This is a part of the “Ask Jane” Series,
in which Jane answers questions
you email to her that of concern to you.
(Names are changed to protect your privacy.)
Just go to the “Contact Jane” page
and ask your question in the contact form.
This “Ask Jane” came up during a TimeLine session, with a client I’ll call Sarah. Click here to see past “Ask Jane” Q & A’s.
Sarah said her boyfriend usually gets home from work before she does. The other night he had told her he was going to make dinner for her, but when she got home from work it wasn’t even started, and he was involved in doing something else. And so she got upset about it, feeling as though it means he doesn’t value her. And then the next night she came home and he had dinner all ready for her, and he teased her, “I learned that if I don’t have dinner ready for Sarah, it’s really a big thing. And she said to him, “Well did you do it because you wanted to do it, or because you felt pressured to do it.”
Jane: This is the big trap that many people in relationships fall into. There are certain symbolic things that you (like many people) require that mean to you that you are valued or loved or respected, or whatever the symbol represents. And you feel your boyfriend doesn’t value you, love you, and so on if he doesn’t do them. And not only do you expect him to do the specific symbolic thing, but you expect him to think of it himself and do it because he wants to.
But this is an impossibility right from the start. Your boyfriend is thinking in terms of what you want. He can’t possibly want to do it originating from himself, because he’s catering to your particular symbolism. So he has to focus on what you tell him you want, rather than what’s really true for him. And what you’re asking for isn’t the real thing that matters to you any way. It can’t really give you the knowing you are valued.
Everyone inherently starts out knowing they are valuable, loveable, worthy of respect and so on. And they have experiences in life in which they feel loved, valued, and so on, because they’re open to receiving it. And it doesn’t have to come in a particular form. But when they make limiting decisions* that they aren’t valuable and so on, they close the channels for truly receiving these. Therefore they then require certain symbolic things from other people in order to feel that they are valued, loved, and so on. And when they don’t get those symbolic things, they think that other person is withholding it from them, as in your relationship with your boyfriend.
Sarah: Then how does it work with a couple? You have to compromise and push and pull to know what the other person wants. I thought in intimate relationships you just do things for each other.
Jane: It’s not about what the person wants that’s the issue, but what is motivating him wanting it. If it’s substituting for some emotional need that he doesn’t have access to receiving, because he doesn’t have the channels open, it won’t work and will conflict with you. It won’t work in terms of happiness or things really working well for both of your highest interest or joy. The only way to accommodate someone’s substitute desires is squelching and limiting yourself, and making yourself smaller, because it doesn’t leave you free to be true to yourself. It doesn’t lead forward. It contracts the relationship.
If the relationship is based on catering to each other’s substitute desires, you can get into your own little world of each other’s symbolic things. In order to do that, you have to make each other the center of your world. And if you go down that path, it doesn’t really expand the relationship. It insulates you from having to grow. You get more and more comfortable in a locked-in position, cut off from here-and-now experience. You become co-dependent on each other. Doing that insulates you from life, rather than opening up to it and growing — which I know you and your boyfriend really want. But with some couples that kind of compromise is the best they can do, because they’re not really into transformation. And they’re willing to compromise what really matters to them, because they’re more invested in feeling stable and secure, which really means stuck. And they can do that — unless or until there is something in their soul that can’t stand it. And then they end up physically or emotionally hurting each other, and/or leaving.
The part of you that is invested in the security and co-dependency is the part of you where there are limiting decisions*, resulting in you sacrificing being the divine you — as big, and as free, and as empowered, and as creative as you really are.
But you can have it all, all of it — the freedom to be true to yourself, as well as an intimate, committed relationship. This is a process. You go to where there is a conflict, where something is not working. And that alerts you. “Look over here. This is getting in the way of life working.” Compromise over something that really matters to you is never something that has to happen. When you’re in a relationship where there is a deep loving connection, and where you are connected to the divine love and truth, then certain things that used to be important to you no longer are, because they were substitute desires. And if there is a desire that either of you feels invested in that is causing a conflict between you, then one or both of you are invested in a substitute desire, resulting from an unhealed issue. And so you get to what it is and work through it, which then allows you to get more in contact with what really does matter to you.
