Breaking the Cycle of Unfulfilling Relationships

An excerpt from How to Create a Magical Relationship,The Three Simple Ideas That Will Instantaneously Transform Your Love Life

If you want to create a working, supportive relationship with another, it is imperative that you be willing to be complete in the r
elationship you have with your parents. The dictionary de-fines complete as "lacking no compon-ent part; full; whole; entire." But what does being incomplete with your parents mean? It is when you are looking to prove them wrong or right for what they did, or didn’t do, or when you endlessly search for their weak points.

When you reference how you are living your life in comparison to how your parents have lived their lives and to what they did or didn’t do for you, then you are incomplete. If, for example, in your opinion they were either there too much and smothered you or they were not there enough and you felt abandon-ed and misunderstood, these are symp-toms of being incomplete. One way or the other, your source of identity is in relation and reaction to your parents. If you are saying that your parents are responsible for the way you relate, then you are incomplete with them.

We have seen many adults who were children of highly successful people be failures in life and relation-ship because they wanted to prove to their parents that their parents did it wrong. Any time things started going too well, these people would sabotage the possibility of their own success. Being right was more important than being happy. The aversion to being like one’s parents is nondiscriminatory; you can’t just pick and choose the parts of them you don’t want to be like. If you are trying to not be like them, you will avoid even their "good" traits.

You can’t be yourself if you are avoiding being like one or the other of your parents, because then you are not living your own life. If you are resisting your parents, or going for their approval for that matter, then that relationship will persist, and each action you take will be filtered in a nanosecond through your idea of how they would do things rather than simply being yourself.

If you are still blaming your mother or father for the way you are, you will be handicapped in your ability to have a fully satisfying relationship. Your rela-tionship to your parents is your arche-typical relationship to men and women. They did not do it wrong. They were just living their lives as best they knew how, and you happened to be born into that family. Your parents probably didn’t take any courses on parenting or on how to have satisfying relationships. Neither did their parents—nor theirs. Until recently, probably within the last fifty years, there weren’t any classes in parenting or relating. The way people are is the way they learned to be in the families in which they grew up. And, more than likely, your parents did the best they knew how to do.

From a child’s point of view, your parents should have done things differ-ently. Children’s perspectives are cen-tered on themselves and on what they want. They cannot take into account all of the complexities of earning a living, having to relate with other people, and being responsible for the well-being and survival of the family. Children, by def-inition, have an immature and limited perspective of reality and can filter day-to-day events only through how these events affect them and their desires, preferences, and wants.

At a young age, you made decisions about who your parents were and then have held those decisions over time as though they are true. Most people don’t realize that many of their opinions were formed when they were in a childish temper tantrum or contraction many years ago.

Our friend LeAnne can now laugh at her child’s inter-pretation of the things her father did "wrong." One rather dramatic childhood memory had to do with a vacation she had with her parents in Greece. While traveling about the country, they stopped at a scenic overlook. Because LeAnne was not tall enough to see over the stone wall that hugged the cliff face, her father lifted her up and stood her on top so that she could enjoy the view. LeAnne was scared by the height, and through her immature perspective, she made up the story that her father was trying to throw her over the cliff. This fable remained in place for years, repeated to herself and embell-ished over time. Eventually, LeAnne realized that she had made up a very imaginative, creative explanation to justify her fear and further saw that her father had no intention of doing her harm nor had any desire to hurt her in any way. Bringing awareness to how she related to her father released her from her expectation that men were out to hurt her.

Some people reading this book will have had parents who were, in fact, abusive or severely lacking in parenting skills. We do not mean to suggest that some individuals did not experience severe childhood trauma. What we are suggesting is that carrying a grudge or having a vendetta with one or both of your parents will severely hamper your ability to relate. Even if your parents did things that were insensitive, ill-advised, or abusive, there comes a point where you must choose between having a fully satisfying life or being right about how your parents did you wrong.