Escaping Toward Your Partner: Finding Depth in Relationships
We all go through various transitions in life. Most of which are intricately designed to test our ability to be certain in ourselves. You'll note that life is a whole process of many situations like this. The same goes without saying when it comes to our relationships we choose to journey in.
In most cases that I have worked on, and I'd definitely throw myself in the mix here are often escaping from our partner rather than identifying your partner as your escape. Whats come up for me here is a myriad of different defences which have not allowed me to understand the mechanism of getting close and experiencing depth with my partners. I can most certainly see where this has come from in my upbringing and growing up in an ecosystem that functioned the way it did. Depth was definitely not on the cards even though I craved it.
Our systems are all designed for quick fixes, from the 20 second videos to fast food to easy access pornography. The whole system conditions us to step into a fast paced, dopamine and serotonin enriched environment. Although effective in getting the “hit”, it too is very effective in helping us become more and more detached from relating well with ourselves and others in our life.
So if we are looking for something to blame we can find it. I am definitely not suggesting to blame anything except our inability to take action. It is inaction that keeps us stuck in our flawed belief systems because the one thing we avoid is experiential situations that have immense power to change our perspective on life. It is the experiential that always places our perspectives into question and ultimately lead us to experiencing a potential answer.
I have a wonderful client who always says "the grass is always greener where you water it", and she's absolutely correct. We all fall victim to distractions and these distractions prompt us to stop watering our grass and this destabilises not only the relationship we're in but also everything you have been working on within yourself to reach this state of health and tranquility.
Escapism is a great tool to avoid depth. Through escaping we are avoiding the meeting of the shadow and the light where light always triumphs. But it is in this meeting of opposites that we experience real discomfort. Most people avoid this space but life always attempts at steering us back to this place so we can familiarise ourselves with feelings of discomfort and rationalise what we really want in life.
I have learnt that there is a universal answer to this, and what we all want and crave is freedom, love, empathy, being seen, heard and felt. The problem is that many of us have not yet developed the tools to voice what we need out of fear, so it’s much easier to distract ourselves with escapism rather than stepping towards the other.
If you can relate to this, I pose these questions to you:
1. What do you have to do to see your partner as your escape?
2. Can you practice seeing escaping towards your partner as a means of facing up to your vulnerability and insecurities?
3. Can you identify how you have used escapism as a means of preventing depth? If yes, how so?
4. Can you have the conversation with your partner that you would like them to be your escape, where you relish in the entirety of them?
5. Can you see the difference between escaping from versus escaping towards?
You are escaping to your partner not running away to escape
Always remember that help is only a question away, so if you feel the need for assistance with your relationship, please reach out.
Vaya Con Dios
