Have you ever had the opportunity to experience love, only to run a million miles or go into self-destruct or sabotage mode, often without even realising it until it is too late?
I had just this; an incredible relationship, an amazing man who adored me, and most of all could see me for the incredible woman I was, even though I was not choosing to live that woman at the time of our relationship.
I knew how much he loved me, that he would always be there for me, and to be honest, it has only been recently I have been able to admit and see just how far I went to push him away and end our relationship.
I constantly went into self-doubt, always questioning him about where he had been, and my mind would have a field day with me, coming up with all sorts of scenarios while he was out with his friends.
Yes, I was young, but deep down I knew he was not up to anything, that he was totally trustworthy, but because of my own insecurities and lack of self-worth I would go into self-destruct mode and on would come the arguments, which just confirmed for me that there was something more than what he said was going on, even though I would be the one to instigate the arguments to begin with.
I would think that if he became argumentative in return then there had to be more to it, or if he walked away or didn’t want to talk about it, then again there had to be more to it.
Absurd, crazy and totally unnecessary, but for me, holding myself back, not allowing myself to truly be loved or to live the love and the woman I was, was a self-defence mechanism I had created to keep others away, no matter how much I loved or cared for them. I had so much fear around being hurt I wanted to get in first.
The crazy thing was it was me who was doing all the hurting; firstly, and most of all, to myself, and then to others, as an end result of my own issues I was not choosing to deal with or allowing myself to feel.
Relationships are something many of us want, but not all of us allow ourselves to truly commit in full, without holding back any of ourselves. It is this holding back, the constant guard and protection that we hold so dearly, that contrasts with the absolute love that we should be holding dear – the absoluteness that allows us to stop and connect to ourselves and others, to have deep connections with no expectations, ideals, images or wanting of another to be anything but themselves.
I was lucky enough to have such a relationship presented to me at a young age. Sure it was not perfect but there was a love there that could have supported it to deepen and develop into something that was true if the choice had been made.
It was not until recently that I realised I had held regret for the choices I had made, as well as the hurt I still held in my body for not choosing love over my own insecurities and hurts.
What I am learning is just that – it is a choice to allow yourself to be open, to commit in full and not hold back, to honour yourself and another in the gentleness, tenderness and fragility we are.
To love and commit to a relationship with yourself first is paramount: that all relationships begin with you and without that, you cannot truly commit to or love another.
It is for me an ongoing commitment, one that I am developing and deepening daily, constantly observing my choices. If they are a step towards the love I am, or away, do I choose to open up and let others in or am I choosing to hide behind the protection that I create in order to not be seen for, or live, the amazingness I am?
True relationships develop, as do we, and it has been with the ongoing love, support and reflections of Serge Benhayon, his family and Universal Medicine that I have had my own journey of re-connection and development of what it is to live as the woman I am today, and to discover and allow myself to begin to live in, and part of, true relationships.
By Nicole Serafin, Age 44, Tintenbar NSW, Woman, wife, mother, hairdresser
Further Reading:
Discovering my True Strength being the Delicate Woman I Am
True Responsibility – My Understanding
From Searching for Love to Self-Love
799 Comments
‘What I am learning is just that – it is a choice to allow yourself to be open, to commit in full and not hold back, to honour yourself and another in the gentleness, tenderness and fragility we are.’ I am also learning this. I can feel how I have a protection and that I have an expectation that others be loving to me first and that then I will be open and loving with them – I have felt lately how this stops me being consistently loving and open and harms me and the people that I am in relationship with.
This needs to be known from day one for all children, and the education system could re-enforce children’s understanding of this fact,’To love and commit to a relationship with yourself first is paramount: that all relationships begin with you and without that, you cannot truly commit to or love another.’
It sets the foundation in every relationship when we hold another in all the beauty and amazingness they are even though they may not be living it and likewise it is very, very beautiful when we are truly met, constellated in a relationship where the man or woman can see us for who we truly are – amazing, tender and powerful human beings even though we may choose not to live that man or woman.
Committing to ourselves first is absolutely fundamental before any other relationship, and we get countless opportunities throughout the day to practice this: our every thought, movement or action can either erode our sense of who we are and know ourselves to be, or confirm and affirm it.
This does remind me of when I was younger how when a really decent guy came along I would sabotage the relationship because of my lack of self-worth. There was something inside of me that could not handle having someone who accepted me as I was, perceived flaws and all.
The opportunity to love ourselves is always on offer. The more I do so – the more love I feel for people around me.
Very true Hm, every loving movement big or small we make towards ourselves the more ripples of love we offer to those around us. We cannot ever underestimate any movement that is made in love.
