This was a question posted by a person on Quora, and this is the manner in which I answered it:
I have been involved in the world of mental health for almost 30 years now – both sides of the table. There is no such thing as healing just from ‘knowledge’ – it is just knowledge. The knowledge needs to be applied and that means being vulnerable enough to share what is truly going on in your life and processing whatever feelings and limiting beliefs you may have that are causing the issues that would bring you to employ a therapist in the first place.
Understand that the relationship between you and your practitioner is based on you being open and willing to do what you need to do and your practitioner’s ability to take that info and give you the ability to process whatever feelings need to be processed along with tools and techniques to better navigate your world.
Perhaps one of the better outcomes from your therapy would be able to better understand why it is that you are fearful of your therapist ‘coming close.’ What is the fear around that notion for you and how do you overcome it so that you can gain closer relationships with friends and loved ones in your own life. Therapy is a place where one learns all these things in a safe place where the learnings are generalized to the client’s/patient’s interactions with all the people with whom they interact every day.
So, this isn’t a venue for intellectualizing at all – it is a place of doing the healing work necessary to be free of whatever is burdening you enough to seek help.
I thank you for your question on behalf of anyone who may be reading it after it is posted.
Today we are going to speak to relationships, specifically how are your relationships working for you? This came about after my introduction to spiritual teacher Caroline Corey. She challenges us to be truthful with ourselves in terms of how it is that we are living our lives – certainly very aligned with all the work that I have put out there in the world to date.
Caroline has a basis of understanding that we all need to come to regarding what it is that we truly desire for ourselves regardless of the ‘thing’ is that we are speaking of. In this case, we are speaking of relationships with those people with whom we have chosen to partner.
Unfortunately, many people ‘settle’ for the comfort of what they know making excuses to stay in the relationship. Maybe you are being taken care of financially, have a beautiful home, and yet, you are not really happy with your partner. So it takes real courage to feel into what your relationship is bringing you and what it is not bringing you.
I have a client that I have worked with who had a wonderful home with her partner. He built a pool for her behind their home, knowing that this would make her happy. However, though the pool was appreciated, there were many issues inside the communication patterns that were not at all appreciated including his endless cheating with other women. Up until we looked at the meanings behind the behavior she felt that when she walked away from the relationship she had made a mistake – and yet, she was not happy with this man – not really not only because of his endless cheating but because he did not share her values on many other parts of her life. It seemed that he would constantly find ways to sabotage her career which she had worked very hard to build, by bringing in all types of emotional turmoil taking her energy away from her work.
Now, you may not have such a large amount of issues in your relationship, however, it demonstrates how the idea of having a partner can harm one’s own life’s purpose, as was the case in this situation.
So, what do you want in your relationship with your partner? Are you able to honestly say that you are receiving it?
Do you have the freedom to be who you truly are feeling supported in living your own purpose be it a career or a stay-at-home mother? Many of my clients have partners who are uninterested in what they are doing, even though that which they are doing is a huge part of their identity, it being the purpose they have found in life. This is certainly something that I lived through myself with my ex-husband. Though he was the one who truly wanted me to find my purpose, once I found it he had no interest in it. And, yet I was to be involved in all his artistic endeavors. Luckily I liked being involved with most of his artistic endeavors, however, the relationship was one-sided and as a result, it felt unfair in terms of the activities that we did together.
Are you feeling stimulated by your partner in terms of growth and development? So many people that I work with find their partners to be rather dull, wanting to do the same things all of the time. There is never a desire to explore new places, new activities, new relationships with new people. In some cases, the screens of their lives are dictating what they do with their time which in too many cases excludes their partner’s involvement with them.
In some situations, the issues can be healed between the partners and in some cases, it is time to have the courage to move on to the unknown.