* Limiting Decisions: Unconscious decisions usually made before 6 or 7, and sometimes in adolescence. They are always some form of life doesn’t work, and usually that there is something inherently wrong with you — such as “I am bad, worthless, unlovable …. People can’t be trusted …”
This is a part of the “Ask Jane” Series,
in which Jane answers questions
you email to her that of concern to you.
(Names are changed to protect your privacy.)
Just go to the “Contact Jane” page
and ask your question in the contact form.
This “Ask Jane” is a continuation of one that came out a few weeks ago called “My wife has gone off the deep end.” I’m describing the continuing journey of a client who is dealing with a very difficult situation at home. (Real names are never used.)
William was saying his wife is more irrational than ever and it is a living hell for him, and nothing seems to help her. He has no personal space in their home. Whenever she wants to ask or tell him something, she interrupts him or just starts talking. It doesn’t matter if he’s sleeping in the middle of the night or if he’s working in his office. She just barges right in. She tries to hang up the phone when he’s talking with someone she doesn’t want him to talk with. He’s making plans to work outside of his home so he can get some work done, but he feels bad for her spending the whole day alone by herself, probably in bed. She keeps thinking she has everything wrong with her and gets into panics about it, such as thinking she has diabetes when she doesn’t; she believes she isn’t breathing, when she is. And so he tries to demonstrate to her that she is in fact breathing, and so on. At times when she gets more rational, he thinks things are getting better. And then she goes off the wall again. He’s generally a person who is unemotional and never cries, but he’s been feeling so stressed he finds himself crying frequently.
William: I don’t know what a loving person is or does now.
Jane: This is not about doing the right behavior. I make suggestions to you, but that’s not necessarily what you should do. What’s more important than taking certain actions, or changing your behavior in relation to her, is changing your insides. This situation is causing you to have to deal with your own unhealed issues, and is breaking through your own emotional defense systems. I can’t necessarily tell you what the right thing to do is, because I’m not in your situation. But I can help you find where the emotional triggers and the limiting decisions are in you. We clear them and things shift in you; and then the way forward becomes clear.
Right now you’re supporting your wife’s insanity to some degree. A good example of this is when she is convinced there is something wrong with her, when there clearly isn’t. And then you get upset and try to convince her there isn’t. When you’re trying to convince her or change her, it’s because you’re leaning on her to define what reality is. You’re triggered by her irrationality, and are trying to get her to be rational. Any place you’re emotionally triggered by her and therefore coming from that triggered place, you’re supporting her insanity. You’re supporting the reality paradigm she’s living in. She’s in a power-struggle with you, and you’re in a power-struggle back, and feeling controlled by her. But what your power-struggle actually is against are the emotions that are coming up in you that are triggered by her.
The best thing you can do to help her is to come into reality yourself, and relate to her from that place. As you clear the limiting decisions in you and come more into reality, you’re connecting from a real place, from your heart to her heart, in the real world in relation to her. You’re holding the real truth of what’s really true between you and her, despite the way she’s acting, which is outside of the reality of what is true. And then you’re not being controlled by the insanity that’s coming from her. And you’re also coming from a compassionate place, which includes compassion for you. It includes you in the picture. And so you’re no longer letting her insanity rule the situation between you.
Who knows — this could be the best thing anyone could do for your wife right now — to be actually going through the process with her, and coming into reality and relating to her more and more in reality. It could perhaps bring her into reality.
This is a part of the “Ask Jane” Series,
in which Jane answers questions
you email to her that of concern to you.
(Names are changed to protect your privacy.)
Just go to the “Contact Jane” page
and ask your question in the contact form.
William: “My wife has gone off the deep end. She’s become very anxious, and is not willing to do the things that would help her. She has become completely reliant on me for everything, and needs constant reassurance. She is upset if I do anything without her. I am reaching the end of my rope. What should I do? I’m afraid she might harm herself if I don’t do whatever she wants me to do that she feels reassured by. I only see two choices: Either go along with her — or don’t and feel responsible for the state she gets into as a result, including that she might harm herself.”
