toxic relationship
Keeping The Family Out Of Your Love Life
Family and our relatives have a huge impact on our romantic lives, whether we realize it or not. We bring so much from the way we were raised into our love relationships and marriages.
But having had a difficult childhood does not necessarily set us up for challenges and failure in our relationships. In fact, for those who are self-aware it can be an advantage of choosing not to bring the toxic drama of your childhood home into a current relationship.
For example, if you saw your father treat your mother without respect, you might set your mind to never allowing that happen in your own relationship. This kind of courage and personal responsibility can break the cycle.
We all have things that happen in childhood things that happen that are out of our control, it is all in how you deal with them that forms us as adults. We have a choice always.
The other aspect is culture and the values and customs with which we were raised. Depending on the circumstances it can have a significant impact on our relationships. Once again it is a choice how we want to handle it. Do we follow the family traditions, or not?
It takes courage and an open mind to march to your own drum. Standing up for what you believe can also go a long way. Sometimes this is vital to ensure a healthy, happy relationship that will last.
Of course, the biggest challenge for most couples is having the family up in your relationship business. Do your relatives influence your decisions and interfere in your relationship? Navigating a relationship or marriage successfully in this day and age is challenging enough.
Successful Relationships Begin With Self-Love
How do you ensure your relationship will work long-term? Many callers ask me this question almost every day. In my experience, there needs to be a balance of love, caring, respect and truth for any relationship to last. If you do not have these components in a relationship, more than likely it will not work out. If a relationship is out of balance, then it usually is too one-sided and not serving your highest good.
The key first step is to love and respect yourself, because when you love and respect yourself, you will also receive more love and respect from others. There is not much of a future for any relationship that is based on the self-sacrifice of one party. It never lasts and typically does not end well. Balance is required in matters of the heart.
Along with the respect you deserve in the way you are treated. it is loving, caring, and respectful? This is applicable to everyone in your life, including romantic partners, friends, co-workers, family, and relatives.
Respect is not only something we must demand, but we must also set boundaries for it in our daily life. When a boundary is repeatedly disregarded or violated by someone in your life, then something needs to change. This is when you have to say, enough.
Sometimes the hard decisions need to be made. If someone is not respecting you in your relationship, treating you poorly, and not meeting your most essential wants and needs, then it is time to make a change. Respect yourself enough to end it.
Too many people do not believe they deserve love and respect, for various reasons. The problem often begins in childhood. It is important to realize you do and to start loving yourself a little more – not in an egotistical way, but in a way that you love and respect yourself enough to want only the best for you and to no longer settle for anything less.
Conscious Conflict Resolution
Dealing with tension and conflict is one of the most challenging dynamics in friendships and relationships. We have all found ourselves in a shouting match with someone we love, or concluding an argument feeling awful and unresolved.
Getting to the root of an issue without all the drama sometimes feels impossible. But conflict resolution is a skill, and one that can be honed with practice and patience.
The following strategies are helpful in shifting from overreaction to consciously seeking resolution when faced with difficult conversations or conflict scenarios.
Pause For Self-Awareness
Pause and identify what you are feeling. Step back from the feeling and merely observe it, as well as any thoughts that come along with the feeling.
Recognize that ‘you’ are not the feeling; it is a simply a sensation you are experiencing. Often people will say they are ‘angry,’ but words are powerful and this indicates that you have identified with the anger. You are actually saying: ‘I am anger.’
Do not choose to ‘be anger.’ You are merely experiencing anger. Shifting this mindset can help to separate your rational mind, from the emotional sensation of anger (or hurt, or whatever feeling you may be experiencing).
Once you are able to observe your emotions and thoughts in this way, it becomes much easier to avoid reacting from them. By not reacting, you give yourself the opportunity to think about your response first, and consciously choose your course of action.
Energetic DNA
When I am reading for a client, and we are evaluating either a personal or a business relationship, I always ask for the first name of the individual or name of the business, as well as when the relationship began.
With this information I am able to see the client’s energy and then the separate, but very distinct energy, almost like a fingerprint, of the other people involved or attached to the client. The link becomes clear.
More importantly the strength of energetic pattern is revealed, and whether it is detrimental or constructive, supportive or invasive, positive or negative. I call this ‘energetic DNA.’
Positive energy left in our field enhances and strengthens us. It uplifts and encourages us, building our confidence, opening our minds and expanding our hearts. On the other hand negative energy does exactly the opposite.
