Outside In

The most beautiful relationships we experience in life are the ones where we feel safe enough to be vulnerable, to trust that it is safe to let our guard down and relax into being who we really are, farts and all. 

When we hold a baby it is a sacred privilege for we respect they are so very vulnerable, so we attempt to give them our utmost attention, respect and heartfelt warmth.   When we fall deeply in love with another in a long term relationship, sometimes giving them our utmost attention, respect and heartfelt warmth can be emotionally challenging to say the least.  In the initial romantic or what I have heard called the tertiary stage of the relationship, it is easy.  It goes without saying if we are into them, and they are into us we give the other person our best, we treat them with respect and ensure we provide them with our undivided attention when we are with them. 

As the relationship shifts emotional gears and progresses (or in some cases regresses) into the secondary stage (a steady committed courtship) undivided attention, respect and heartfelt warmth can sometimes begin to diminish.  In relationships where emotionally intimacy and vulnerability are a challenge for one or both parties, the tertiary and secondary phases may not be problematic at all, but once the couple reach the primary stage (move in together, get married or have children) any unresolved heart wounds will surface for healing.  This is when the rubber hits the road and couples either grow emotionally closer or further apart, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly.  Until heart wounds are addressed and healed this pattern will continue to repeat itself for the wounded party until they resolve it. Our primary relationships are always the ones that involve the most vulnerability, and challenge how safe we really feel about trusting someone to love us once we let them closer.

From birth until early teens we experience vulnerability it seems from the inside out.    So if we think of our lives as little people, we were all absolutely vulnerable to the adults that cared for us.  When we started school, primary school, our teachers understood that we were still very vulnerable little creatures that needed our hands held, our tears wiped, and gentle encouragement on a daily basis as we learned to feel emotionally safe outside of the protection of our primary home environment.

By the time we got to secondary school, we were not so vulnerable.  We had learned the lay of the land within the schooling system and how to keep ourselves as safe as we possibly could.  We began to understand how to make emotional connections with others to the best of our ability.  By the time we get to secondary school most of us have started to learn how to emotionally guard ourselves a little more effectively, and our relationships with our teachers are not so intimate.  We don't hold hands anymore with the teacher or each other, or reveal our feelings so readily for others to observe.  We have learned how to protect our hearts more and keep our emotional distance more than we did at primary school.  We are still accountable to our teachers at a secondary level, and must still commit to following the schooling structure, but are not monitored so closely and given a little more autonomy.

Tertiary schooling, like University or a TAFE College involves very little emotional vulnerability and we are left to our own devices a lot more.  It seems more enjoyable as a schooling system as we don't get in trouble if we do our own thing as much.  If we don't show up to lectures, or miss a day here and there we understand that the new structure makes us less accountable, and more of a free agent.  Self governance is what tertiary schooling offers and with that freedom some do really well, and others drop out.

Relationships I have found also fit into this model very well.  Tertiary relationships like tertiary schooling can include lovers and casual acquaintances.  These people only see us at our best when we have time and it suits us.  They are play people that we party with and share little of our hearts with and control the amount of emotional vulnerability we choose to offer.

Secondary relationships (committed courtship) mimic in my mind how secondary schooling structures operate.  There is more accountability and commitment; we are not free agents anymore, and a little more vulnerable to the other party than we are in tertiary relationships.  In a secondary relationship we have made an initial pledge to be truthful to the other and that hopefully involves a heartfelt sincerity that requires emotional integrity and responsibility to uphold.  We have made an initial commitment to the other party.

Primary relationships (marriage, living together or becoming parents) I have observed are similar to the amount of vulnerability we were exposed to in our primary school years backward to our birth date.  The longer an adult primary relationship continues, the deeper into our emotional histories I have found, we backtrack with this new person.  When we have made heartfelt vow on some level to share our hearts territory and our home with the other party it is only natural that they will want to grow to know us and learn more about us at a heart level.  If you don't know yourself or are unwilling to share what you truly know of yourself at a heart level, this relationship will encounter difficulty. 

