| effective, enhancing logical, practical strategies for empowerment, self-control, relaxation & hope |  | dr. j's head-cleaners shrink rap & shrink think for practical, powerful healing & hope |
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so here's a brief example I've been dating my girlfriend for about two years. Everything was okay in the beginning and then as we got further into the relationship, my jealousy and trust issues began to come into play and slowly they began to ruin our relationship. For some reason I just feel like I can't trust her even when I am out with her. I'm always thinking that she is going to cheat on me. Even when she talks to my friends who I trust, I get mad. It annoys me just as much as it annoys her, and it ruins the evening for both of us. Why do I always think she is going to cheat on me? Why do I feel like I can't trust her? She has never done anything to make me think this way. I just do it on my own. I know there is more that I have problems with, but this is the one that is bothering me the most. I really love my girlfriend.
So what the heck is happening? An impatient sense of worthlessness and a strong belief in ending. Sometimes when there's low self esteem and an expectation that things are likely to go quite wrong -- when life experience has seemed to add up to a reasonable expectation of doom and gloom -- it's hard to wait to see things through. It's hard to wait till things go bad when deep, deep down you think they will.
This applies to relationships when a person has had what seems to be a lot of bad luck and he or she finds that the longer the relationship goes well, the more anxious he or she feels about when it is going to get around to ending. In spite of the fact that all relationships that a person gets into actually do end until the right one comes along and lasts, some people with little or no faith in themselves and in life can be certain that they are doomed to experience ending every time. Being unable to really believe that the relationship could actually go well, it becomes more and more anxiety provoking to wait. If you believe something bad must be happening, it can make you pretty tense to keep wondering when and where and how it is all going to crash and burn. Being certain that one's partner can't possibly be planning on staying in the relationship, one sees little signs of possible evidence of infidelity everywhere. A lot of guys -- and gals, too -- have these problems, feel these feelings and trash potentially good relationships in pretty much this precise same way. The pattern comes into play as a relationship develops. The feelings of jealousy and paranoia beginning when the relationship has moved from possible-casual-dating-is-good to probable-this-is-good-this-might-last status. So what the heck is happening? Dependency makes people panic, things get ugly, things go bad. When a person is so dependent on others that they feel a need to be in a relationship to survive life, things get very complicated, very fast. Dependency -- a sense that you are incomplete without another person living with you, even if they hate you -- can be a very ugly thing. It makes panic happen easily and twists up judgement right and left. People who believe they MUST maintain their relationship at any cost can often make terrible mistakes with respect to making the relationship work. When intense feelings of jealousy and paranoia show themselves, this is evidence of a sense of anxiousness that begins to make you more and more self-centered, more encumbered with guilt feelings that seem best to avoid being in touch with, and more angry and resentful of your partner. You begin to feel and behave as if it is important to get your partner under complete control in order to deal with the anxiety. You begin to essentially say to yourself "to hell with her needs, wants or wellbeing." Mindless anxiety results in self-centeredness that twists feelings of love and affection and you begin behave very unloving and inconsiderately. You begin to fel that you need chains and locks to enslave your partner -- who would then, of course, cease being your partner. It is ugly, ugly twisted thinking with anxiousness and lousy insight at its core.
So what the heck to do 'bout this? Rethink your history, work on hope and faith in your self A basic place to start revising is how you've seen how things have gone. Telling yourself that your relationships always fail, things always go badly, you always make poor decisions, etc., is very counterproductive and never based on reality. Male-female relationships are all doomed until the right long-term one comes along. It is silly to assume failures in finding a partner means anything besides you are experiencing a normal process of finding a partner. If you tend to tell yourself everything always goes wrong or that your decisions are always bad, this is also counterproductive and simply not possible. There are far too many things happening day to day for anyone to survive if even a significant proportion of things actually do go wrong. Revising your estimate of your own ability to handle things at least within normal limits will help a great deal. It is WAY better than freaking yourself out with a constant stream of negativity. How much you need to do here would dictate how much help you need. You might only need to concentrate on not being so negative about your past. If you need a bit more assistance, self help books and recordings might do. Many of the Head-Cleaners hypnosis tapes and CDs can help a great deal in helping you feel more resilient and in helping you feel more hopeful about your future by reminding you that your past has not been so bad. (These would include healing tree 2, self to self partnering, to be comfortably confident, who and how you hope to be and allowing one's self to get past it.) If this is not enough, look to counseling. There are a lot of ways counseling can help you rethink how you think about you and your chances for a good, lasting love. So what the heck to do 'bout this? An all out effort to soothe out anxiousness. Since anxiousness about your wellbeing may be a big component of all this ugliness, work on your anxiousness to decrease