Have you ever tried to love someone, but you could feel their emotional walls? You can feel them not letting you in. You can feel the little person trapped inside. Or have you ever felt somebody trying to get to you, but you can feel yourself stopping it? This is how most of us experience relationships. This is what the emotional baggage from our past that we carry.
Sometimes we have so many walls that we can't feel much of anything at all. We can't feel passion. We can't feel excitement. And of course, we can't have real moments. Those walls don't just separate you from other people. They separate you from yourself, making loving and liking yourself very difficult. That source of power and love and passion inside of you, your inner child, is in an emotional prison.
How do we break down those walls? The emotions that you feel and express, you can heal. You can't heal feelings that you stuff inside you. But all those old emotions, and all that old energy, need to come out. I call it unfinished emotional business. We need to actually go back in there, say the things we never said, cry the tears we never cried, get angry about the things we never got angry about, so that we don't need to protect ourselves with those walls any more.
Second, we need to let new love in. The irony about emotional walls is that new love heals old pain. It was from not being loved enough that we built the walls in the first place. So the only thing that can really heal that feeling is new love.
What I'm saying is this. Finding your ability to feel again is the first step toward creating true intimacy with your partner and experiencing real moments in your relationship. To do this, you need to defrost the ice around your heart, to work on healing those emotional wounds, because the more you do, the easier it will be for you to love.
Do some work on healing your unfinished emotional business and allowing the love that's inside you to come out, so you can share it with your partner and create the real moments you deserve.
The kind of intimacy I'm talking about isn't something that happens automatically. Great love requires great courage. It asks you to push past the fears that would keep you protected and invulnerable to your partner, and instead to reveal your most secret hiding place and your most unguarded doorways. Great love demands that you invite your beloved in past the walls, and allow him or her to know all of you the strength and the despair, the vision and the terror, the confident adult and the lonely child.
And great love insists on showing you every place in your being that is selfish and strong-willed, every shadow in your heart that's not loving or compassionate. Your partner is your teacher, reflecting these things back to you so that you see all the ways you need to grow as a lover.
But the reward is truly magnificent, because when you love deeply, courageously and with commitment, your relationship will be filled with sacred, joy-filled, real moments.
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Live each day as if it were your last...because tomorrow?
It might be.
Hey Phil: Love this: Its funny to me that after 22 years of being with someone , I find I still have a lot of "breaking down the walls" to do. Always feeling abandoned (my parents divorced when I was 6 and my dad, God love him, raised us), I had alot of trouble letting anyone really get close or know me. Then, along came my husband(before I married him) and I felt I could share anything and everything with him, and did. Sometimes, especially during the drinking days, it would totally backfire on me and he would use the things I shared against me. This caused me not to trust or be as truthful to him as I would have wanted to be. A long story to be true but now things are getting a little easier. We are both trying to work the program and are finding ourselves to be a little more understanding, loving and kinder towards each other. One example of this : We were laying around talking and I was in a bad slump. Fear was driving me almost to insanity. Job issues mostly, lack of confidence in myself, etc. He asked what was wrong. I told 1/4 of my worries to him. He just listened then said, "ok, what else..." This went on for quite a while, "ok, what else", until I finally just spilled the beans and trusted that I could share all that was on my heart! What a great feeling to finally connect! Not that it is like that everyday, but I am so glad we do have a chance at a new beginning! I love what you wrote because it does give me hope!! After all the years together Im realizing that I do have a great spouse!! "new love" I suppose, could even mean an old love that you took for granted or put on a back burner for a while!! Anyways, thanks! Lani
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"We tend to forget that happiness doesn't come as a result of getting something we don't have, but rather of recognizing and appreciating what we do have. "
