Curled up at the end of the bed, the woman was quietly weeping.  Her beagle stuck its nose into the bit of space between her arm and cheek and began to lick her face.  This made her cry even harder.

“Why is it so hard?” she cried.  “Why can’t I find a relationship that lasts.”  She grabbed a kleenex and stroked her dog’s head.  “I swore I wouldn’t let this happen again. and here I am, crying over another break up.”

All alone in her dingy little apartment, she forced herself to get up and poured herself a cup of tea. “I hate this apartment!”  Tears began to stream again. “I hate my life.”  Shoulders slumping, she made her way back to the couch.  Absentmindedly she grabbed the remote and began to run through the channels.

“Three hundred channels and nothing to watch.” she growled as she tossed the remote across the room. continue

“My partner’s bad mood is NOT in my mind!  He is grouchy and mean spirited sometimes and I am SURE I am not attracting that behavior.  I am not grouchy and mean spirited.  How can the Law of Attraction be working when he is so melancholy all of the time and I am not?”

What a great question.  Being in the same environment with another person on a day in and day out basis means we have to adjust to what is going on around us all the time.  When our housemate is not faring well emotionally, some of us go into hyper rescue mode.  We want to remove the bad mood from OUR surroundings so we start trying to help by saying and doing things we think are encouraging.

Have you ever noticed how that always seems to make things worse? The suffering person does not want to be cheered up and the result is sheer frustration.  Is it our responsibility to cheer up the wallowing one?  More importantly, is there something in us that actually attracts more of the depression we are seeing in our partner?

I don’t claim to understand all of this.  Sharing a home with a soul mate ,can often be blissful and fulfilling and I am grateful for those moments, but what do we do when one of the pair is decidedly out of sorts?  Here are five tips for coping with your overwhelmed and discouraged house mate without losing your emotional well-being:

1.  Acknowledge that his angst is his angst. Tell yourself the facts as you see them.  Your boyfriend is going through a challenge.  He can’t see the way out.  He is not a reader and doesn’t seek help in books. (I know, hard to believe but true.)  He is picking at you and that is not cool.  These are all good observations and will help you make a plan. It is hard to see him with loving eyes if he is having a pity party, especially if he really wants you in there with him.

2. Check in with yourself and notice what you are feeling. Once again, tell yourself what you are noticing.  “I don’t like when he is like this.  I feel disconnected and out of the loop.  I feel alone and sad.  I can’t cheer him up and he gets annoyed when I try.  I feel yucky.” Be as honest and descriptive as you can about your own feelings

3. Ask yourself how you WANT to feel. “I want to feel separate from his problems.  I want to feel happy and perky.  I want to feel light-hearted.  I want to feel hopeful and full of expectation.  I want to feel encouraged and vibrant.”  Just writing down how you want to feel is super empowering.  How many of us skip this critical step and then wonder how the whole day goes by with little productivity.

4. Choose your point of focus for YOUR mood of the day. Yes, your partner is struggling and it is excruciating at times to see the emotional turmoil he is going through.  Believe it or not, the best thing you can do is to lift your own spirits.  Once you write down how you want to feel, you will give your Inner Being the marching orders it loves to fulfill.  Your focus on YOUR well-being will change the dynamic in your home….subtley at first but with persistance, the entire mood of your home will shift.

5. Shine your light in his direction. Use your imagination to shower your man with love and light as often as you can.  Being an invisible benefactor and fueling him with your highest intentions for his well being is a precious gift.  He lets himself be known by you more deeply than any one else and your respect for his transparency will yield results.  Sometimes your brightest light toward him will come when you are not with him. Go out and have some fun yourself. Go somewhere he isn’t into and focus on you and your well-being. When you come home, you will be refreshed and energized.

I know it feels unfair at times to just let the grouchy energy be with itself.  After all, it is your home too, why do you have to put up with it? See, I can hear you all the way over here.  The key is to realize that your reading of another person’s mood is a good thing.  It reminds you of how you DON’T want to feel!  Don’t try to fix him, make a choice to do something that uplifts YOU.  When you get in the habit of responding in this way, you show by example how simple choices can radically change perspective on an issue.  And as always, we teach more by our behavior than we do with our words.

