The late Queen Elizabeth II once said that the price of love is pain. And it is an unfortunate truth. I would add that, sometimes, the price of personal growth is pain also.
When we fall in love, we do so wholeheartedly. We throw ourselves into the experience because it’s such a delicious feeling. That sense of intense wellbeing flowing through us, the notion that there is someone else in the world who is thinking of us, who lights us up, who makes us feel special, who makes us laugh and, usually, to whom we have an intense chemical attraction. It’s amazing, it’s wonderful and it is captivating.
But then, what happens when it goes wrong? When that love dies? Or, when that love dies in someone else but not you? I hear this a lot when I do online readings, people wanting to know if they are going to get back with their ex or if so-and-so is going to contact them again. Invariably, I know the answer is going to be ‘no’. I feel the pain, the anguish and the upset of the people who are desperate enough to reach out to me to give them some measure of hope and comfort. I do know how they feel, I have been there myself in the past and it is absolutely agonising.
When you are in the midst of this, I know it’s hard to believe, but there really is some learning we can take from such experiences.
One thing I learned from my own experiences, eventually, was that I was repeating patterns. There comes a point in life where you can’t keep on repeating the same mistakes and blame others for them. It wasn’t that I was rubbish at picking men, that they were all commitment-phobes, and it wasn’t that I was unlovable. The problem rested with me. I was the commitment-phobe, not them. And I didn’t love me so I made it very difficult for other people to love me. I was running a pattern based on the fear of rejection, and I was executing it flawlessly. It was my first experience of how we create the life we live.
When I was 10 I went through my parent’s very acrimonious separation with the domestic violence that accompanied it and all manner of nastiness. By the time I was 11, I had no relationship with my natural father. I saw him one more time at the age of 12 and have had no contact at all with him since. 43 years. The abandonment issues related to that are huge because they were combined with such awful behaviour (just two examples – his girlfriend waited for me at my school with a knife, and after I found out he had had an accident I went to see him at the hospital and he had me turned away) I was simply reeling for years. It was all probably not helped by the instruction to ‘be strong’ all the time, not to cause any more stress or distress for my mother and to get on with it. So, I suppressed it all.
I was already ‘different’ (ADHD, likely AuDHD and with strong ties to spirit) and not feeling like I fitted in particularly well in life generally. I was nothing like my mother in temperament or looks, and I felt like a fish out of water. I was terrified of her rejection as well and so my days of people pleasing really ramped up. But what I didn’t realise at the time was that my subconscious was working overtime to protect me. It began to harbour me from the horror of rejection. To a large extent, I did cut off from relationships. I didn’t feel comfortable with a wide circle of friends, I was happy in my own company, and I didn’t court romantic relationships. Until my first love at 16 which, predictably, ended in the disaster of him cheating on me after just over a year of being together. That made the groove that much deeper about rejection. Again, I shied away from relationships for a while. Until the next one which also ended in disaster (obvs). And rinse and repeat.
What was happening was that I was subconsciously choosing people who would ultimately reject me. It sounds oxymoronic I know, but my subconscious’s way of protecting me was to choose people who were no more inclined to commit than I was at that subconscious level, for me to never truly open myself up to them, and for me to anticipate their rejection, including behaviours that would ensure they did. And so when they did reject me, whilst it absolutely did hurt, it confirmed at a subconscious level what I already believed. That I was unlovable and that I would be rejected. My subconscious was happy. The rest of me might not be, but my subconscious was. It had created my reality perfectly for it.
That is the power of our subconscious mind if we let it carry on unchecked.
If we get to a level of self-awareness, if we take as much of an objective view of ourselves as we can about what is happening in our lives then we have a chance of identifying the patterns. And if we can’t resolve them ourselves, find the help that can. But that does mean we have to mean it when we say we want to work on this aspect of ourselves. Because it’s one thing to say it, another thing completely to truly mean it.
As to how we can identify the difference between something we say and something we mean well, that’s easy. Do we take action? If we don’t, it’s something we say and not something we mean. I will return to this topic another time.
We absolutely do create our reality. Look at your own lives and see if you can identify where that is true – both positive and negative. And see, if you think there are things you need to change, if you can identify where to do it. If you can’t, please do email me (hello@louisasimpson.com) and I will happily give you a free one-hour initial chat to see how I might be able to help. Sometimes, that really is all it takes. And if you’re interested in a spiritual journey, please do join my free Skool group at https://www.skool.com/soul-path-calling-888
Growth is never easy. But with help, the right mindset and taking the learning along the way we can absolutely get there.
Louisa Simpson 