Jane: “The bottom-line is if your life is appearing to not work, there are one or more limiting decisions you have that are distorting your experience of reality. And when they are cleared, the way you are looking at things will shift and a way forward will become apparent. The reason you see only those two choices is because the ground you are standing on is limited and structured by limiting decisions that filter in only the information that supports the limiting decisions, and not anything that doesn’t.”
When we discussed it further it turned out that how William was experiencing his wife was virtually identical with how he felt with his mother when he was a child. His mother was very anxious about life and felt to him to be very unstable. He felt responsible for her emotional state, and that what he did or didn’t do determined whether she felt OK or not. He thought he had married someone who was strong and the opposite of her, but now it turns out that underneath that apparent strength was someone who was actually very weak, and now he is right in the middle of the very thing he thought he had escaped.
After we cleared the limiting decision “he is responsible for the existence of the woman he’s dependent on,” William said he felt a huge weight had been lifted off of his shoulders.
He was standing on the new ground of realizing that he really didn’t have the power to determine his mother’s well-being and stability, no matter what he did or didn’t do; and so he was also now realizing that about his wife as well. He realized that he doesn’t have the power to personally solve the problem for his wife, and that nothing he can do will make any difference about it, as the source of it is only in her; and that he’s been enabling her to not find a real solution. And therefore he is no longer feeling hostage to her, or that her life depends on what he does or doesn’t do.
And so, because of this, he realized that there were, in fact, other options than the unacceptable ones he had felt locked in by. He can now relate compassionately to her, from standing on this new ground, making clear to her what he can and can’t do, and therefore no longer being co-dependent with her. He had felt imprisoned by his wife’s dysfunction, but what he had really been imprisoned by was his own.
This is a part of the “Ask Jane” Series,
in which Jane answers questions
you email to her that of concern to you.
(Names are changed to protect your privacy.)
Just go to the “Contact Jane” page
and ask your question in the contact form.
Lucy is a woman in her 40′s who has never been married, although she’s been in many relationships. She has been afraid of commitment, and generally has been in relationship with men who are also afraid of commitment.
Because of the work we’ve done clearing Limiting decisions in TimeLine sessions, Lucy is now in a committed relationship with a man I’ll call Alan. They are living together and seriously talking about getting married and having a baby. But some fears are coming up for both of them. They are thinking of making a pre-nuptial agreement in case they end up divorced, as many people end up doing. Lucy recently talked with a married friend of hers who was talking about how unhappy she is in her marriage. She talked contemptuously about her husband, and said “Just wait, 10 years down the line after you are married, you’ll see what I mean.” And another woman who was there agreed that was also how she felt about her marriage. Lucy said she was afraid that will end up happening to Alan and her.
Jane’s response: Up until fairly recent times, more people stayed married than got divorced. This was because of the social stigma about getting divorced, and perhaps even more so because women depended on their husbands to support them. Now, as women have come increasingly more into their power, this is no longer such a constraint.
To many people, marriage is a kind of a fantasy about home, and stability, and being loved forever, and safety against the trials of the world. They believe that in order to make marriage work, each partner has to sacrifice and compromise themselves to whatever degree is necessary. And this is a part of what defines love. Out of fear of losing this security, people lock themselves into a particular form, rather than paying attention to and evolving whatever is really true between them, as well as growing and evolving themselves. People, in general, don’t believe life will work if they follow the truth of what it actually is.
What is holding this is place are limiting decisions. If there are limiting decisions in there that cause you to lean on the marriage as a fixed form, in order to compensate for whatever is unhealed in you, it will get in the way of a true relationship between you — unless you recognize and deal with the limiting decisions. In fact the relationship form can be used to substitute for actually relating to each other. Examples of limiting decisions that result in this are decisions you can’t take care of yourself, you’re not good enough, you aren’t safe in the world, you can’t succeed in life, emotional intimacy is weak or dangerous, people can’t be trusted, other people’s needs are more important than yours. Using your relationship to compensate for these will ultimately cause one or both of you to attach yourself to each other, put huge pressure on each other to be other than who you are, create a sense of emptiness or meaninglessness, and probably cause one or the other of you to pull away from the relationship.