Yes, the more love we build and embody for self, the more there is for other people.
It’s interesting that deep down we absolutely know the truth of who someone is and how they are, but we allow ourselves to get taken out by thoughts of them being this or that – a corrupted version of who we deeply know them to be, when we’re not present, and not with ourselves. The more we build a loving relationship with ourselves, listening to and honouring what it is that we need, we learn to know ourselves, inside out, and the truth of how and what we feel is given permission to come to the surface for us to feel and know it in a more tangible, clear way.
Even though we want love more than anything, we are very good at pushing it away. For some it’s not feeling worthy of it, or others the fear that it will leave. As the author has shared, you need to develop true love with yourself first, so it feels familiar and natural when presented by someone else. I am also realising just how important it is to put old hurts to rest by feeling and nominating them, as they are like a cancer that eats away at the potential for love.
It is crucial to become honest if you tend to project your hurts onto another person. Only when you deal with your hurt you will be open to see another with pure and untainted eyes. For as no one ever will have a chance to come close to you.
The moment we resist more intimacy and love we will find a million reasons and distractions, which are connected with the other person, only to avoid expanding in ourselves and becoming more.
How can we other than connect to who we are (with ourselves), build relationships with other people? We would have no basis to grow from. That is why a relationship must be built first from within, to make it truly the success it can truly be.
Self doubt is super insidious, it festers and grows and causes much harm, the problem is that it is so ‘normal’ you are considered abnormal if you don’t have it.
Starting to call out this imposter is super important if we want to claim back our lives.
Life is about relationships, Lets face it when our relationships are going great then life too is great – have problems in our relationships and life loses that sparkle – well worth the investment in.
If we don’t have a loving and honest relationship with ourselves then it becomes imposssible to have that with others, What you share here shows how we need to deeply appreciate ourselves first so we can see the love offered in a relationship – otherwise we can bring in things to disrupt it. It is crazy to think about all the games we play when we do not want to let love in.
It’s great to acknowledge that our insecurities and when we don’t deal with our stuff actually damages all our relationships. It’s worth knowing what you are worth, otherwise we can destroy the opportunity to have most amazing relationships.
Self doubt is absolute killer in relationships, the crazy thing is it that we blame self doubt when we it is us that actually choose to go into it.
I have run away from true love for life times and this life I am only just opening one eye to it, but more will unfold. I have been in a relationship for a while and it has been staring me in the face that this is true, the real deal, but for years I have held out and sabotaged….now I am beginning to surrender to it and doing so, I realise that it is love that is within us all and holding us all, that I surrender to and that is not just about one person that is a way of being with the All, with our bodies and with our divinity.
When we hold ourselves back in any relationship we don’t get to feel the potential we are offered to know ourselves and others for all that we are.
It is quite a huge deal, to not hold back and to allow oneself to be vulnerable in a relationship, especially the intimate ones. Because there is always some form of hurt, there is never life without hurt and personally I find this much easier to deal with when it comes from a stranger, but subsequently this means that I feel safer with strangers and so keeping very dearly close loved ones out and protected away from has become the normal way… a way that perhaps needs to end.
I remember a time in the past when love was offered to me, it was so hard for me to stay in that presence of such love, because it reflected how much I did not love myself, but gradually over time as my love for my self grew I was able to accept more of the love offered and be able to express love back.
Provoking others first to sabotage a relationship, means that we remain in a pattern of protection and defence that really never delivers us the connection and intimacy that we are really seeking.
Crazy how we push away what we crave the most – love, connection and intimacy – because we’re so afraid of being hurt. When we learn to love ourselves, then everything else becomes an extension of what we’re already feeling, already connected to – and nothing can take away that feeling we have within, because it comes from us, and is backed up by us, without depending on anything beyond or outside of it.
A lot of us think that once you find the perfect partner and experience a true sense of love that that is it. There is no need for more and the love matching is done and dusted. Yet soon come the fights, conflicts and quarrels which only come about because we have not committed to love any more and if we have not committed to love then what have we said yes to?
“The crazy thing was it was me who was doing all the hurting; firstly, and most of all, to myself, and then to others”. I love the self-awareness and honesty here. Most of the time when we have hurts our first response is to blame anyone and anyone, rather than look at what the cause is within ourselves. But that just leaves us in protection and trying to control situations, in the constant tension of worrying when our hurts will get triggered next.
“It was not until recently that I realised I had held regret for the choices I had made, as well as the hurt I still held in my body for not choosing love over my own insecurities and hurts.” – This statement really hit home for me while reading it, and I feel that the mental self-flagellation for making many choices to hold myself back from love for myself and from others tends to do far more damage than the actual acts themselves of sabotage, whether it be via eating something that dulls, stimulates, or creating issues that don’t really exist as distractions from going deeper in our relationships. For me, dealing with the lack of acceptance I may have for all my imperfections is now key to letting love both out and in.
I totally agree Michael. Regret is like a poison in the body and can continue to haunt us for years if we do not address it and seek to dig out it’s roots.
“all relationships begin with you” This is all part of our confusion that we think a relationship is about the other person and what they offer us without stopping to look at what what we bring to any relationship. Our relationship with God begins with the love that we bring to the relationship.
Beautiful Nicole, thank you for writing this. It touches the deeper part of me, my heart.
It is fascinating and disturbing to observe what behaviours we pull in to sabotage the call we feel or have said ‘yes’ to, to go to a deeper quality of love within ourselves and with another. We create issues to avoid going deeper with honesty, knowing the responsibility that is there to step up into. As soon as we resist love we are instead moved by all that is not love, with all the emotions, self-doubt, lack of self-worth and whatever other issues our minds can come up with to make us think that there is a problem as such keeping us very distracted. Being honest about what we are allowing to play out is what brings awareness as to why we have resisted love, the quality we always seek to return to whenever we have chosen to separate from its beholding light.
It shows that we definitely know love inside and out because we can sniff it a mile away and make choices to either accept it or avoid it.
It is an illusion that we can protect ourselves from hurt. As the hurt can only occur by being in alert and tightness in the body before already. The key for me was to learn to surrender, step by step. The more my body could let go, the more I dared to let myself be seen and as a result letting others in. Plus the fact, the surrender in my body helped me become an excellent observer of energies and challenging situations. As we are all vessels of energy, I could understand the game behind certain reactions and incidents, that wanted me to withdrawn from love and people again. So it only makes sense that I must be very powerful when I am in openness, connection and expressing all that I am- why would otherwise an energy be interested and do everything to get me to shut down again?!
It is so very easy to not want to look at the hurts we are carrying and then project them onto others and in this, because of the position we have chosen, it feels very real and our eyes see what we have positioned ourselves to see.
How very beautiful to understand in relationship that we are not perfect and are going to go through things but to have a commitment to going deeper, holding steady and allowing things to come up but making it about love.
A very wise man ( Serge Benhayon) once said to me after a lot of trying to solve the problems of the relationship : “You have to choose expansion for yourself first”. Since I ´ve done that my whole relationship changed, I grew instantly into more and my power, which then offered a whole lot of different reflection for my partner. Because in fact I said YES to myself. I said Yes, with no “but”.
Wow very wise indeed! “You have to choose expansion for yourself first”… I have held this silly belief and held it against my family, that I can only expand if they also do. But this isn’t it, such a beautiful reminder, thank you.
Great point. It is a choice, an allowing of this expansion for yourself first. Love it. Then it will reflect to all and within all the relationships I have, so these can also expand. Thanks for sharing this gem!
It is often when we are offered these qualities that we run from them as we have been so conditioned to want less and live less.
I have a partner who loves me just who I am. From the start I very quickly became aware that any disruptions, quarrels etc. were created by me trying to project on him my own uneasiness, not letting him in and/or become more intimate with him. He was and is a person who does not even hurt a fly – Dutch expression. I knew the pointed finger towards him had to be directed at me. That frustrated me in the beginning, but I knew this was a speed course of taking responsibility and learning to deepen my relationship with myself ánd him. Still learning….
Saying YES to a constellation in not pointing the finger out to the other but bringing it always back to yourself is in deed an absolute evolving booster. Imagine we would use every relationship we have as a gem to learn and to move on, no matter, if we have to learn or bring more understanding to the other? !
When you look at the way we live in the world, the way we fight and resist Love – it’s crazy! The only thing I have found that comes close to explaining what’s going on is the fact of spirit and soul as presented by Serge Benhayon. When you know there is a part of us that fights unity and clings to individuality it starts to make sense of the absurdity we see in the world. Thank you Nicole.
There must be a part in us, that sincerely fights and wants to be apart from our soul. As our souls only know togetherness, love and expansion. Our soul carries no hurt, it is the other part that does everything to not get rocked in their supremacy. And it will hold onto hurts as long as possible, until the moment, when we realise that the greatest hurt was, living separated by our soul and not expressing from it.
How often do we wish we had a partner who was caring, loving, deeply respectful and trustworthy, someone who listened and was there for us? But how often are we willing to be all those things for ourselves, and how often do we unreservedly express those things to another person? We can’t expect from another anything we can’t give ourselves, and equally no one will be able to truly be all those things consistently without first and foremost loving themselves.