I have another client who came to me with issues of being fearful of speaking her truth with her husband because every time she did, they would get into a huge argument. During our work together she has learned how to better communicate what she really wants in a simple and easy-going way. Her relationship is much healthier for being willing to shift her communication style in a manner that her husband can hear her desires and help her to achieve them. He even wants to help her to achieve them – so it was her fear of communicating which was the issue, not her husband in this case.
If you are a person who is in a relationship that is not serving you – where you are unhappy and unfulfilled, understand that here are many reasons for this to occur. The first step is to be honest with yourself that you are unhappy and then the next step is to learn how to create a relationship that serves both you and your partner better – because all relationships do indeed take both people to work well. However, we need to know if it is really our partner that is the issue, or our inability to ask for what we want in a way that will be understood by our partner.
***For anyone who is looking to improve their current relationship or anyone who is having a tough time creating a great relationship with a significant other I am running a 3-Day Retreat “Bringing True Love to Your Primary Relationship” Oct. 2-4, 2021 at the lovely Villa Serena Holist Hotel & Retreat Center right on the water in the Dominican Republic. You can find out more about it here:
Today we are going to learn how to create excellent health based on the work of Anthony Norvelle – an author and a speaker who taught about New Thought from the 60s to the 80s. His teachings are very aligned to everything that I have learned in my hypnosis and NLP training over the years, where our thoughts really do create our lives – and within those thoughts are the thoughts that let us know how we are doing emotionally. So, Norvelle’s Master Key teachings have everything to do with emotional stability. But, how does one achieve emotional stability?
It all goes back to the desires we all have to have a healthy life. There is a lot contained in the message here so I am only going to hit on the foundational concepts.
We need to have security and peace of mind backed up with the faith that what we desire becomes an expectation – that it is going to happen. This occurs when we let go of the messes we created in our past.
Certainly, having enthusiasm for what we are doing will propel us to where we want to go, however, Norvelle speaks to the necessity for self-confidence to allow us to create what we want to create in our lives.
Being unselfish, sharing that which we have with others brings about a higher purpose to our lives and positive emotions with it.
Good health brings youthfulness and vitality. It is the chemical balance in the body that allows us to be healthy. By keeping ourselves emotionally healthy we are able to repair the damage that is done to the glands and give the body the basic building blocks it needs through the whole foods we eat so it can do the repair work necessary.
Friends and social connections are important because they bring the emotions of love, enthusiasm, charity, and good by sharing with others. In fact, a life without love Novelle states is like living in a tomb. He understands true love as one of the most unselfish of emotions with which I am certainly in agreement.
Right work with the right motivation to make work pleasurable is very important. I again am in total agreement having had too many jobs to count that were miserable for me to do. Yet, in those jobs that I loved, I looked forward to going to work each day. It had everything to do with love, hope, expectation, anticipation, and unselfishness for the clients, key emotions for a good fit for a job. Employers are one aspect, however, we also need to be doing work that fills our soul – something that we enjoy doing with people that we want to be doing it with.
Happiness is a state of mind which we can create when we indulge in healthy emotions habitually with the end result bringing us health and wellbeing. Norvelle suggests that we wake up every day with the expectation of great things happening. When we find ourselves in negative emotional states, to note it and find our way back to a positive emotional state. I have actually found that one can indeed do this if one so chooses. There used to be a time when I would spend weeks being upset about something. And, then I had a chat with a friend of mine and she told me how she did the same thing, and then started to limit the time that she felt bad to a couple of days, then a day, then a few hours, then one hour, then half an hour, then 15 minutes and then 10 minutes and then 5 minutes and lastly 3 minutes or so and then she is done with the negative feelings. When she told me this process she went through I loved it and made a decision for myself to allow myself to be upset about something only for a short while – to do whatever needed to be done to turn it around in my own mind so I could get on with the process of living. This was many years ago now, and it still works to this day. Of course, doing meditation or self-hypnosis on a daily basis helps even more as the relaxed state allows one to be much more emotionally stable after the practice.
