Self-Love, The Fourth Project
Photo by ROMAN ODINTSOV
Early in his book, You Are the One You’ve Been Waiting For, Dr. Richard C. Schwartz describes three projects that people often work on in the course of a failing relationship.
If you focus on project one, you work on changing the other person back to who they were early in the relationship so you can be happy and feel loved again.
If you focus on project two, you work on changing yourself to make them happy they will love you again.
If you focus on project three, you’ve given up on the relationship and have begun to look for someone else to make you feel happy and loved or you stay in the relationship and find ways to numb yourself and hope things change.
I often refer to these projects when coaching a client struggling in a relationship and suggest that there is a belief commonly held by many who are working on one of these projects.
“I am responsible for my partner’s happiness, and they are responsible for mine. Our efforts to make each other happy provide evidence of our mutual love.”
This belief, like all beliefs, feels like the truth to those who believe it. Beliefs are thoughts that seem true, often because others hold the same beliefs. Beliefs seem true because they are thoughts we have accepted as truth and have repeated enough to form thought habits. Beliefs are thought habits.
For centuries, most people on the planet believed the earth was flat and that if you traveled too close to the horizon, you would fall off the edge.
But beliefs are only concepts - best guesses that sometimes argue with reality and cause all manners of suffering and limitation. No matter how many people believed it, the earth remained unflat.
Win them back
Believing your partner is responsible for your happiness, you blame them when you are unhappy. You remember the early days of the relationship when you felt happy and loved. You may have spent hours on the phone talking well into the night. You could think of nothing else but the next time you could plug into the magic that only they could provide. You felt happy simply thinking about them.
But now you are unhappy. Of course, it’s their fault. Your unhappiness is evidence that they have stopped loving you. To get them to start loving you again. You use manipulation, criticism, and blackmail to win back their love.
When this doesn’t work you may decide you are the problem. Maybe you are unhappy because they stopped loving you and maybe they stopped loving you because there’s something wrong with you! If there is any hope of feeling loved again by your partner, you must figure out what is wrong with you and do what you can to fix it. You try to control, hide, or eliminate aspects of yourself to make the job of loving you easier.
This, of course, is a lose-lose. If you aren’t happy they must not love you anymore. If they are unhappy, they must not appreciate your efforts to make them happy. You simply cannot win, and neither can they.
It’s no wonder the divorce rate is so high! The only real surprise is that it isn’t higher.
What if
What if, as Dr Schwartz says, you are the one you’ve been waiting for? What if you are responsible for your own happiness? Pushing this idea even further, what if you cannot sustainably feel loved when unhealed parts of you feel unloved?
It now seems evident that it is the belief that someone else can make you happy and feel loved that makes feeling loved and happy so challenging.
Without this belief, we could let go of the chase. We could relax and just be who we are without waiting for someone else to give us permission to be ourselves by loving us. Without this belief, we could simply return to our natural state of joy. We could be happy.
If the belief is the problem how do you change it?
In my experience, beliefs don’t change until a better idea comes along. Through the lens of the internal family systems model, you could say that our beliefs are held by parts of ourselves that have decided what is and isn’t true. When these parts become activated by the circumstances of our lives, they impose their beliefs on us and influence our thoughts, emotions, and reactions.
In this state, I feel rejected when a part of me believes I have been rejected. I feel abandoned when my partner is unhappy. And I feel betrayed when my partner stops trying to make me happy.
We need to help our parts change what they understand. But before we can expect them to listen, we will need to earn their trust.
And that is what the IFS model is designed to do. Using the IFS approach, you can get to know, understand, and even appreciate how your parts formed the beliefs that run your life for you. Once your parts feel understood by you they will begin to trust you. And when they trust you, they become willing to consider new information that can change their beliefs.
As parts recognize it is safe to drop old beliefs, they soften back and allow the fully resourced core of who you are to provide internal leadership that reflects reality.
In this state of Self-leadership, seeking love from others is no longer necessary. Self-love leaves us free to enjoy the connection with others that is possible in the absence of an agenda to be loved.