A new primary relationship starts almost at the same point of the last years of primary school.  So for example, in Queensland Australia, a child starts primary school in grade one after kindergarten, and then progresses through until grade 7.  Grade 8 takes them into secondary school.  So for a newly committed primary relationship couple it seems to equate to them starting at grade 7 (the final exit years of primary school seem to be the entry point back into primary relationships).  So becoming emotionally intimate with another is like working backwards from the outside inwards, surrendering our emotional guards, and our secret childish fears, like we might actually be unlovable, as time passes.  If both parties are willing to keep sharing the story of their hearts moving backwards over the years they will end up in an absolute state of unwavering love and trust, like an infant does, they trust they are lovable no matter what.  We all started out that way, that is our birthright to feel trust in being loved at the beginning of our hearts journey.   However, if you are someone like me who had a great deal of childhood trauma that started when I was an infant and seemed to ease up by the time I was in grade 6 and 7, you are only ever going to get grade 6 and 7 levels of intimacy with someone like me.  Any years before that from grade 5 back to my hearts beginning point became a no go zone for anyone, including me.  Birthdays were intolerable for me, and are for many with distressing pasts because they mark our hearts beginning point.  Being clean and sober and emotionally present to the day my birthday, when my heart started this journey only bought up emotional discomfort and anger for me for many years in my early recovery and sobriety, probably from 1995 until 2000. 

So many others with similar histories to mine keep repeating this pattern with primary relationships.  We can only get so close, and then my lover becomes my enemy as my elders who loved me as a child were in my experience, my hearts most dangerous enemy.  So the relationship all falls apart as the wounded disconnects for emotional protection. .. until we become willing to take an emotional trek with a trusted person who knows how to help us remain emotionally safe as we work from the outside of our hearts inwards.  For me this work commenced at grade 6 primary level and went backwards and deeper inwards into my hearts history and past wounding from there.  Until I was able, with professional help, to remove all the splinters and shards of glass in my heart from the trauma that had wounded me back as far as my hearts memory could verbalise, I could not move past grade 6 intimacies with anyone.  Once I had cleared away all the rubble and wreckage from these years, I could then invite my darling husband Mr. Delicious into this once no go zone, where no person, other than my abusive elders as a child had ever had access to before. 

We have been together 6 years now, and I am taking my time as I show him around the sacred garden within my heart that is almost like virgin land. He is very respectful of where he treads and our intimacy at a primary level just keeps growing deeper and more beautiful.  It is a miracle, heaven on earth instead of the hell I had been used to.

If the wounded person in a relationship chooses not to do their emotional homework and tend to their hearts past wounds so they can regain emotional fitness and mobility, they are destined to only be able to maintain more superficial emotional connections with others, like I was.

Often as an avoidance tactic, people in committed primary relationships emotionally hide pretending all is well to the outside world.  Sometimes they have sexual affairs in order to feel the lighthearted connection of a tertiary relationship again, when intimate physical pleasures were easier.   For in tertiary encounters there is little vulnerability, accountability and responsibility.  Like going back to University, they delude themselves into believing they have become a free agent again.  When they are actually running from themselves and their own hearts wounds, not their partner.  For they will end up in the same place with any new lover in years to come unless they attend to their wounding.

Resolve it or repeat it!  It is a universal emotional truth.

Some people don't sexually betray their primary relationship, but become emotionally polygamous and become more emotionally intimate with others outside of their primary relationship.  This behavior can be just as emotionally corrosive to their primary relationship.   It leaves the other party feeling, unwanted, discommunicated and emotionally "in the dark" and unable to meet their partners emotional needs, because their partner is not sharing what those needs are with them, but with someone outside of the primary relationship.  It is easier to confide to someone in a secondary or tertiary relationship with us, about how we feel, because we have them already at an arm's length; we are not as vulnerable, so it takes less courage.  However to confide our true feelings to our primary lover requires a brave heart, but is the only way to continue to build intimacy.