Our emotions are so important when it comes to being healthy beings. I know this from my history with bipolar all those years ago – never was there a time when I had balanced emotions for close to 2 decades and now my emotions are very balanced 95% of the time. I certainly do have issues that I can be upset about, but I can determine how upset and how much energy I am going to put into it – and that is the control that we can take should we choose to. To love ourselves enough and the people around us enough to stop allowing our negative emotions to run us, and instead to realize that all of life is nothing more than perception and we have a choice in the perception that we choose to have. It is not up to anyone else – it is up to us to be responsible for how we feel and to keep these emotions healthy and happy (at least most of the time as sad things do occur in life as do frustrating ones – but we get to choose how long we stay in those negative places).
***For anyone who is looking to have a healthier marriage or partnership or for those who are having a hard time developing such a relationship I am running a 3-Day Retreat at the lovely Villa Serena Holistic Hotel & Retreat Center right on the water of the Dominican Republic. To learn more go to:
Today I want to speak to the idea that being a loving person in a primary relationship as well as any type of relationship requires a sense of humility and a recognition of the importance of being honorable.
All too often we humans create a sense of who is ‘right’ and who is ‘wrong’ instead of realizing that there are infinite ways to understand a circumstance. We have this great need to jump to conclusions that are anything but aligned with reality because our minds are wonderful at creating stories to back up our feelings. Yet, in a truly loving relationship, there is no need to create a story. Instead, there is a desire to understand through honest communication what is going on because there has been a foundation of trust upon which to build.
I know that in my truly loving relationships the disagreements, the need to prove the other wrong was never there. Questions were asked and discussions were had, pure and simple. When relationships started to lose the loving quality, stories were created and resentment ensued. In these cases, I pulled myself out of these relationships not desiring to be a ’cause’ of someone else’s distress – because, in many of these cases, it had less to do with who I am and more of who the other person was being for whatever their reasons. Without having control over the other person, the healthiest thing to do was to limit the time with them.
Going back to my most loving of relationships, and I have many of them thank, God – I show up for these folks as they show up for me. It is just an understanding that we are there for one another. We may not agree on everything in life, but what we do agree on is that we truly care and support one another in those ways that we can as we can without the need to be asked in many cases. We just are there for one another because we can.
It is through these loving relationships that we have in our lives that the difficulties can be made much easier. It is through the difficulties of others that we can rise to the occasion to bring the love and care deepening the trust and love inside that relationship. Because it is only when we are able to be there for others in this sort of manner that we can truly understand what real ‘love’ is all about. It isn’t forcing another to be perfect according to your ideals, and it isn’t about having to check everything that you do and say. It is about being loved and accepted by each other for exactly who you are realizing that till you are perfect, there is no need to expect that from anyone else – that is the humility.
Being honorable has everything to do with being your word. So often these days people will promise things to forget about the promise or find a way to wiggle out of it. Best to demonstrate that you can be on time doing those things you promised to do. Or, do not make the promise in the first place, which is the more honorable thing to do if you are not in a place where you can or want to follow through.
It is about knowing that we all have our difficulties in life and to be present to the degree that we can be to be loving and supportive of our loved ones – because maybe it was this person who helped you through your difficult time, maybe without even being asked, just jumping in to make sure you were okay. Because at least to my mind that is what a loving relationship is – being present, being caring, being humble, and being interested. It does not take much to demonstrate these attributes these days, not at all. Just letting the person you claim to care so much about a message, a text, a phone call, a video call, or even a letter or a card to let them know that you were thinking of them and that you care and are interested.
Learning: All truly loving relationships are built on a foundation of humility and being honorable. Be your word and realize there are many ways in which to understand a given circumstance. More often than not we do not have all the information till we ask for it. And, follow through on what you said you would do, timely.