When we are involved in any type of relationship, be it business or personal, family or friend, energetic DNA is always present. It is actively leaving a positive of negative mark on our energy field and can impact our daily lives in very powerful ways.
It’s extremely important to be aware of how the energetic DNA present in a relationship has affected us, or the future impact it may have. Love, family, money – these are all very important aspects of our lives. Who we bring into our hearts, our minds, or business can be the difference between happiness and heartbreak, peace or chaos, success or failure.
Transmuting Enemy Energy
Some clients ask for readings about people they think of as their enemies, and I’ve seen certain commonalities with this over the years. In these relationships there are typically an energy pattern that has formed to create a dynamic of mistrust, tension, and resentment.
One of the most prevalent issues I have noticed in terms of long-standing resentment or hatred towards another, is that both parties usually consider themselves the ‘victim,’ and that the other person is always in their mind the one who is in the wrong.
When you take it a level deeper, you usually find there was an initial intense or significant energy when these two people first met – be it a lover, friend, or work associate. It is usually a conflicting energy that sets the tone for their future ‘vibe’ with each other.
This initial energy has a resistance to it and eventually takes on a life of its own, separate from the two conflicting parties. Peel away the layers of this ‘enemy energy demon’ and you come to find it is essentially comprised of nothing more than simple fear.
Also, this enemy demon resists the idea of resolution and will not accept its own demise. It will do whatever it can to stay alive, and it feeds off the emotions anger, fear, and sadness. I believe this is what may be responsible for some suicides, violence, acts of terrorism, mass corruption, and others evil we see in the world.
There is never an excuse for violence. If someone is attacking or harming another person, safety and protection come first. Recovering from trauma is not typically something that happens quickly. However, when we are better informed about what is behind the behavior patterns of those who hate us, we can better see to the root of the disease.
Free Your Soul From Toxic Negativity
It is usually advisable to get over it and move on. When we continue to vent about people or things that annoy or frustrate us, or when we cannot forgive someone who has wronged us, and we go on, and on, and on about it, we are affirming the negative and attracting more of the same energy into our life.
Revenge or vitriol does absolutely no harm to another person, only to the person pursuing it. Anger or hatred does not affect the other person, only the person sending it out. What comes from your own spirit, your thoughts, words, actions, is what you will create in your own life. You are hurting or changing no one with your negative feelings other than yourself.
That person who hurt you has moved on with their life. In fact, they might even be living their best life, while you are still stuck and stagnant in the pain and misery of the past. It only becomes baggage that carries forward into the now, and into the future.
I once had a client who obsessively held onto anger, hatred, spite, and revenge towards her ex for over a decade. She could not figure out why every new relationship and project in her life since then failed miserably, usually with almost the same endings.
Finally, after years of struggling to bring her different insights, she was able to look at the person who hurt her, release his memory with loving, forgiving energy, and let the whole thing go. Then, as I had predicted, the next person who came into her life was everything she had always wanted in a partner!
In fact, her new beloved was far better than anything she ever had with Mr. Most Hated, before it went wrong, and had she continued on her path of anger and toxic baggage carrying, this new love miracle would most likely never have happened.
When Relationships Are Not Meant To Be
I have in recent months become particularly aware how many people are increasingly reminiscing about failed past relationships. In some cases, these are relationships that go back many years. Some folks even go as far as stalking their ex-partners on social media!
I believe it is mainly due to the unusual circumstances caused by the pandemic over the past two years, which prevented the possibility of meeting a new people, or going out on dates. It also brought many of us intense life lessons regarding love, connection, belonging, and loneliness.
I see these issues coming up in many readings nowadays and it often doesn´t sit too well with some of my clients, who tend to feel that their ‘love luck is down,’ or that that the universe is somehow ‘punishing’ them. In extreme cases, folks even believe a hex or curse may have been placed on them.
I also find many people are talking about ´what ifs.’ If only they had done things differently, how things might have turned out differently. But perhaps, if things were meant to have worked out differently, it would have? Again, this would fall in line with certain life lessons we came to this world to experience. I believe we have chosen to incarnate into this world at a time when romantic and social relationships often tend to be more fleeting and distant, especially because of digital technology and our rushed modern way of living.
Interestingly, I am also seeing lately more divorcées remarrying their former spouse after spending many years apart, and despite having lived a new life with someone else in the interim. This often drives their children insane after all the heartbreak, drama and grief the divorce had unnecessarily caused the family. Again, a hard lesson, but a life lesson nevertheless for all concerned.