Hi Everyone,

I’d like to continue on the theme of relationships. There’s so much to explore in this area, so I’m going to make it a recurring theme in my Blogs and upcoming course curriculum. My goal is to provide you with content, podcasts and assignments to help you gain insight about relationships and hopefully provide you with additional confidence in this often challenging area of life.

In my last Blog, I wrote about the Conscious Relationship, where you and your partner are awake and alert on a psychological and emotional level and moving towards your mutual soul growth.

Now I’ll explore the Unconscious Relationship, as essentially, you can’t really know one, without knowing the other, right?

What traits or behaviours are characteristic of an Unconscious Relationship?

• You neglect to see each other as mirrors for one another. Instead, you initially see one another as “dreams come true”; as saviours; as forms of escape; or an opportunity for completion.Then when reality sets in, and it becomes time for the real healing work that you were brought together for, you start to see each other as opponents. Instead of looking at the other person’s defects and asking “where does that defect live in me”, you zero in on the faults in each other and become disillusioned, disappointed, disenchanted and the conflict and power struggles mount.
• You experience a lack of acceptance of each other’s humanness. As a deep self acceptance is missing in your relationship with yourself, this lack is mirrored and therefore missing in your relationship with each other. So, instead of acceptance, you might find:
  • Tolerance – a very poor cousin to acceptance. It can look similar but there is a huge difference. Tolerance includes passive judgment. Tolerating a situation is not surrendering, accepting or looking for the greater good in a situation. Sometimes, the greater good means leaving and sometimes it means staying. Emotionally immature people hold on when they should let go and let go when they should have held on: OR
  • Intolerance – You may be completely intolerant with your partner or them with you. There exists a frustration and a demand for change. This often happens in a relationship between the exhausted co-dependent and the irresponsible addict. You believe it’s your job to convince the other person to change so you can “get your needs met”. As Marianne Williamson says, “no one is here to meet your needs, except God!” So, your focus naturally becomes about changing them ‘so that you can be happy’. Alternatively, it can be all about changing yourself so they won’t leave you. This insecurity-based form of change does not fall under the heading of mutual soul growth. Your assignment was to change you not them and for that change to be for your psycho-spiritual growth, not to avoid your unresolved abandonment pain.
  • Change – Of course, if something is not working, you have a right to seek change – after all growth is change – but unlike the Conscious Relationship where the desire for growth is mutual, and the desire for wholeness is high, in the Unconscious Relationship, the desire for change is usually based on the belief that your happiness can only come about as the result of a change in your partner. You want them to “see the light” rather than you being the light that reflects to them the possibility of becoming their greater self.
• Instead of supporting one another to heal the shadow self, support comes in the form of rescue behaviour, such as:
  • Caretaking, control or unsolicited advice giving;
  • Critical behaviour – righteous indignation, inventory taking, raging, shaming;
  • Avoidant Behaviour – shutting down, avoiding or becoming indifferent;
  • Prescriptive feedback rather than descriptive, respectful feedback;
  • Telling them their Reality – You don’t share your reality and feelings, instead you tell your partner what they think and feel, or they do that to you.
• The relationship lacks a commitment to mutual soul growth. The struggle is not an evolutionary one designed for your mutual soul growth – but rather a struggle for power. The fostering of mutual soul growth is not at the core. You and your partner are unaware of, resisting or denying the Universal Will for your mutual soul growth and you are stuck on the level of projection. Every relationship has a level of projection in it – positive or negative – but if you stay stuck on this level, you are operating at the level of co-dependency, or a power struggle. This does not foster mutual growth. It fosters either mutual suffering or mutual apathy.

Can you get the picture now? Can you begin to see what traits and behaviours exist in an Unconscious Relationship as opposed to a Conscious one?

Go back and read my Blog on the Conscious Relationship and listen to my podcasts.

I want you to understand these characteristics, otherwise you might find that you can be stuck, with your partner, arguing about the obvious things (superficial battles) while the deeper powers of your subconscious ride gun shot over your relationship . You may end up breaking up the relationship over the obvious while being completely oblivious to the deeper lesson that your relationship was designed to help you learn. Then guess what, if you haven’t learnt the lesson intended by that relationship assignment, you won’t evolve to a higher vibrational relationship, you may create a different one but it won’t be a higher one.

Pay attention to what you notice in yourself, so that you can assess whether you are in a Conscious Relationship and whether YOU, yourself are doing what is required to make that relationship, conscious?

Keep an eye out for my Blog on Barriers to Intimacy coming up in a few weeks and better still, the Blog on Breaking Down the Barriers!

Please listen to the radio show link below to reflect on your own relationship history.

Identify traits and behaviours in yourself so that you can determine if you are in an Unconscious Relationship. Listen also to my previous podcast of April 10^th on the Conscious Relationship, and reflect.