picture of your primary references when you were a small child. These were the people you depended on for everything. You were totally dependent on them and in their human weakness and ignorance they made mistakes in your upbringing. Maybe they were distancing, controlling, shameful or even cruel. In other cases, you may have had references who were loving, kind, patient, and supportive. You may have also experienced a combination of these traits from birth through the age of three to five. In that time your concept was shaped by the world and love.
The instinctual attraction you feel romantically towards another person as an adult is just a subconscious desire to heal the wounds your primary references inflicted. We consciously want euphoria and all the things that come with idealized romantic love - that love that we fall into so easily in the early stages of a relationship when we are idealized and fantasized and joyfully offer ourselves to our romantic partners.
Subconsciously, however, there are deeper needs that cry out for attention, and these play out through what has been described as an "Imago Match." The image is the subconscious mind that behaves very much like the child that was present during his education.
The subconscious mind acts according to its wishes and emotions and nothing else. It ignores all sense. It does what it wants and leaves out societal norms, courtesy, compassion and other important developments in the human psyche. It acts like a bio-computer that stores all your memories, including things that happened to you when you were so small that they couldn’t be embedded in your conscious memory. Certain convictions you have about yourself that don’t seem to make sense are often formed in the subconscious mind due to these very early memories. Some say they have even been taken over by past lives.
𝘿𝙞𝙚 𝙚𝙧𝙨𝙩𝙚 𝙋𝙝𝙖𝙨𝙚 𝙙𝙚𝙧 𝙇𝙞𝙚𝙗𝙚: 𝘿𝙖𝙨 𝘾𝙝𝙚𝙢𝙞𝙚-𝙀𝙭𝙥𝙚𝙧𝙞𝙢𝙚𝙣𝙩~
In the first stages of love, we feel like the "golden child" of our families, even if we weren't treated the same way when we were little. Norepinephrine, dopamine, phenylethylamine, and other neurochemicals turn our bodies into a straight-up chemistry experiment when we are inundated with substances that make our hands sweat, butterflies appear in our bellies and make our hearts race. The "high feeling" we feel in the first stage of love is necessary in order to connect us with someone who can help us heal the deepest wounds we carry, and our subconscious knows exactly who that is.
When love starts to feel banal and exhausting, we have usually entered the second phase of romantic love, which turns into a "fight". It's important to understand that this phase is not meant to stop. If you're dating someone who puts you down, ignores you, holds back love, isn't really in love with you or treats you less than great, in five minutes another bus is coming. It's time to move on. For some reason, they are not the person who is going to help you complete the healing you need to have fully functional, real love.
The first stage of love is full of passion, euphoria and lust.
They may have served the purpose of wounding you in the same way you were wounded before so that you'll realize healing is necessary, but they won't be the channel through which change ultimately happens.
In the first phase, however, love feels like an altered state of consciousness - the closest we know to spiritual happiness - and it can feel incredible!
The second phase of love: The Power Struggle~
In the second phase of love, the signs are almost as universal as in the first. Instead of feeling excitement and euphoria, you’ll probably feel unwanted and unloved when you consciously realize that your partner doesn’t meet all of your emotional needs. Eventually, you'll learn how to meet these needs in a more compassionate way, but during this phase it often looks like this:
The 2. Phase is a power struggle:
⚪ He or she doesn't feel loved, so they start withdrawing or being withdrawn
⚪ The other partner feels abandoned and acts impulsively
⚪ Someone cries a lot; someone screams a lot
⚪ Excuses and blame are the norm
⚪ We tend to see only the negatives in our partners and forget about all the positives
⚪ Frustration and despair take the place of enthusiasm and happiness
⚪ Every button we have feels like it's being pushed or triggered (and that's how it should be!) )
⚪ There is a missing real connection
⚪ There can be explosive quarrels and reconciliation
⚪ It is likely that both partners will constantly feel lower anxiety and pain when they repeat the emotional patterns of their childhood
It's important to understand that this phase will end. Many partnerships do not survive this phase because they do not understand its importance and necessity. Here our higher selves will either do one of two things: end the relationship and break up, or grow over the relationship.
3rd phase: True love~
As soon as we are exhausted from the struggles between our inner, wounded selves in communion with another person’s wounded self, we can decide to “give up.” We can also choose to take the relationship to a conscious level. Conscious love is not based on crazy chemistry or constant fighting. There is no emotional abandonment or constant back and forth to make someone else give us what we need to feel loved.
Instead, we learn to grow. We stretch ourselves into better ways to express our needs, our hearts, and our feelings of abandonment, rejection, or fear.
Both partners are beginning to see how they are self-creating behaviors and outcomes through their own actions within the relationship. They will become more open to giving their partners love the way they need to receive it, rather than using violence, manipulation, or retreat. They’re really interested in supporting the other person rather than just having their own needs met and that’s a big change happening.
We begin to lay down the defense mechanisms we developed as survival strategies when we were injured children and begin to open up to true intimacy - physically, emotionally, sexually, and spiritually.
We may be alive and fulfilled, but the same neuro-chemicals that were present in the early stages of love are being replaced by a chemical mixture similar to what advanced meditators experience in compassionate experiences - like a Buddhist monk, we start differently on the "blows of life" to react.
More plasticity is developing in the brain, and we even experience an increase in our immune system and relaxation of the nervous system. We’re not constantly in fight mode or flight mode, and while we’ll continue to have challenges, we take full responsibility for everything that happens in our lives - and that frees us to love in an elevated way.
While I don't subscribe to everything said here, particularly since I believe that aware individuals can move through the second phase with rapidity and into concious love with relative ease, I did find the final part to be quite intriguing in the term of 'elevated love' and taking responsibility. This I think is a key to understanding what some would define as polyamory- the capability to romantically love more than one single being. It's not to be equated with sexual promiscuity in my mind, although the two may appear to be tangentially related at first glance.
In this scenario, the love is elevated above a 'simple' physical attraction and into a space of emotional and mental connection, forming a relationship that is more likened to a kinship, but with open boundaries to explore sensuality, sexuality and vulnerability, with a level of trust and safety that can only be maintained through effective and open communication and consent within the agreed upon boundaries, negotiated throughout the course of the relationship.
These are flexible, yet tacit understandings and should be reexamined on a regular basis, primarily to ensure that no party develops a sense of obligation to participate in something with which they feel discomfort.
Consider that familial love can be extended to multiple individuals, then ask why it is that western culture in particular has a mindset of monogamy and which societal influences and dogmatic edifications are defining that.
Removing that influence from the equation and applying a conscious love principle changes that remaining equation drastically.
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