***If you are in a relationship where you would love to learn better communication skills or are a person who has yet to find the correct person for yourself I am running a 3-Day Retreat at the lovely Villa Serena Holistic Hotel & Retreat Center Oct. 2-4, 2021 right on the water of the Dominican Repbulic. It is the perfect place for both deep transformative work and relaxation. You may get more information here:
There are many ways for one to ‘feel’ love that have very little to do with a primary relationship. It has more to do with the gut response that one may feel not necessarily on any one particular person, but on something that brings these feelings into one’s consciousness. Because we can gain these loving feelings in many different ways in different aspects of our lives. This is something that I do not believe is spoken about enough so I want to address it.
One of the areas in life that we can have loving feelings for would be our friends. There are certain people in our lives who have demonstrated how much they care by being present – even being able to forecast when you needed something without your telling them. These are people who are highly tuned into your energy because of their care for you. I know that when I think of those who have been there through thick and thin with me throughout my life – these are the purest of ‘love’ feelings coming through. I have many thoughts of certain people who when I think of them or speak about them a loving feeling overcomes me because these people are so integral to my life – none of them are from my family of origin, yet all of them have brought something incredibly meaningful to my life and many still do, even those who have since passed away.
For some, loving feelings come through with the close relationship that they have formed with their pet(s). We know that some people love their pets so much they will put themselves into a huge amount of debt to take care of any health problems that their pet may have. This may be because the feelings of guilt for not doing whatever they can for their pet are worse than the cost to do what they can for their pet. I have had clients in the past whose pets have died placing them into deep depressions, the loving commitment to them being that strong. I had one landlord that had his pets cremated and placed in urns that were on the mantlepiece of his fireplace. He made of pointed out the urns and explained what they were upon my moving into his home.
Experiences that we so love to take part in for our love of the activity. For me, that would be travel – not the process of getting to the local. It’s about being in the new location and taking in the culture, learning about the people, the history, and architecture, etc. These are so intriguing to my mind that I get a real feeling of the love of the experiences of just being in that new realm of existence.
Those who love sports, especially those that actually take part in the activity itself will put themselves through what some would feel is torturous to be able to reach the level of competence some do. It is only through that feeling of love for that activity that one would be willing to go to those extremes.
Music can most definitely bring emotions of love – as people find that certain musicians are able to set
off those neurochemicals of love – wanting to listen to the songs over and over again. I will never forget sitting in the Paradise Theater in Boston when I was a college student with a few close friends of mine, watching my favorite band ever perform, Renaissance, with Annie Haslam right in front of me, having a center first-row seat. I had spent thousands of hours listening to the band even at that time in my life after my oldest sister had turned me onto that band while I was in high school.
Art can bring feelings of love as well. One of the things my art collector friend told me was that the art that was on his walls (and there were no open spaces on his walls given all the art he had) spoke to him. He loved the images and the history behind much of the art that he purchased. In some cases, he got to know some of the contemporary artists personally bringing a deeper meaning of love for the pieces of art from those particular artists.
Some may argue that these are not actually feelings of love that I am speaking to, yet, I would like to disagree with them because we do have it in our being to find love for many people and many types of experiences that we humans have the ability to enjoy.
I believe it is important to understand what these feelings of ‘love’ feel like so that we know that we are capable of feeling them, so that when we have the opportunity to bring in that special person, that we have a way to understand what those feelings actually feel like. Because, it is the deeper feelings of love that matter – not the initial chemical attraction – but to get to the much deeper long-lasting understanding of what ‘love’ really means to us and how we encode it in our mind and body so we can recognize what it is when we feel it.
Learning: There are many ways in which we humans can experience feelings of love many of them having nothing at all to do with a primary relationship. It is through getting in touch with these feelings of love in these other domains that we can better understand how we feel ‘love’ bringing deeper meaning to our lives.
***For anyone who is in a relationship and wants to make it stronger or is unable to figure out why it is so hard to find a loving partner I am running a 3-Day Retreat at the lovely Villa Serena Holistic Hotel & Retreat Center right on the water of the Dominican Republic Oct. 2-3, 2021. It’s the perfect local to do deep transformational work and relax. For more information:
