Thursday, April 9, 2020

Day 35- Revisiting a Past Relationship

I started typing this out on the forum, but thought I'd share it here to increase exposure of how someone can walk out issues related to a very old memory using the tools of self-forgiveness, self-honesty, self-writing, and breath and change one's life for the better.

Here I want to look at a Memory I have related to a particular individual who I will refer to as A throughout this writing. During my college years, I became very close to A. We spent time together almost every week and it got to the point where I would hang out almost exclusively with him and my roommate. Eventually, I became so close with A that I began to envision myself spending the rest of my life with him. My affection for A wasn’t so much sexual, as I hadn’t had a homosexual encounter before that nor had I seen him express interest in men. I did imagine and fantasize about cuddling or at least holding each other as an extension of our affection for one another, but I left sex as something that could be a potential development in the future, if we both agreed to such a point.

When we moved in together, I was under the assumption that his feelings for me were reciprocated. We had never explicitly discussed this, but I experienced myself as psychically connected to A and believed we were on the same page. However, after we moved into the house together, it eventually became clear to me that he had no intentions of a physical relationship with me (sexual or simply affectionate) and in fact I experienced him distancing himself from me somewhat as compared to our relationship when we both lived on campus.

I didn’t know what to do at this point. 

I believed that having A be a part of my life into the future was so important, I couldn’t bear to consider the idea that I would be deprived of being the principle relationship in A’s life.

Within all this, I assumed a lot about our relationship and could have avoided years of strife and pain related to this relationship with A if I had communicated any of what I was experiencing towards him with him.

Also, I overextended myself within myself during this relationship because I assumed he would be there for me to support me and had to deal, and am still dealing with, the consequences when that support fell away.

From there, I ended up homeless and alone, partly due to the fact that so much of my world was intertwined with A's, and I simply no longer could deal with running in those circles, especially as I considered A to be a powerful figure within the scene we had been participating within.

Here, I can see that part of my identity was tied up with him and when I realized that it wasn't going to work between us, it was like a part of me was no longer being nourished. Essentially, a part of me had died.

What I didn't realize at the time, was that every part of what I experienced during those years was actually just another part of me. The potential that I believed I could only become if I was in a relationship with A (and I meant that we would be 'primary partners' who were allowed to essentially do what we want, but were emotionally and physically bonded more closely than the peripheral characters in our reality) was actually my own potential that I had mistakenly placed within the idea of A. Perhaps I was naive in becoming as vulnerable as I did, and in doing so I gave some of my power away.

When the relationship ended, it was very difficult for me to stabilize myself and figure out a healthy next move, as that overextension of myself meant that I counted on someone else in my reality to care for parts of myself that I hadn't cared for in the first place.

In a sense, really, there was a part of the relationship I had entered into quite greedily: I saw an opportunity to take too much, or more than I was capable of getting on my own, by using A to extend and expand into areas I hadn't ensured I was personally stable enough / grounded enough to reach should the support of A fall through.

This is why the relationship was so exhilarating: I experienced myself as an übermensch because this person was giving me access to things I should not have had access to and it made me feel special, like I was better than those around me. It's also why I fell so freaking hard after it ended: none of the people I left behind in my self-imagined superiority were particularly keen on helping me out once the music had stopped. I felt abandoned but hadn't realized how I had abandoned everyone when I was flying high. Then, I had to suffer the consequences of crashing hard.

I remember thinking that I had peaked and struggling with figuring out what I was going to do with the rest of my life. What do you do when you know for certain that you will never get an opportunity to fly so high and get so close to being better than so many people, especially when you have invested so heavily of yourself to get to that point? What do you do with the knowledge that you won't ever have it so good, within a system of competition, as you had it, and that if you choose to participate in that system again, everything else will be a compromise?