As conflict or pressures come up in the relationship that seem to get in the way of being true to yourself, it’s an indication of a limiting decision* distorting your perception of how things really are. And so it’s necessary to face and deal with the limiting decisions* — or you end up forfeiting a piece of yourself. You end up compromising what matters to you. And that’s what kills relationships. But that’s what people do all of the time, because they don’t make personal transformation an essential ingredient in their relationship. It’s never the nature of life or relationships that’s the problem. It is unhealed issues distorting your experience of reality that causes life to appear not to work.
* Limiting decisions: Unconscious decisions, usually made before the age of 6 or 7, such as “I am bad,” “I am not good enough.” “People can’t be trusted.” They are always some form of deciding that life doesn’t work, and usually that there is something inherently wrong with you.
This is a part of the “Ask Jane” Series,
in which Jane answers questions
you email to her that of concern to you.
(Names are changed to protect your privacy.)
Just go to the “Contact Jane” page
and ask your question in the contact form.
Below is a response Fellow Healer in New York had to a previous “Ask Jane” Q & A. For the original Ask Jane Q & A with Sally that this response is about, click here.
Fellow Healer in New York: YES.. and integrity means wholeness with self …watching the game may just be more in Integrity for this man, then following a promise he in retrospect will prob. not make again!
Jane: Being in integrity with himself is not about the action Sally’s husband (I’m calling Jake) decides to take one way or the other. It’s the process by which he gets there. People often take a stand on one particular action in order to feel in integrity with themselves, in order to hold some kind of boundary. But they only need to do that if there is an unhealed issue that results, for example, in them tending to give up their needs for the sake of the other person’s needs, if they don’t rigidly take this kind of stand. And so doing it that way is a part of an emotional defense system that ends up causing a separation with the other person in order to feel you can have your own needs met. This is the kind of dynamic that often occurs in relationships in which people believe it’s not possible to both be in integrity with yourself, and also be vulnerably and intimately connected to the other person.
The only way around that is to engage in dialog and be willing to explore your own unhealed issues (limiting decisions*), which requires letting go of control, rather than taking control, and results in transformation.
Jake had agreed to go to the event with Sally. But when he realized there was a crucial football game on TV that was really important to him that conflicted with him going to this event, his knee jerk emotional response was feeling forced to go to the event with Sally or she would probably get really upset. And so he emotionally rebelled by blurting out that he wasn’t going, before he could get his conscious mind around what he was doing. So basically his knee jerk response causes a separation, believing this to be the only way he could get to do what he really wanted to do. This is based on the very common belief that if we stay connected in reality with each other when there appears to be conflicting desires, there won’t be a solution. In other words that it’s not possible for life to work out well for all concerned. So Jake caused a separation because he believed that there inherently was a separation between his desires and Sally’s. It feels far less painful to cause a separation from an invulnerable, defended place, then to feel at the mercy of there inherently being a separation between himself and the person he loves, when he’s coming from a vulnerable place. And that is because if that would turn out to be true, it would be evidence that life doesn’t work.
But the truth is — the only thing that could create this situation not to work out well for all concerned are the limiting decisions* each person brings to the table, that causes each to respond from a defended place, rather than being open to a solution.
As it turned out, after they discussed the situation, a friend of Sally’s came to town and Sally asked her to go with her, which worked out well. What was keeping Sally stuck in having bad feelings toward Jake was a limiting decision* in her.
* Limiting Decisions: Unconscious decisions, usually made before the age of 6 or 7, such as “I am bad,” “I am not good enough.” “People can’t be trusted.” They are always some form of deciding that life doesn’t work, and usually that there is something inherently wrong with you.
