The right two people can be better together than alone, helping to keep each other sane, well-loved, and secure. Nevertheless, here’s where we’ve got it backward. A loving relationship can never make us whole. Rather, it allows us to better experience our own wholeness. Only from this perspective can we realize ourselves emotionally.
— Judith Orloff, MD, Emotional Freedom, p. 207
Growing older involves accumulating life experience in a way that allows us to know ourselves, and the world around us, generously, hopefully, and with a minimum of denial. If reality is to bring us meaning rather than despair, however, we need to learn to soften life’s hard edges with hope rather than illusion. Which means that we need to learn how to play….
When we engage each other in real and playful ways, we touch those places that have been most injured, and are therefore most closed to growth, with love, kindness, and compassion. We bring our deepest fears into creative contact with each other. In ways that are at once real and not real, that simultaneously embody both past and present, play, once again, invites seemingly immutable aspects of our histories into the present, and so enlivens parts of ourselves that have become deadened, lightens parts that have become too heavy to carry, and teaches us to live with pains that have all too often become too great to bear.
— Mark O’Connell, PhD, The Marriage Benefit, p. 171, 185
Our experience of abundance is determined far more by our inner state than by our outer circumstances. The point of leverage for changing our circumstances is how we meet what happens to us, not changing the details of what’s happening. We humans are meaning-makers — we decide what something means to us. Out of our assigned meaning grow all our choices and actions. And the meaning we assign is entirely based on our inner state.
— Victoria Castle, The Trance of Scarcity, p. 178
Our intimate partners are by and large our most important persons. Because we share responsibility for our lives with them, because they are magnets for our disappointments, it is all but written into our marriage contracts that we will blame them when things go wrong.
But what happens when we make a point of doing the opposite? What happens when we let go of our proclivity to blame and resent our lovers for our own disappointments? Every time we forgive and thank each other we teach each other critical, and generalizable, life lessons: There is no master plan. There is no life that we were supposed to lead. There is no good future in wishing for a different past. The assumption that things should always go our way, and that someone or something is to blame if they don’t, only leads us away from the path to our better selves.
— Mark O’Connell, PhD, The Marriage Benefit, p. 164-165
Much as we would like, we cannot bring everyone with us on this journey called recovery. We are not being disloyal by allowing ourselves to move forward. We don’t have to wait for those we love to decide to change as well.
Sometimes we need to give ourselves permission to grow, even though the people we love are not ready to change. We may even need to leave people behind in their dysfunction or suffering because we cannot recover for them. We don’t need to suffer with them.
It doesn’t help.
It doesn’t help for us to stay stuck just because someone we love is stuck. The potential for helping others is far greater when we detach, work on ourselves, and stop trying to force others to change with us.
— Melody Beattie, The Language of Letting Go, p. 164
If grievance is the act of wishing for a different past, then mourning is the act of accepting that past in order to allow a different future.
— Mark O’Connell, PhD, The Marriage Benefit, p. 160
Your life is brimming with opportunities to learn about emotional freedom. Every success. Every heartbreak. Every loss. Every gain. How you transport yourself through these portals determines how free you can be. I want you to start viewing your emotions in a nonordinary way: as vehicles for transformation (the word emotion comes from the Latin meaning “to move”) rather than simply as feelings that make you happy or miserable. Expect them to test your heart; that’s the point. What you go through — what we all go through — has a greater purpose. Always, the imperative of emotional freedom is for the love in us to evolve. Albert Camus says, “Freedom is nothing else but a chance to be better.” To make this a reality, you must begin to see each event of your life, uplifting or hurtful, earthshaking or mundane, as a chance to grow stronger, smarter, more light-bearing.
But here’s where many of us hit a wall. We’re ashamed of feeling afraid, inadequate, lonely, as if we’ve failed or done something wrong. None of these conclusions are true. It’s a misguided expectation that we’re supposed to be serene all the time. A depressed patient once apologized, “I wish I could be coming to you for something more spiritual.” I felt for him, but like so many people in pain with that commonly held perception, he was mistaken. Facing emotions — all of them — is a courageous, spiritually transformative act.
— Judith Orloff, MD, Emotional Freedom, p. 16-17
Noticing and counting the beautiful reasons unexpected things happen for us ends the mystery. If you miss the real reasons, the benevolent reasons that coincide with kind nature, then count on depression to let you know that you missed them. Anger, frustration, and aggressive reasons can always be imagined — and what for? People who aren’t interested in seeing why everything is good get to be right. But that apparent rightness comes with disgruntlement, and often depression and separation. Depression can feel serious. So “counting the genuine ways that this unexpected event happened for me, rather than to me” isn’t a game. It’s an exercise in observing the nature of life. It’s a way of putting yourself back into reality, into the kindness of the nature of things.
— Byron Katie, I Need Your Love — Is That True?, p. 187
Being judgmental is a habit, and it can be changed….
Training ourselves to feel and then express unconditional love, the antidote to judgment, is possible, particularly with God’s help. We can choose to bring God into our minds whenever we find ourselves in the act of judging; this changes our experience and our perspective instantly. Practicing gratitude is another simple way to escape from the habit of being judgmental.
Let’s try to remember that we choose all our relationships for the lessons they bring. Being willing to accept these lessons and the people who bring them can change our minds from judgment to love and acceptance.
— Karen Casey, Change Your Mind and Your Life Will Follow, p. 139
One day at a time. What a concept. There is nothing we can’t do if we do it in small enough increments. Since we are certain of being alive only one instant at a time, let’s cherish the awareness that right now we can begin our day again with a new idea, a new attitude, and the appropriate accompanying behaviors. Anytime you choose to begin is the right time. Take it slow and small and your life will change.
— Karen Casey, Change Your Mind and Your Life Will Follow, p. 128