Breaking the Cycle: Truth and Love in the Shadows
About the beautiful self-made drama choreographed by our inner parts
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will rule your life and you will call it faith” (Carl Jung)
Relationships are the places where the past tends to reproduce itself. We are sleepwalkers caught in a dream that isn’t even ours. We reproduce and relive the past as we saw it unfold in the lives of our parents. We suffer and we cry, and we can’t understand why our intimate lives are so devastatingly painful.
We are the creators of our realities and the majority of the time we don’t even realize it. We have immense power of creation, but our unconscious minds, hidden in the shadows, away from the light of awareness, do not grasp that “now” is not “then”. Our unconscious minds learned at some point, long ago, what love and safety looked and felt like. So we repeat those patterns again and again, confirming and reconfirming that “this is how things are”.
As babies and children, we are powerless and our lives depend on our caretakers. No wonder that in our unconscious minds, how we were treated back then is of paramount importance. In the end, our survival depended on those around us, and how they treated us became a life-or-death issue.
How vulnerable that must feel. To be so dependent on someone — those strange creatures moving around you that you can’t even see clearly in the beginning, whose language you can’t really understand. They behave in mysterious ways that you can’t understand. But you do understand that they have the power to bestow love upon you or inflict punishment, that they can give you attention or ignore you, that they can praise you or ridicule you, that they can make you feel wanted and worthy or like a worthless burden.
My parents had troubled lives. Alcohol addiction, depression, marital violence. It had a very peculiar shape: it unfolded in a circle. There was the good time in the beginning when everything seemed normal and then, when the time was just right (as in, I could never see it coming), the crisis began. A wrong word or look, and the fighting started. The drinking. The fear.
The crisis usually took a couple of weeks to resolve. Then there were apologies and promises that it would never happen again. After that, there was silence and peace.
I didn’t believe it in the beginning, that it could be so easy — that by making up and making promises, the drama would not happen again. But the peace lasted long enough that I started to hope. Maybe this time… maybe this time it would be different.
But it was not.
It always came as a shock. I had finally relaxed. And then it started again.
That little girl learned to never trust peace and serenity. She learned to brace for the worst, to never let her guard down. In my unconscious mind, this is how love looks and this is what relationships are like: a circle of love and suffering, of happiness and pain.
As a mature woman, I have worked to open up and be more trusting, but there is something my unconscious mind is still replaying: the cycle of peace and love followed by drama and crisis.
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I don’t even know how it happens. It just happens. Half a week in heaven and then half a week in hell. This was last year, during the summer. Sometimes it was even shorter: a weekend together, and at the end, a look or a remark that suddenly destroyed all the peace and serenity of the last few days.
My partner has the wound of his mother loving him but constantly criticizing him for not doing anything right. He also has many traits that remind me of my mother and father combined. His own way of being used to be a huge trigger for me. My inner parts were still suffering so much from memories of my parents that his presence brought up irritation and anger in me. Anger that I projected in his direction: he could never do anything right, and his sin was that his way of being reminded me of my parents.
So, we would get close because we do love each other very much. My shadow parts started to stir, and I began to feel anger and irritation. And he would feel my gaze, how I could hardly disguise how much his actions were annoying me. So his wound — of not doing anything right — was touched and painful.
I was playing the role of his mother, and he was playing the role of my parents. We were dancing beautifully in a self-made drama choreographed by our inner parts.
I asked myself many times, “Do I unconsciously choose partners so that I can relive these patterns of the past?”
I’ve come to think that yes, that is exactly what I am doing. And for some time, I thought the solution was simply to leave and find another (a solution I believed in for a very long time). But over time, I realized that it doesn’t matter. The circle will repeat, in different ways, stronger or weaker, but it will repeat.
So then I wondered — why is it the fate of relationships to bring up the shadow parts of us? Could it be that instead of being a curse, it is a blessing in disguise? What if the purpose of it all is to give you the opportunity to break the cycle? Not by bailing out of the relationship, but by breaking the pattern of the past and creating a new one.
In my case, the way I contribute to the cycle of love and drama is by withholding the truth. I don’t dare to say when something bothers me at that moment. Because I am afraid to hurt their feelings. Because then they might not like me anymore or even leave me. Or other times, I think, “It’s not my business what they do.” But obviously, it’s bothering me; it’s affecting me. And other times, I’m afraid that if I call them out, they will call me out, and then we will end up in a fight along the lines of, “How dare you tell me this? Look at yourself!”
And these moments of hiding, of not telling the truth, accumulate until they reach the point of no return. Then the volcano explodes, burning everything around. Voilà! It seemed like everything was going well, but underneath, the current of magma was already moving, and the climax was steadily and surely approaching.
Awareness. Acceptance. Action.
Do something different.
So, I made a commitment to myself to not run and to tell the truth. To tell the truth in the moment about what is happening inside of me. And I stopped beating myself up for feeling the way I feel or having the thoughts that I have. This is how it is. I accept it. And I will not bail out anymore. Because I can’t run away from the pain forever. It is here with me. Always.
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