This is a part of the “Ask Jane” Series,
in which Jane answers questions
you email to her that of concern to you.
(Names are changed to protect your privacy.)
Just go to the “Contact Jane” page
and ask your question in the contact form.
This question is from Jered in San Diego, CA (Real names are never used.)
Jered: As we all know, the head of BP Oil is being crucified in the press. From my perspective, his personal comments to the public and Congress are the sincere truth. His people are working around the clock to solve the problem. He goes home to the UK for personal family time and to get a few hours of fresh air. Certainly, his mind is preoccupied. Yet no matter what he does or says that is truthful – the public is unsatisfied. How does one handle these situations? It’s as though the truth is insufficient as compared to a carefully postured response.
Jane: We don’t really know the character of Tony Hayward, the CEO of BP, or really what responsibility he does or doesn’t hold for what occurred. But I agree that he may very well be saying the sincere truth, but that many people want a scapegoat. They want someone to emotionally pay for their suffering, as if that would make them feel better.
The whole idea of sharing the suffering seems to be very strong in people. If I am suffering, then you ought to be suffering also — or you don’t care, you are selfish, you are a bad person. But this has nothing to do with any real solutions, or any easing of human pain.
This is a triggered kind of emotional response, and not reality-based. Whether Mr. Hayward is outwardly suffering or not, has no actual benefit to anyone who is suffering because of the oil spill. It won’t have any effect on solutions being found any faster, or people getting compensated any faster.
People who are invested in finding scapegoats for their suffering are looking in the wrong direction for any real solutions, and are invested in holding in place vibrations of misery, hatred and pain. As a result, I would guess, this is only one of many sources of misery in their lives, as this is what they would attract.
To answer your question more directly, about how to handle this kind of situation: Rather than the focus being on how other people might respond to us, as if that is the source of our well-being, and trying to cater to them, the real dialog is between oneself and a larger perspective, beyond the limited human scope of things. In other words, specifically in relation to Mr. Hayward, I’m sure there are lessons for him to learn, or he wouldn’t have found himself in this kind of situation in the first place. For example it is possible that he might have an emotional defense system of keeping himself at a distance from getting emotionally or personally involved in general, believing that that will keep him safe. This experience could rock that defense system, and be a huge wake-up call for him. Perhaps if he had been more personally involved, he may have prevented what happened.
* Limiting Decisions: Unconscious decisions, usually made before the age of 6 or 7, such as “I am bad,” “I am not good enough.” “People can’t be trusted.” They are always some form of deciding that life doesn’t work, and usually that there is something inherently wrong with you.
Life is Meant to Work
Prepare Yourself for a New Reality
Tele-Seminar
Underneath everything in human experience — the pain, the tragedy, the heartache, the perceived unfairness — the bottom line always turns out to reveal love.
This is because the only thing that really exists between people, underneath their emotional defense systems, is love. Our defense systems are a way to shield us from the pain of believing we don’t have it. Think about the last time you got angry at someone. Perhaps you felt they were inconsiderate of you, or were disrespectful of you, or took something that mattered to you away from you. If you really knew, in that moment, that you are fully loved and cared about, wouldn’t that change that angry feeling? And if, because of knowing that you are fully loved and cared for, you began relating to your friend or significant other out of love and compassion, instead of anger, do you think that would change either their behavior toward you, or your perception of their behavior?
Underneath pain is love. When you are grieving because someone you love has died, what is underneath the grieving is love for them. When people rose up as a community after 9-11 occurred, what they were feeling was love for all of the people who died. The strange thing about that is why does it take a catastrophe for us to feel love for each other? Often we don’t really acknowledge how much we love someone until they are seriously ill and/or die. Why is that?
The feeling of love is very intense, when we really acknowledge the fullness of how we feel. Being able to feel the intensity of how much we actually love is an evolving process, as it seems to be too much for us to feel its full impact in our present vibrational state. It is generally in direct opposition to aspects of our defended self. In fact, it can split it open. The full intensity of our love can feel like an expansion of the self that goes further out than we have the ability to stretch. And so mostly we divert that feeling into our defenses, rather than admit what it really is.
