Finding your YOU that leads to TWO
You've been waiting for someone your whole life, haven't you?
Whether it was your mom to love you, your dad to be proud of you, or your teachers to like you, your friends to include you, your boyfriends to never leave you, you've been waiting for someone to do something you wanted them to do your entire life.
To love you.
To want you.
To hold you.
To be with you.
To choose you.
To commit to you.
To never, ever leave you.
Except that never worked out the way it was supposed to.Continue Reading
I've written a lot about fathers. Especially about how it's our primary father-daughter relationship (or lack of one) that sets the stage for who we're attracted to when we're older.
Our entire understanding of the emotionally-available man is built around the type of relationship we had with our dads.
And so today, as I called my own dad to wish him a Happy Father's Day, I was reminded of what I've come to know for sure over the almost 2 decades since I've been with my husband now, a man who couldn't be more unlike my dad.
I know my dad did the best he could with who he was and what he was taught when I was the little girl I used to be.
See, there's a process we go through when we first realize the cause of so much of our pain is because we're chasing after a mirror version of what we were missing in our relationships with our dads.
If your dad wasn't someone who sought you out, who pursued you, who came to you instead of you always having to come to him if you wanted a relationship with him, you won't think twice about chasing after men now.
I want to be so clear here.
You are not your mom's programming or your dad's programming or your grandparents' programming or whoever else went before you and said this is the way it is or this is what we believe, and then subtly (or not so subtly) passed it on down to you to become your own.
If you know anything about our cellular level memory, you know we absorb these types of messages in our very being. Where we have no conscious memory, we have the cellular kind.
This is why our patterns of survival, the way we love, what we can't believe could possibly be true, and all our defensive behaviors that keep us walled-off from our truth, are so difficult to change.
At that deep cellular level, we've absorbed only their deep truth.Continue Reading
Our letter this week comes from Andrea, who's recovering from her marriage to a narcissist. She wrote to me wanting to know more about these men, and how she can keep from finding herself in a relationship with one again.
Hi Jane,
Could you write some information on narcissists?
I realized when I was 42 years old that my father is a text book case narcissist. I grew up in a crazy household due to his narcissism and watched my parents have a toxic marriage.
They are still married. (Don’t ask me why except that my mom has been so beaten down and destroyed emotionally by him for so many years that, at the age of 70, she stays.) She truly is a prisoner living with him.
His narcissism has gotten worse as he has aged too. I learned in my college years to handle him by distancing myself from him because he is so toxic.Continue Reading
I've been having some deep discussions on my calls lately, around the underlying subject of our longings for unconditional love.
Leftover from our childhoods, from a place most of us have never connected to the present, until we realize something must be amiss for us to keep attracting and choosing the men that we do. The irony is that while we long for unconditional love with every part of our heart and soul, we look for it precisely from the ones completely incapable of giving us that kind of love.
Why do we do this?
It makes no sense to our logical minds, but the pull is so strong (and entirely subconscious) to extract this kind of love from someone who cannot give it to us because he never received enough of any kind of love to have a place of overflow within himself that it could even come from.
Why the pull? It's because it's so familiar.
It's once again someone with so much potential because they give us glimpses of that soft part within them. We take that and run with it because even just the feeling of the possiblity of that potential lights us up to the possibility of what might be. This time might be different. This time. The promise of which is so familiar. Continue Reading
If you don’t get to the root, nothing changes. If you don’t find your “why”, you can’t know where to look.
And if you don’t like where you are today, change it.
How? Find your why.
Why do you keep falling for the same type of man? Why is this man so attractive to you? Why him, and not someone else?
And more specifically, why do you believe so strongly that you NEED him? What is it about him that has you putting up with things you said you’d never EVER put up with before there was him?
Most of the women I work with discover right away that almost every single one of these questions has a common denominator – and it’s not her we’re talking about here. It’s a specific man.
Namely, the man known as her dad.Continue Reading
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