general anxiousness and increase your sense of confidence, faith in your self, relaxation and cool. Again, how much you need to do here would dictate how much help you need. You might only need to concentrate on not being so negative about your past or you might do find with self help books and recordings might do. Again, many of the same Head-Cleaners hypnosis tapes and CDs mentioned just above can help a great deal in helping you feel less anxious, more hopeful and more resilient. (These would include healing tree 2, self to self partnering, to be comfortably confident, who and how you hope to be, relax...relax..., allowing one's self to get past it, performance 2, nightmares to nice dreams.) If this is not enough, look to counseling. There are a lot of ways counseling can help you rethink how you think about you and your chances for a good, lasting love. There are also many effective medications that your doctor might prescribe to help with anxious feelings -- though you should be sure to ask about side effects that might cut down on your sex drive (sudden disinterest in sex can be a problem when working on bettering a relationship). So what the heck to do 'bout this? An all out effort to be a love. Because the crap in the head makes you self-centered and causes urges to turn your partner into a slave to make you feel better, it is a good idea to focus on love -- focus on being a great love and great lover. This would include putting your partner's wellbeing and happiness in front of yours. Determining to accept that if your partner really could find someone better than you, then that's what you want, is very contrary to the jealousy and paranoid feelings. As the saying goes, "if you love someone, set them free." This way easier said than done but when you can do it, you feel like a knight in shiny armour rather than a troll trying to keep a prisoner. This will tend to make you anxious, so you might get help with the ideas about anxiousness above. So what the heck to do 'bout this? An all out effort to be patient and okay with not knowing. Working on being patient and not needing to know how things are going to work out can be VERY helpful. This takes a lot of conscious effort, telling yourself you can be okay with not knowing -- that you can survive being patient enough to see how it goes. Just recognizing that this is an essential requirement to any long term relationship -- just like it is an essential part of owning things and having a job, etc. You never know how things will turn out -- whether you will stay at your job, whether your car will last, or whether a relationship will be lasting the rest of your life. If you get panicky about it, you have to destroy it - you have to quit the job, junk the car, destroy the relationship. And then start all over again? Not. Reminding yourself that this is just what you have to endure -- this really not knowing -- will help quite a bit. Reminding yourself that you accomplish this with respect to everything else in life will help you apply that same part of your brain to the issue of your relationship. This again is an area where you might get some help, if you need it. Working on patience and a sense of your own ability to stand not knowing can be helped with counseling or some of the Head-Cleaners or other hypnosis tapes and CDs targetting a sense of patience and resiliency (e.g., healing tree 2, nightmares to nice dreams, who and how you hope to be.) So what the heck to do 'bout this? An all out effort to be a cool partner. Looking into educating yourself on relationship issues and issues relating to the opposite sex can make you a better partner. Working on your ability to keep a promise, speak your mind without hurtfulness, be flexible, etc. can be very helpful. This is hugely important and helpful for guys. Women tend to struggle with guys because they can be so disrespectful of their feelings and their thinking. Guys can be very poor at keeping promises, remembering what a woman has mentioned she'd like, being sensitive to their feelings -- emotional and physical -- and any number of other things that are written about in a thousand self help books (e.g., Men Are from Mars, Women Are From Venus). When you are a great partner, sensitive, supportive, flexible and loving -- when you can endulge now and then and be very patient -- you have real relationship security. It doesn't mean you can make it work with anyone but it does mean that you can be certain that when a relationship breaks up it is simply because of a bad matching -- which happens and you can't be sure of for years of dating.
You can get a lot of help by simply talking to individuals of the opposite sex also -- siblings, parents, friends, bosses, coworkers. All women and all men, any age, can tell you about the top twenty things men do to women or women do to men to make them miserable. All you need to do is ask. Pretty much everyone over the age of 20 will have a lot of things to say. So what the heck to do 'bout this? An all out effort to be independent. Since feeling dependent is at the heart of this crap with the jealousy and the paranoia, the more independent you are, the better. This is a matter of self-talk if you are working on a relationship now. Counseling, self-help books, hypnosis CDs that make you feel more confident and self assured, more hopeful about the future and feeling more faith in yourself will all help. If you are currently dealing with a relationship ending due to the paranoid behaviors and jealousy and attempts to chain your partner down, then you can work a lot on independence by resolving not to get into another male-female relationship until you have lived a year by yourself. You can date but you must try to not get serious about anyone. It can be helpful in this regard to recognize that as long as you have dependency issues, you will not be able to see clearly when looking at people that might have partner potential. Dependency will have you seeing positive characteristics where there are none. [Whew! I may add some additional ideas on dealing with all this as the days go by and my brain watches for issues to add and ideas for solving.] |
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