It can also feel like a breaking open, when the vulnerable emotions break through the defenses, dissolving us into tears. You could say that is the meaning of a broken heart. The heart breaks open, so that the emotions that have been trapped by the rigidity of the defenses can rush out. When a loved one dies, we cry for the pain and loss, rather than embrace the intense love we feel for them, right now, even with their passing. The depth and intensity of our feelings are often more easily diverted to hate or pain than to opening ourselves up to the intense vulnerability of love, which cuts through all of our defenses, false personas and worlds.
To listen to the Preview audio for the next “Life is Meant to Work” Tele-seminar, click here.
For the info page with all of the details about the upcoming “Life is Meant to Work” Tele-seminar, click here.
This is a part of the “Ask Jane” Series,
in which Jane answers questions
you email to her that of concern to you.
(Names are changed to protect your privacy.)
Just go to the “Contact Jane” page
and ask your question in the contact form.
This question was from Fiona in Oceanside (Real names are never used):
Fiona: I’m always sacrificing my own welfare for the benefit of my husband and my parents, in order to make them happy. They seem to be so unhappy and have so many difficulties in their lives. And so I end up not doing what’s good for myself. I don’t know what to do about this.
Jane: You are not responsible for another person’s suffering. Each person is on their own personal path in life. And if they find themselves in the position of suffering, it’s because of an unhealed issue, a limiting decision that they made, not because of the nature of life. For instance a person might make the limiting decision that there’s not enough to go around, and as a result of having made that decision, they always find themselves in financial difficulty. The unconscious mind is invested in proving that our limiting decisions are true, which is the reason that people keep finding themselves in the same kind of life patterns over and over again, even when they know better. From what you’ve previously told me, your parents have locked themselves into a very limited and controlling way of living their lives, in which they don’t allow anything in that doesn’t fit what they are used to. And by doing this, they are holding in place their unhappiness. And then they are expecting their children to compensate for that.
This is most likely a pattern for your family that has been going on for generations, and keeps perpetrating the idea that suffering and sacrifice are necessary. It is representing a paradigm of reality that life is about suffering. And now, as an adult, you are attracting into your life similar kinds of people, so you can play the same role in relation to them. You taking on other people’s suffering, in order to relieve them of it, is reinforcing this mistaken idea. It is not helping. It’s coming from a limiting decision in you. But you coming into joy and working on your own life, and clearing these issues for yourself, and getting into a place of joy and happiness, and not taking on suffering — is representing a paradigm of reality that is helpful for all of those around you.
*Limiting decision: A decision made in early childhood that is some form of that life doesn’t work, and usually that there is something inherently wrong with you — such as “I am powerless,” “bad,” “without value;” or “The world is a dangerous place,” “People can’t be trusted,” and so on.
This is a part of the “Ask Jane” Series,
in which Jane answers questions
you email to her that of concern to you.
(Names are changed to protect your privacy.)
Just go to the “Contact Jane” page
and ask your question in the contact form.
This question is from Laura in Encinitas, in the process of her TimeLine Session with Jane:
Laura: What if in 5 years, my boyfriend decides he’s done with me? Then I’ll be single and 47. My fear is that then that will happen again, and again, and again with all of my relationships with men after that. I’ll be good enough for a while until they get sick of me.
It is similar to how my father treated my mother. My mother always put a lot of energy into looking good for him, but he never noticed her. When the family went to a restaurant together, he wouldn’t pay attention to her or to me, but his attention was, instead, on blatantly flirting with the waitress. And the message was, “he’s a man, so he can do whatever he wants to.”
Jane: The way you interpreted this, then as a child and now, has to the with limiting decisions you made, which had to do with your father having all of the power and value; and you and your mother having none and being valueless. But how you interpreted it wasn’t in reality.
