“Realizing I can be independent whether I am in a relationship or single is what healed my love life”

In a time and age where masculine energy, the side of your being that cultivates responsibility of taking actions and always trying to be in control, dominates most areas of our lives, dating and relationships can get complicated. 

On one hand, we are encouraged to pursue our goals independently and stand our ground alone when challenges rise. 

We are taught sometimes that asking for help is a sign of weakness and that being in a committed relationship is harmful to our independence. So while it is great to take the lead in our lives, a state of constant hyper-independence can pull us back instead of forward just like the story of one of my beautiful clients.

A stunning lady in her 30s decided to give NLP a try, a type of therapy that focuses on identifying negative beliefs you have about yourself and are unaware of them that make you develop or attract unpleasant situations or people. 

She was struggling to find a partner who met her standards and put effort into their relationship. She did believe that relationships are beautiful and heartwarming, however, as the session progressed another belief came up about herself as a single woman which was: “when I am single, I am free, I am independent and I can choose how to live” and because of that statement, her subconscious was wired to protect her from successful relationships as they would cause a “threat” to her freedom and independence. 

Diving deeper into the origin of this limiting belief, it was traced back to when the client was 4 years old and witnessed how her father walked out on their family.

 Losing that much of an important figure early in her life stimulated a suppressed traumatic response that pushed her to become hyper-independent, push her feelings aside and prioritize other people’s needs over her own. It also created the belief of “If my father did not love me enough to stay, no other man will” and this obviously stayed with her to later manifest itself in the future as a series of failed relationships.

When these beliefs and emotions were made aware, we started working right away on building new positive ones that would eliminate the existing negative beliefs. The main lesson was that even though the root cause of these beliefs happened between her parents, it does not mean that the same will happen to her. She deserves love, a healthy relationship, and a man who is ready to commit to her.

It takes great courage to face your feelings and the sides of you that you don’t like. We often avoid them like the plague because we fear that what might come out will be something we can’t handle, and the simple truth is, that if these feelings or “truths” were out of our capacity to deal with then they would not exist. Our subconscious suppresses them to protect us from facing them because it’s painful to our ego not because it’s going to kill us. 

Regardless of it all, you don’t have to do it completely on your own and you can always reach out for guidance whenever you want.