Well, for me, I fell into a deep depression. All of my motivation in this world simply dissipated. I continued to live in the same house as A for a while, but I stopped having fun hanging out with our old friends, in the old venues we used to frequent. Part of me understood that A was partially responsible for doing me wrong, as I knew he knew I had, albeit unspoken, feelings for him, and did things that allowed me to continue believing there was a future for us. But I couldn't understand why his life seemed to continue to go on so smoothly, as if he wasn't feeling any consequences for the part he had played in my fall, while I experienced myself as totally unsupported by the same group of people. I knew he didn't really care about these people either, we were both addicted to power and manipulation and that's why we used each other to gain the statuses we had, but for some reason he continued to be adored while I was increasingly ignored. I suspect that differences in our socioeconomic backgrounds had something to do with this situation, as people were sub- or unconsciously attracted to him as someone who came from money while I always knew I had to work harder to gain people's adulation coming from a more lower-middle class background.

Eventually, though, I just gave up. Up until that point, all the good things in my life seemed to just come to me. It was the same with my relationship with A: everything about our relationship was so easy: I don't think we ever fought in the two plus years of knowing him and hanging out on a weekly to daily basis. After our relationship fell apart, I was waiting around for the next good thing to come into my life. I didn't think I had done anything wrong and knew he was guilty of manipulating me into believing things that weren't true, so I had the belief that I had a karmic balance coming to me and would receive something equally amazing in my life to make up for what I had perceived myself as lacking in losing A.

So, I waited. And waited. And waited. And still, nothing happened. I continued working my dead end job and even though I eventually moved out of that house with A, nothing good was placed into my life to replace my relationship with A.

Yet, I still had placed my power in A. I believed that it was extremely unlikely for me to achieve anything near what I had fantasized I was capable of achieving within a relationship with A. Nobody had the right combination of a good upbringing, empathy, a rebellious and risk-taking nature, a love for psychedelic adventures, a good sense of humor, and curiosity, I believed. When I saw him eventually pair up with an otherwise remarkable woman, I knew inside of myself that he was compromising. He was hung up about the fact that we were the same gender and didn't want to go through with the relationship because he lacked the courage to deal with the social fallout of being in a same-sex relationship. I knew I was also the most amazing person he had met. And I knew that together, there would never be anything like what we could accomplish together, both for each of us individually and for the world at large. So, I had confusion about why A, who was otherwise unafraid to explore new aspects and styles of self-expression, was hung up on something that I saw as an opportunity to push the boundaries of our culture in being in a visible same-sex relationship.

And yet, he balked out of the relationship. So, I was confused, saddened, and depressed not only for myself, and not only also for him, but for the world. Our peak was also the world's peak and he backed away from it, letting it all fall down. I could not, and still do not, understand why.

But as someone who has come to study the Desteni material and specifically learned about that it means to enter into an Agreement, I am starting to realize the importance of some things in trying to build a new, healthy relationship.

Point one being Communication. While I am able to talk at length about what happened in our relationship and who was responsible for what and how we both felt about each other, all of this was gleaned psychically from A or experienced only within myself. Never, not even once, did we discuss being in a romantic relationship together. I never spoke about it with anyone else until about a year ago. So, while all that potential and the amazing things I experienced while being close with A were real, without being spoken about and agreed upon between the both of us, there was no accountability. A was able to escape the relationship without saying anything and I was left in pain without communicating, and thus receiving feedback and support, to anybody, either A or a friend or family member. The whole thing arose and fell in silence and so it was difficult for me to pin down who was accountable for what within the relationship.

Only now am I realizing what a stable Agreement between two individuals would look like, and only with the tools of Desteni (self-forgiveness, self-writing, self-introspection, breathing, and self-change), have I been able to begin to unravel just what the **** happened in my relationship with A: what was real, what I did wrong, what HE did wrong, and how I can change those things or avoid doing them again when I am ready to enter into an Agreement with another individual.

But I was lost for many years after that relationship and only by walking tools for even more years was I able to put distance between myself and that situation. Other patterns that I had been walking even longer than the things I held onto from my relationship with A have taken even longer to walk out of, so I suggest to check out the FREE online course where you'll learn the nature of thoughts, feelings, and emotions, and how to effectively take responsibility for them in a way that demonstrates care for yourself and the planet as soon as possible.

You owe it to yourself to change. And the world needs you now more than ever.

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