Until we are willing to invest in improving our primary relationship with ourselves, we will be unable to have a quality primary relationship with anyone else.  If you don't like being with you, and are unwilling to take deliberate time to invest in peaceful and enjoyable activities, and non activity with yourself, you will be unable to enjoy time with another long term.  We must become willing to own and accept the whole of our history, especially our primary and formative years, before we can ask to be loved wholly by another.

The only way I could spend peaceful time with myself up until 1995 was with booze, pills or drugs.  I used substances to create a chemically induced state of peace, because I didn't like being on my own, with myself, straight.  I was poor company for myself and got bored because I had no heart connection to myself.  I was emotionally numb and felt little.  We all know how disenchanting it is to be in the company of someone else who is emotionally unavailable and doesn't want to be with us.  We leave those sorts of people and find an excuse to move on.  I had left myself.

When people choose to work on their Emotional Fitness what this really means in a nutshell is they need to come home to themselves and work on their primary relationship with self.  Once they own who they are and who they are not, and learn to firstly care, then like, respect and eventually love themselves for their best and their worst, like we do for those we love... then we discover and experience inner peace, which I can tell you for nothing is far more exhilarating than any chemically induced state I experienced in 19 years of drug and alcohol addiction.  Natural highs rule!!!.  This journey from the outside inwards involves self study without harsh judgment but with a willingness to sift through what they discover. 

When we have journeyed back into the most vulnerable places of ourselves and made peace, we then value and respect ourselves in a way we never could have had we not gone to this effort.  Like we would protectively be discerning about whom we let close to a vulnerable child, we value ourselves as we do the vulnerable child, in a new way.  Self respect is hard earned if you are someone like me who had so very little when I got clean and sober.  When we emotionally invest in helping ourselves we become reluctant to allow people, places and things back into our primary arena who have not earned our absolute trust.  We begin to trust ourselves first and foremost to keep ourselves safe, and honour our marriage to ourselves above and beyond a commitment to anyone else.  This is not selfish, but responsible.

When we become emotionally self supporting human beings who can be honest with ourselves we are less willing to tolerate superficial bullshit from others.  We find we move from wanting to be popular and have a quantity of friends, to becoming discerning about whom we let close and how close we allow them to come.  Those we do trust and love and welcome into our primary world and share our hearts with honour us and we them.  We find our hearts are our responsibility so we don't  give them away to someone else to look after, they are too precious as nobody knows how to look after our dear hearts as well as we do. 

Letting someone from the outside world into the deep private inner world of our hearts is the biggest challenge we face in our lifetimes.  Knowing how to trust ourselves must come first, before we can truly trust another to share our hearts with us.  This acquired wisdom we learn through trial and error, but the important thing is to not give up on learning about our amazingly resilient hearts. 

It took me years to even begin to trust in the concept of trust when I began my recovery journey almost 15 years ago.  But gradually as I have been educated to listen to myself with compassionate eyes and ears of my heart, without judgment and with patience, what once seemed impossible has become a reality.  Living with myself used to be hell on earth.  Today I experience glimpses of heaven on earth in my own company.   It is our birthright to find joy in the simple pleasure of living within our own skin.

If you live in or near Brisbane and would like to join me from August 3^rd on Tuesday Evenings as I commence Series 1 of my Emotional Fitness Master Classes, just send me an email at cynthia@emotionalfitness.com and I will forward you the information.

I hope today's blog has enabled you to reflect a little on the subject of tertiary, secondary and primary relationships and help you gain a deeper insight on how much you trust yourself to choose safe people to be vulnerable with.  For it is true in my experience that we are never so vulnerable than when we trust someone, but if we cannot find the courage to trust neither can we find the courage to deeply love and know heartfelt joy in just being who we are, like an infant does in an absolute state of surrender to their vulnerability. 

I will leave you with these Word Vitamins from Dr Joyce Brothers to ponder today, thanks for meeting me here again, and please forward you comments, I love to hear back from you too.

"The best proof of pure love is trust"