Is it love or just drama and pain?

We choose partners that reflect the things that we believe about ourselves. If you carry negative ideas about yourself, love, and relationships, your partners will mirror these and create a self-fulfilling prophecy.

We adjust and accommodate and in some instances even enable our partners to keep doing their painful behavior. If you habitually choose emotionally unavailable people and find regularly find yourself in poor relationships with poor mate material, no matter what you say and believe, you too are emotionally unavailable and you choose people who yield the least likely possibility for a healthy, positive relationship.

Emotionally available people don’t habitually get involved with The Dirty Seven and when they do find themselves involved with them, they back away because it doesn’t feel healthy, comfortable, or right.

We say we want to be committed and we want to be loved, yet we choose people who can barely commit to seeing us the following week and who don’t actually love us.

And this is where some of you will become confused because:

1) You believe that you love them.

2) You believe that they love you but they just don't know it, or they love you but they're too afraid to show it, or they loves you because they tell you that they do even though their actions say different.

3) You believe that you have an amazing connection and this is your destiny because the sex is great/he’s funny with a great sense of humor, no-one’s ever made you feel like this before, etc.

4) You feel that you love them and if you feel this way then surely they should appreciate how much you feel for them and love you back because you have projected how you think and feel on them and you believe that you are the best they've ever had.

5) You believe you can do enough loving for the both of you and that in time, they will realize it and you’ll love happily ever after.

Pain is the opposite of love But pain is not love. It's the opposite of live. It’s just pain. So and don’t mix the two up and think that you’re suffering for your love and that only real, passionate love is painful, because quite frankly, there are many people who would pass on putting themselves through this pain.

Fear and drama
Much of the pain stems from fear and drama and we mistake our feelings of fear and penchant for drama as love, because we have poor relationship habits that have been learned over an extended period of time, often from childhood. This means that our behavior and desires may seem completely normal and even familiar as we can be playing out subconscious patterns.

Patterns What you learn though as you become aware of your relationship habits and harness your pattern is that if we don’t address how we feel about ourselves, love, and relationships we end up with a very skewed idea of what love is.

1) You learn to accept crumbs, feeling grateful for slivers of attention from people who are unworthy of your energy.

2) You convince yourself that what you’re getting is what you deserve or it must be what you want, because surely if you didn’t want this person and this relationship then you could walk away?

3) You believe that the magnitude of pain that you experience is in direct correlation to the amount of love you have, thus the more pain you feel, the more in love you believe yourself to be.

4) You convince yourself that you’re not good enough to expect or get more and that a better relationship will elude you.

5) You believe that because you have such poor experiences and that time is passing that you must ’settle’.

6) You become obsessed with getting attention from these people and aren’t concerned with the quality of attention so you end up with drama, either sought out or thrown in your direction.

7) You become co-dependent. The very person who is on one hand the very source of your pain also appears to be the sole source of your happiness. You can’t seem to function without them and you believe it’s because of your love when in actual fact it’s because of fear.

8) You think that the butterflies in your stomach that you get around these people is excitement and passion when in actual fact, when you have a habit of being with the same poor partners, it’s familiar fear.

9) You expend so much mental energy thinking about them, what you think they feel and do, what you think you do and feel, and betting on potential that you lose sight of the reality of them and become obsessed and infatuated with an illusion.

Fake love and passion Many of the dysfunctional things that happen in poor relationships are easy to tag as ‘love" and "passion" but it is important to remember that reality becomes distorted in poor relationships . If you don’t reconcile who you think you love with the reality of who they are and the relationship you have, you will fail to process that feeling of drama and fear for what they are - fear and drama - and as long as you are doing this, you will continue to fall into a cycle of poor relationships that result in similar experiences.

