And does this pain stem from a deep sense of knowing that your soul is lacking a vital substance that is as central to your survival as air and water.
What is the real source and solution to our epidemic ennui?
At the core, humans crave emotional connection. Being disconnected from others is the real source of the sorrow that cries out from the deepest depth of our souls; and connecting to others is the cure.
Life on the Earth plane is what I call our love lab.
We are here to learn how to love ourselves and others fully.
And relationships are the stage upon which this laboratory lives.
The highest and most divine purpose of our intimate relationships is to help each other heal what I call the “Old Scars” from childhood. It is these Old Scars that block us from fully loving and connecting with others.
My research has proven that the Old Scars many carry from their “deformative” years (pun intended) create conflict in adult relationships. And, much research, including my own, has demonstrated that these relationship conflicts are known to cause HPA-axis dysfunction. (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3775283; Kiss Your Fights Goodbye: Dr. Love’s 10 Simple Steps to Cooling Conflict and Rekindling Your Relationship, NY: Hay House, Inc. 2014).
The chemical imbalances associated with HPA-axis dysfunction spark the Demand-Withdraw Negative Escalation Cycle, which, in turn, creates a vicious cycle of ever escalating fleeing reactions and intensified relationship conflict. All the fleeing and fighting disconnects--rather than connects--us to those we love.
As we help each other to heal our Old Scars, the chemical imbalances and fighting dissipates. Then, and only then, can relationships be mined for the hidden gold—the love and connection that is the buried treasure beneath the mess of our Old Scars.
Why is mining our relationships for healing so elusive to the masses?
For starters, at the deepest level, many of us don’t love ourselves as well as we should. The old, negative voices of our parents’ and significant others buzz in our brains like a swarm of killer bees.
When we enter relationships, especially intimate relationships, we hope that our partners’ love will somehow silence these voices and fill the aching, loveless void within.
Rarely does this kind of healing come about.
For two reasons:
First, we unconsciously choose partners who emotionally resemble the people who did us the most harm during our deformative years.
Humans are wired to restage their traumas, again and again reliving the primordial plays of their youth, all in the unconscious hope of finally achieving what I call our Happy Ending-the resolution of Old Scars.
Tragically, this restaging and reliving rarely brings that Happy Ending.
Why?
By choosing partners who are limited and damaged in the exact ways our parents and significant figures of our youth were, we easily fall into repetitions that recreate our earliest disappointments. (Our Happy Endings are elusive until we learn how to work with our partners to consciously provide each other with the Corrective Emotional Experiences that can heal our Old Scars.
Additionally, because the human mind is programmed to repeat Old Scars—rather than guiding our partners to help heal these Scars, we behave in ways that induce our partners to act the way the players of our youth did. In this way, your adult relationships repeat our Old Scars; and we end up being reinjured rather than repaired.
It has been my life mission to help every living soul break free of these tragic repetitions. My conflict-resolution method actually resolves these repetitive patterns and consequent fighting for the majority of those who follow it.