Since your father was making such a big effort to make himself appear to be so important and have the power, no doubt he was compensating for a limiting decision in himself, something along the lines that he doesn’t have power and value. And so he was behaving the way he was, not for the thing itself, but for the symbolism of it. He’s trying to feel like a man, basically. And the only reason a person has to do something like that to feel like a man is when they don’t really feel like a man. He’s trying to compensate for an unhealed issue.
So it’s not about the girl that he’s flirting with. It’s not about any of it. It’s really about that there are unhealed issues in him that he’s not dealing with or doesn’t know how to. And in truth what he is doing is as painful for him on a soul level, as it is for his wife and children, because he’s essentially betraying himself. When a person does something like that, he is reinforcing the limiting decision, even though it feels to him that he’s compensating for it.
The reason it’s such a big issue for you, is because when you have a limiting decision such as men can’t be trusted, to you that’s the way men are, and you then believe you have no choice about men. And so then you’re a part of the problem, and when you clear it you’ll be a part of the solution. By the fact that you made this limiting decision, you’re holding in place that reality just as much as the man who is in the heart of the dynamics of it. Both are holding in place an untruth.
There’s a really big difference between interpreting this as this is just the nature of men, all they care about is their genitals — and realizing that that’s not what feeds this. The source of it, for those who have this unhealed issue, is a deep pain that they’re not powerful, or they’re not good enough as a man. But, instead, you saw them as having the power, which is the illusion they’re trying to present in order to compensate for feeling powerless. As soon as you realize that it’s not that they have power when they do whatever the behavior is, it’s that they feel powerless, then it puts you out of the position of feeling powerless in relation to them.
*Limiting decision: A decision made in early childhood that is some form of that life doesn’t work, and usually that there is something inherently wrong with you — such as “I am powerless,” “bad,” “without value;” or “The world is a dangerous place,” “People can’t be trusted,” and so on.
This is a part of the “Ask Jane” Series,
in which Jane answers questions
you email to her that of concern to you.
(Names are changed to protect your privacy.)
Just go to the “Contact Jane” page
and ask your question in the contact form.
This question was asked by a client of mine named Sue:
Sue told me she was feeling lonely and not happy in her relationship with her husband. She felt he spent too much time working or doing other activities he likes to do. And often when he was with her, he wasn’t really focused on her, although he was sometimes. She wanted him to spend more time with her, really focused on her, but didn’t want to stop him from doing the things he enjoys doing, and wondered what she should do.
My response: I think what you’re really wanting is intimacy. And the lack of intimacy in your life is what is resulting in you feeling lonely. The particular amount of time with your husband focusing his attention on you, is just a symbol of that for you. But you not receiving intimacy, has to do with you not having the channels open for receiving it, in other words, an inability to receive it. Intimacy can’t be gotten by controlling another person’s behavior.
This is actually an interlocking issue between you and your husband, because he also doesn’t have the channels for intimacy open. And so the solution is not to have him stop doing what he likes to do and focus his attention on you. Approaching this by trying to get him to focus more time on you is an attempt to control what can’t be controlled in reality, and it is a backwards approach to the problem. The problem is not about what each of you wants being in conflict, but it’s about your unhealed issues distorting each of your experience of reality in a way that proves your limiting decisions to be true. When people make a limiting decision, the unconscious mind gets invested in proving that it is true. That’s what causes people to keep repeating dysfunctional patterns in their lives, doing things over and over again that they know isn’t good for them, or getting into the same kind of dysfunctional type of relationship. In this case, the limiting decision, and what your unconscious is invested in proving, has to do with believing you are not lovable. And so the solution is to transform the unhealed issue.
When the limiting decisions in both of you that are closing the channels for you being able to have intimacy in relationships are cleared, than the issue of how much and in what way you spend time with each other will natural flow in a way that creates intimacy. The truth is that intimacy is something you both want, as it’s inherent in intimate relationships. When you get to the real issue, you find that what each of you wants is not actually in conflict with the other.
*Limiting decisions are decisions made usually before the age of 6 or 7 years old, that are some form of deciding that there is something inherently wrong with you, and/or some form of that life doesn’t work — Such as “I am bad,” “I am worthless,” “People can’t be trusted.”