10. Whine about what your best friend got and how you never get anything you like.
9. Drag him to the mall with a notebook and stroll around pointing out things you like.
8. Remind him how much he botched the last three gift giving occasions.
7. Tell him how your last boyfriend always picked the best gifts for you.
6. Stop in front of every jewelry store and drool over diamonds.
5. Pick your favorite store and tell him a gift certificate from there is perfect.
3. Cut out pictures of things you like and tape them to his bathroom mirror.
2. Agree to a $25 limit and stick to it.
1. Ask him to plan a romantic evening for the two of you and surprise you!

Remember, he loves you. He knows that Christmas is special to you. He may just be insecure about buying you the perfect gift, especially if you want a ring. Be patient and kind. Praise him for being thoughtful and accept his gift with a sense of light heartedness and he will feel awesome for pleasing you!

How many times do we hear it?

“Sure, after I trained him to be the perfect boyfriend, he breaks up with me and goes to be perfect for someone else.”

Has this happened to you?

We can learn a lot from our short term relationships. We bump and bruise each other like bumper cars in an old time amusement park. We fight, argue, push our weight around or we withdraw, pout and manipulate.

Isn’t that a charming list of behaviors! If we think that our man of the moment is the One, these ups and downs can be devastating. If he IS the One, fear of losing him can take your power away from you and you will start compromising on some things you know are not right for you. No wonder we are in a mess when it comes to sorting out our feelings and getting really clear….I mean REALLY CLEAR on what we want in a partner.

When your man disappoints you, it is painful, I know because I went through a disappointing event with my man just a few hours ago. The first thing I did, which was different for me, was to say “Could we not decide right now? Could we table this and at least talk about it later?” He agreed and I left the room.

I felt hurt and sad and everything in me, well that is not so true anymore, but a rather large part of me wanted to blame him for making me feel so bad. After all, his words made my heart start to hurt….or did they?

I am learning that the emotional pain I feel when my man disappoints me was there all the time. He doesn’t climb inside of my body and pinch me in the place where I feel my heart ache. I am learning that the spot within me that aches when he acts in certain ways is simply a place where my body has agreed to carry the emotional pain from past events.

What, you say? The past is in the past and that is that. I don’t let any of that drama bother me anymore.

I hear you! I know you have moved on and have turned your back on a lot of the hurtful relationships you have had in the past and I say….you go girl!! But, and this is a big one, how sure are you that you are not missing some emotional energy still stuck to the ghosts in your past?

That is why, and ladies….write this down….you can learn to actually be grateful for the hurt feelings that your man brings up in you. Look, you have to admit, half the time he upsets you he simply says something stupid that he doesn’t really mean at all, right?

Learn to look at yourself differently and you will respond to him differently….guaranteed.

After I got my own self back in balance, I went outside and meditated and rested for an hour (VERY unusual behavior for me, as I am about a 15 minute meditater) and re-entered life. I still felt a little hurt but I had convinced myself that if his opinion was right that it would all work out ok. I decided on a course of action that felt neutral and I felt calm about it.

We had a brief and peaceful follow up chat and things are smoothing out.

I know that I am changing as I allow myself to recognize when I am upset and simply handle it differently than I usually do. Breaking habitual relationship behavior is an excellent way to plow the ground and get ready to plant new skills, new fun and new lovin’!

The road to self love and self compassion is the only one that counts!

Are you ready for New Love?  http://TakeTheSoulMateQuiz.com and find out right now!

The Answer May Surprise You.

The disappointment I hear in the voices of the women who are lonely and looking for romance in their lives is haunting.

“Why do I keep attracting the jerks and losers?”

“All of the men in my age group are married or satisfied with being single.”

“What if I never meet the love of my life?”

Ouch.