The drama and the fear
Fear and drama make you dependent on surrounding yourselves in experiences and factors that make it more comfortable for you to believe that this is how things are. Fear causes inaction and we end up being comfortable with the pattern of the very uncomfortable, because it seems far more uncomfortable to make positive changes that will not only make us accountable for our own happiness (or misery), but will throw the spotlight on where we are expending our emotional energy and reveal some uncomfortable truths.

Familiar pain
If you have been involved with the type of people who yield poor experiences on a habitual basis, there will be many familiar things about what you’re experiencing and that’s a sign in itself that not only is something very wrong, but you’re actually gravitating to patterns that you can recreate over and over again, and that’s not love when it ends up causing you so much pain, fear, and drama.

The test of all this is if you develop a healthier relationship with yourself which will result in healthier beliefs about love and relationships, will you still want them? Will you still love them? Or will you finally realize that you haven’t experienced love yet - you’ve just experienced pain.

For more info: See my books, The Dirty Seven: Ladies Beware and Booby Trapped: Men Beware the Dirty Seven Sisters.

He beats me but . . .

Talking about her boyfriend, a reader wrote, "I don't want the child growing up with a father that kicks in doors, smashes ceilings, and has uncontrollable rages. That's just not the atmosphere you want around a child--no less an adult. He doesn't put his fist through the walls every day. But enough so that I don't want a child growing up with that kind of unpredictable destruction.

"But if you met him, you'd think, what a nice guy. He's so sweet and mild mannered. And he tell me how sorry he is."

She still loves him. She believes that he can change, despite a therapist describing him as a “psychopath with a limited emotional span.”

Nice killer
Don't try to change or make excuses for him. Being with an abuser just because sometimes he is a nice guy is like eating the bright red poisoned apple. It may be attractive, but it is deadly in all respects. A serial killer can be charming and can even be kind to people when it serves his purpose, but that doesn’t mean that you can suddenly write off all of his murders. He helps old ladies cross the street. Yes, so he can kill them.

The "when he's nice" trap
This is where anyone in an abusive relationship keeps falling into the trap: Focusing on the nice behavior displayed by these men (often at the beginning of the relationship) and ignoring the consistently bad behavior.

He's sorry
This guy is an abuser by nature. Part of the abusive behavior is to say they're sorry. They may even mean it. But the pattern will emerge again whenever something triggers their irrational rage. Do you want to come home to a place that looks like a bomb site? Stop making excuses for this man's behavior and telling me how nice he is. It's is like when a woman with an abusive man says who says he is truly sorry for smashing in her face. He apologized and now all will be well again, right? Even though he broke her nose and jaw and she lost an eye. Besides, if she hadn't said such and such he wouldn’t have beat her!

The pattern
Stop it now. Abusers follow a pattern that is important to learn. They abuse, maybe apologize, maybe blame you for why they did it, and then THEY DO IT AGAIN.

Clinging to sickness
My reader is ignoring red flag behavior and fatal flaws in the relationship because she doesn’t want to let go. She is focused on the good moments, and she essentially knows no better. But now that a child is coming into the picture, she is at least separating herself from him physically. Yet she still clings to him emotionally.

In situations like this, she is gravitating to the level of emotional sickness that she is comfortable with. She may feel that she does not deserve better. And that somewhere deep inside she is a bad girl who must be punished. If this is so, she is setting herself up for a lifetime of pain. His problems are bigger than her or the relationship.

Love isn't enough
You can’t just decide “I love him” and then bestow your love on him as if it has some magical healing power. It's like bringing home a moldy, runny tomato from the grocery store and sending love vibrations to make it fresh and whole again. The world doesn’t work like that and there are millions of women out there that are living witnesses and testimonies to this.

Think of the child
So don't fool yourself. Think of the child and what you want for your baby. You don't want that new life to be growing up in an environment of abuse. Unfortunately, abuse tends to perpetuate abusive behavior. Practically all abusive people have received similar treatment as children. The cycle must be broken. The only way to break it is to have enough self-esteem to know you deserve better and stop making excuses for his behavior. Move on.