Breaking up is hard to do because it is hard-wired, all about patterns formed in childhood. It’s what we did in order to survive in our family of origin. We choose a partner we can run our story with, or rather is a good fit with our story. For example, if in your family of origin, no one paid any attention to your feelings, you will innately feel that you do not matter. You may then chose a partner who is unemotionally unavailable to you and when that person treats you the way you have always been treated there will be something about the interaction that is familiar to you .
It's what Freud calls repetition compulsion. We pick a person from the get go who reminds us of someone in our family of origin with the assumption being that if only I can get that person to love me then finally I will be lovable. But the person we pick doesn’t have the ability to love – we set it up that way at the beginning.
In your family of origin you had to figure out what you had to do to get love; it was a matter of surival. As a child, you had to figure out a way to get love from an unavailable father; that was your job and you became addicted to the struggle.
We repeat that pattern as an adult. Perhaps we keep choosing men who are unavailable, not able to make a commitment to us. If our story is that we don’t matter or that we are unloveable – we will choose a partner who is emotionally unavailable to us and when we are around them and they don’t pay attention to us, we will feel that we are right and we will see that our story is true and then we will complain about the other person. We will never look at ourselves. Instead of taking responsibility for our unhappiness, we project it onto our partner and say he/she is the cause of it. That is not true. We are responsible for that big hole inside of us – we can’t lay it on someone else.
There’s only 1 way to break an unhealthy relationship, and that’s to understand it’s just about YOU and no one else. You need to understand that no one can make you do anything. You are not unhappy because of anyone else but you are really unhappy about the choices you have made. But just like you made those choices, you can make new ones as well.
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