Want a Great Love Relationship? Forgive.

WANT A GREAT LOVE RELATIONSHIP? FORGIVE.

People often will ask me how to create a lasting, loving relationship. They want to know how to find one or how to keep one. Maybe they have loved and lost, maybe they have loved and left. Either way, people are looking to find a romance that makes them feel safe and secure.

We all have different requests in relationships, different needs and different aversions. But there is one universal step to finding a healthy, strong loving relationship that cuts through all variances: that is forgiveness. Forgiveness isn’t stuffing feelings, or looking the other way. It simply means to let go. It has nothing to do with right or wrong; just letting go, just wanting to be happy.

THE FIRST STEP

First it’s imperative we forgive ourselves for whatever we’re angry, resentful or blaming ourselves for from the past. We carry around that unforgiveness as a defensive energy that feels inauthentic and repelling. Our guilt is defending ourselves against what we know we’ve done, and don’t want others to know about. It’s not sensical to expect someone else to love us unconditionally when we don’t love ourselves that way. How can we expect to feel safe in a relationship with someone if we don’t feel safe in a relationship with ourselves?! Whatever we did in the past we wish we hadn’t, we must forgive ourselves, let it go and move on.

THE SECOND STEP

And the second forgiveness is extremely important: forgive your parents. This is because whatever we haven’t cleared in our relationships with our parents will come up in our other relationships for healing and release. It’s an essential part of life’s healing process to repeat unsupportive patterns until they’re cleared.

When we were infants, our relationship with our parents, or primary care-givers, created the templates for how we experience relationships as adults. Simply put, if our parents were kind to each other, we tend to recreate that in our adult relationships. If our parent’s were not kind to each other, we tend to recreate (or overcompensate) that also.

I had a client with a pattern of attracting men who dishonored her and who were insensitive to her emotional needs. This caused my client continued heartbreak and sadness. She desperately wanted a loving relationship with a man she could feel safe with, but had never. Our work together uncovered how her father treated her mother dishonorably, not providing the emotional support and love her mother desperately wanted. My client could see where she was repeating that pattern she learned from watching her parents relate to each other. I suggested my client forgive her mother for allowing herself to be treated in such a way. After completing the unique forgiveness process I teach in my book, “The Other F Word: 7 Days to Forgiving Anyone”, my client was able to release the pattern she’d held since childhood. She understood that her mother was simply repeating the pattern of abuse she had learned from her own mother. With her forgiveness and stopping that family pattern, my client has found a wonderful man who honors her and allows her to grow and flourish. She can now pass on a legacy of empowerment to her own daughter.

Juliana Ericson, of The Joyful Life Project, http://breathworks.net/ and author of her new book “The Other F Word: 7 Days to Forgiving Anyone”, available at http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-other-f-word-juliana-ericson/1116401...