04/07/2020
Couples therapy: love and freedom in a marriage/relationship*
It is not your partner that is causing you the pain in the relationship. It is the misperception and illusion that your partner should change, should be someone else, which is causing you pain. Holding on to your dreams and illusions of your partner are hurting you. They are denying you the love and freedom you so desperately seek, and are entitled to. Your wish that the other should change is killing of his/her love - and your love. Your dreams and fantasies of your partner have to crumble and burn down to ashes, and when they burn down, the grief of your lost dreams and fantasies will unlock love and freedom.
Your fantasies of reality are your prison. Your prison guard is the illusion that you only can be free to love if your spouse changes to your demands and wishes of who he/she should be. In fact it is the other way around: it is your demands, wishes and fantasies which are denying you love and freedom, not your partner or spouse.
Love and freedom are residing in you, and only in you; still, ever so still, biding time, never leaving you, never giving up on you, waiting for the right soil, so that it can begin to grow and flourish. You thought the love and freedom was in the hands of your partner. You demanded that your partner should see, understand and validate you. You wished that your partner should love, hold, touch and embrace you first. When the love, touch and embrace you longed for and needed were in you all the time, are you; when the comfort, safety and healing are in you, as well as the pain, anger, guilt and grief. Waiting inside of you to be seen, validated and understood – by you.
It may require for you to take some action: Maybe develop the capacity to bear the guilt for the pain you have inflicted on others, the guilt you think is unbearable; to bear the love and humanity you once had to cut off from yourself to not-me, and that you thought could only be found in others; to end the battle inside of you, seeking love and freedom by fighting against the ones you love; perhaps to welcome the grief over what you didn’t get from the ones you depended on, the grief over all the lost opportunities that are no more, and the grief over all the times you had to hide, avoid, withdraw and conform; and maybe the guilt in failing to be you. But you are still you, with your pain and happiness, your longings and yearnings, your love and stillness.
Don’t ask your spouse to be what he/she are not, to exist only to fulfill your dreams and fantasies. Let him/her be him/her. Let you be you. The embrace of yourself, feeling your feelings and welcoming them home, inside of you, will kill of your hurtful fantasies and illusions. Then there are love and freedom. Then you are setting your love free, setting your loved ones free, which is love, setting yourself free, to love and to be loved. Can you bear your feelings; can you share them with the one you love?
* The reader familiar with Jon Frederickson’s book “The lies we tell ourselves” will recognize some of the terms and phrasing in this text. Although most of the credit for the text must go to the couples I have met and still are meeting, who have sheared their stories, pain and love for each other.