What does a successful relationship look like and how to create your own

Many of us didn’t have the chance to see what a “successful relationship” model look like when we were kids. Most likely, our parents were into “survival mode” and did the best they knew. Because of this lack of healthy role modelling, you and I  grew older without even questioning what is actually possible when it comes to the most fundamental aspect of life: RELATING. Relating to people, to self, and to life.

My father was a businessman, an old fashioned Sicilian character, resilient and a hard hard worker amongst other things. Because of this, he ended up reasonably successful over time. Financially that is. Because emotionally I would call him “under-developed”.

He was never shown by his own father how to deal with feelings and considered these things a waste of time and weakness.

Therefore, all the stress and emotional processes he encountered were constantly ignored or suppressed, consciously or not. Anyone else out there can relate to this?

“He never told me that he loved me until I turned 33, that day I told him first, man to man, by doing so giving him permission to finally speak these 3 words to his son, and to himself”

The reason why I’m sharing this today is that in order to experience meaningful relationships with others, we must first and foremost become aware of the way we relate to ourselves. And in 99% of the cases, this means we need a little healing.

In our own ways we’ve all been hurt, misjudged, rejected, ridiculed, abandoned and the rest of it, and to protect ourselves we learnt how to put up some walls, we learnt how to close our hearts, how to shield and desensitise ourselves.

“But the very same walls we have up to protect us are the same walls blocking our blessings”

Healing doesn’t have to be complicated, for those of us who are ready to let go of what doesn’t serve us anymore, this is. Healing, as I see it, is simply about identifying any “charge” we took on, that was, at the time very difficult to deal with, (aka anything we perceived as shameful, scary etc) and to find a way to “distribute” that charge into the void around us, into space.

 Imagine if you will, that your physical, mental and emotional bodies are like a collection of tubes and water hoses. When we contract, because of our inability to respond to the situation that is presented to us, we pinch on these hoses and in doing so we stop the natural flow of life that would otherwise circulate through us.

This “flow of life” I’m speaking of doesn’t have to be a woo woo concept, I could explain it in a more “scientific way” like this: The sum of all of our experiences are stored in an electromagnetic field that radiates from our physical heart; the more coherent this field is, the more in sync we are with life, the more guided and the faster we develop.

Unfortunately, for many of us, we end up accumulating hundreds if not thousands of these “blocks” over the years, to the point that we “compulsively” anticipate outcomes without even thinking about any other possible outcomes, as if they were the most likely thing to happen to us.

For example, I was holding to a strong fear of abandonment until I turned 30.

My sister and I were arguing at the back of the car when I was 7, on a small countryside road. Our father lost his temper and stopped the car, got me out of it and started driving away. At that moment all I did was screaming and sprinting behind this car as my life depended on it. To him, it was an easy and practical way to teach me a lesson, and to get us quiet, nothing even nasty behind it. But for me I took it in as a strong possibility that I would be abandoned without warning anytime I made a mistake, and this blind spot was later expressed in all aspects of my life, especially work and personal relationships.

Imagine how just 2 minutes of a day that occurred over 20 years ago was still “running” me (pun intended!) as well as most of “my” decisions… (To identify and heal similar past events is how one self-actualise and moves from compulsions to conscious choices, but this will be for another post)

After identifying this event and doing a bit of work with my mentor I collapsed that event

from my morphogenetic field and do not carry this fear anymore, meaning that my nervous system is so much more relaxed in so many everyday situations! One step away from being insecure and one step closer to my birth given power.

There is nothing more empowering than this to me now, to be able to look at my life story from a neutral point of view and clean the mess, becoming the author of this book I call life.

“Bottom line:  we do not heal by suppressing, we heal by releasing“

What I learnt over the years is that hurt is inevitable. It is part of life, for all of us. however how we deal with pain is up to us: we can shrink, cry and hide, or we can cease this as another opportunity to grow, to upgrade and evolve into our more functional us.

This whole process starts with a true desire to change. This usually happens when we are fed up of listening to our “poor me” record, and frankly, there is no judgment here, each of us heals at our own pace, yet to change we must first DECIDE we want to experience something different from what we know. This change will require us to FEEL things. To feel things we will have to be willing to drop our shield, to trust that we have what it takes to pull it out and to be vulnerable so that we can intentionally dive in this uncomfortable land of ghosts. From there, we can start transmuting these ghosts into accepting, forgiveness and loving presence.

“Remember: the minute we can allow ourselves to be vulnerable and open our wounded heart is the minute we can start receiving an abundance of love”

From that love-filled cup, we can overflow without ever being on empty. So, if you have received these words, you now know that you have to heal yourself first if you want to have successful relationships. This path is an epic, deep journey of self-actualisation that will give YOU your power back, as it does not require any Guru or any deity to save you, you can earn your own salvation simply by deciding today to become a “better” version of you, or in other words, a YOU that is moving away from a compulsive way to live life, into a conscious way of living that is intentional and will lead you to the promised land.