There is a hidden key to finding the man of your dreams and believe it or not, it has nothing to do with your past lovers or the emotionally distant relationship you might have with your dad.

The key to finding a man who gets you and loves you is to fully recover from the hurts from the women in your past.

What you say?

How can my friendships with women have anything to do with finding my soul mate?

Let me tell you a story.

When Janna went to college, she felt really lucky. She hadn’t fit in with the cool kids in high school and was a loner. College was different though. She met people she could relate to and began to find friends.

Naïve and open, she began to trust these girls and let herself be known more and more deeply. It was fun to come home to the dorm and always find someone up, no matter what time it was, to share about dates, guys and guys.

These were really great friendship times and Janna flourished.

Then, out of the blue, Janna met a guy of her own. It was an instant crush. Every cell in her body vibrated when she thought about him. Body, mind and soul all completely captured by this wonderful man.

She fell hard and, lucky for her, so did he. Janna and Dan began hanging out together as often as they could. They didn’t really date, they just hung out. It was comfortable and fun and felt very right.

What happened next with her girlfriends blindsided her completely. Janna’s roommate, Kate, was going through a messy breakup with her longterm boyfriend at the time. Somehow, they saw Janna’s time spent with Dan as an abandonment of Kate.

As they made their stance more and more clear, Janna was faced with a difficult choice. Her girlfriends or…..her soulmate.

Of course she chose Dan. He was her whole world.

What a time it was. The chemistry was strong and steady. They got each other. It was so easy to be together and they couldn’t get enough of each other. It was completely natural for them to spend more and more time together. And so they did.

The price was high though. In the not fully informed decision making of a teenage crowd, Janna was excised from the group. At the time, it didn’t seem to matter. The hurt and disappointment was completely hidden by the overwhelming chemistry between Janna and Dan.

The loss of the friendships, the support, the smiles, the involvement the fun of girlfriendness was never addressed.

When Janna and Dan broke up after a passionate, complicated and significant length of time, Janna was left not only without her soulmate and her girlfriends, she also had taken a huge hit in the area of trust. After all, she had picked those girls and her soulmate and those choices were filled with drama and trauma.

Unaware of the unexpressed disappointment still deep in her memory, Janna never trusted women again. Holding her heart closed from other girls, she could comfort herself knowing she couldn’t get hurt like that again.

Fast forward ten, twenty years or so. Janna now has had many women friends over the years but few that have sustained themselves. She is lonely and, truth be told, desperate to meet a man to be with. She wants what she had with Dan. She wants to feel that excitement again. The wanting of it is steady and intense. “Where is he?” She cries into her pillow at night. “Why can’t I meet him?”

Freeze Frame:

The betrayal of women, by women, is the single most injurious of emotional wounding. Self protective postures and behaviors keep women at arms length from each other.

Ask yourself, how many women do I trust completely?

Unless you are very different than most, you come up with a very low number.

What in the world does all this have to do with your invisible soulmate?

Everything.

When you are drawn into a romantic relationship with an unconscious (which by its nature is naïve and open, bless its heart) desire to fulfill both a girlfriend’s and a boyfriend’s roles, the result is always devastating. Whether it ends sooner or later, the results are the same. The relationship is lopsided and, without help, pretty doomed.

Not many men are going to be attracted (in the invisible but oh so real world of energetic signals.) to you with this signal. Men run from neediness every time. They can’t be everything to you and you wouldn’t want a man who thought that he could. Trust me.

They read it with their Man Radar.

Yuck, you say, I don’t want to radiate that!

Are you ready to start doing things differently?

How serious are you about finding your soul mate?

Take an inventory and see how many of your past female friendships ended badly. Check in with your heart to see if past betrayal still hurts.

Are you holding yourself back in your search for your soulmate because the pain of a broken heart seems worse than being alone?

Learning to open your heart again toward women will put you on the fast track to receiving the man the Universe has been trying to bring to you.

Before you say that you don’t have any issues with those mean girls, ask yourself this question:

Why am I still single?

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