HOW WE CONTROL UNHAPPINESS THROUGH OUR RELATIONSHIPS
Partners, offspring, family; lovers, sex, affection… relationships served by anguish and anxiety, when they could very well be the source of bliss.
I am traveling by train to Malaga. Next to me there is a young woman, as yet unknown to me. After I have been writing this article for the best part of an hour on my computer, the woman interrupts me and says: “Excuse me but I can’t take any more, I was reading what you were writing on your computer out of the corner of my eye because I find it very interesting”. We then proceeded to introduce ourselves and to chat for about 30 minutes before we reached the destination. We talked about relationships among other topics. Suddenly a relationship developed out of nowhere, with neither an intention nor a plan. I recount this particular anecdote as it is very striking, how one can unknowingly and unwittingly build a relationship with another person.
Before pursuing the topic in greater detail, I’d ask you to raise your awareness and pay close attention to the following questions, perhaps one or more of them will define your current situation:
Why do I manifest or attract situations and people who only lead me to a dead-end?
What is it that people who don’t want deep and meaningful relationships seek?
Why aren’t others available to me or my needs and desires unmet?
What is it about me that they reject? Is it something I cannot perceive, recognize nor even admit to?
Why do we create and indeed sustain such cold remoteness with other people?
Is my own fear or the fear that others carry the reason that I cannot open my heart?
Could it be that are we all in our own different ways closed to love and intimacy?
How can we resolve the inability to communicate?
Is it possible to evolve as a couple?
Is personal fulfilment, freedom and enjoyment incompatible within a stable relationship?
Can we have healthy relationships with our offspring and parents?
Is the defining element a conflict, a need, an impediment, or is it something that we have created ourselves to protect ourselves from failure and to avoid suffering?
Our relationships speak volumes about us and how we are living, about who we are and what our preferences are, about the problems and limitations we may have, or of the abilities and gifts we may hide or express; Ultimately, all our relationships are imbued with elements of who we are, therefore, addressing this issue leads us to get in touch with the mental, bodily and energetic aspects of ourselves.
Human relationships hold the secrets to key aspects of happiness, but most people have yet discovered them, so they remain trapped in models of coexistence that simply do not work. The most important human relationships recognizable to us are the relationships we have with our children, with our partners and/or with our parents, but we often forget that the most important relationship is the one we have with ourselves. It is from that intimate relationship that we develop the ability and predisposition to relate to everyone else.
Even to this day, many families are still led by outdated, antiquated and obsolete ideas that are counterintuitive to the creation of sincere bonds between those who make up the family. Generally speaking, the only relationships that work to any degree are the relationships cultivated with friends, because we choose them freely without any imposition, and also because these are mainly the type of bond that are immune from the strict code of etiquette seen in family relationships. But, although friendships are useful in learning to relate to others outside the family, they often end up being the substitute for actual partnerships, encouraging us to avoid the commitment, dedication and the intimacy that would deeply unite us with others. For many, friendships have become the kind of bonds that last forever, depriving us of the possibility that the same type of sustainable and long-lasting relationship can also occur in our romantic or civil partnerships.
We are eager to find a person with whom to have a relationship of love, sex, affection and / or passion, but, before the search even begins, we instigate all kinds of blockages and limitations. We want to have a loving, peaceful and harmonious relationship with our children, but in everyday life mutual misunderstandings rise to the surface, tensions that are often produced by quirks, trifles or pettiness. We become possessed by helplessness because we scarcely even know where these painful situations originate from, and in turn, we haven’t got even the slightest inkling about how to solve them.
We are dealing with an aspect that represents one of humanity’s greatest problems, one which most of us do not know how to tackle or at times even address. It may also be the case that we are doing all that we can without ever attaining the kind of satisfactory results that we may have desired.
RELATIONSHIPS CONTROL UNHAPPINESS
To take control of unhappiness is a mammoth task, which requires a lot of effort, great dedication and a tremendous amount of energy. Not wanting to love or be loved requires a lot of day-to-day work. Not wanting to open one’s heart to life or to the pleasures of love forces one to have to be focussed 24 hours a day, in order to prevent anything or anyone from entering. Not wanting to be yourself or to enjoy truth and authenticity demands a lot of reticence, resistance and cowardice.
To live at such a high level of unhappiness a person has to be intent and fixated on controlling the varying levels of anguish, anxiety and dissatisfaction that they attempt to handle. This inner tension links to our lives and to ourselves; it puts us centre stage and thus liable to attract all kinds of unpleasant people and situations that affirm the negative impression that we hold – the prophecy that nothing is attainable and that everything is going to go wrong, is fulfilled over and over again.
In the deprogramming program of the Conscious School ® we go to the conclusional source that we have drawn in our personal history, to free ourselves from hidden mechanisms that marginalize us from true happiness.
Happiness through relationships. Is it a myth or a real possibility?
Comprehending the mechanisms of unhappiness helps us to deprogram them, so I propose to delve into the different areas of our lives and relationships with others:
THE RELATIONSHIPS WE CHOOSE (especially with reference to couples): the implicit “contract”, the “clauses”, the “loyalty”, the conflict between actually wanting something and fleeing from it, the way in which we sabotage our own happiness. The challenge of having a satisfying, stable, stimulating relationship, one in which there is also room for each other’s common, mutual and discerning interests and each one’s evolution so that the bounty can then be shared.
SEXUALITY AND INTIMACY: What it is, what is expressed by it, what is unleashed in the human being when we experience a sexual encounter, an intimate, uninhibited and authentic one, both from the female and male point of view. Differences between sex, sexuality and sexual energy. Sex aiming for love and love aiming for sex, two strategies that overlap.
PARENTS AND CHILDREN, CHILDREN AND PARENTS: What aspects of education leads to stagnation in our lives, conditioning us to continually suffer and not know how to form relationships or how to mature? The tried and trusted traditional family models simply don’t work, for the most part, but they’re backed up by certain interests, pressures, and emotional blackmail that deeply damage all the people who make up a family.
THE POSSIBILITY OF LOVING AND OF BEING LOVED: Whether within a family, a couple or any other kind of relationship, is there any possibility that authentic love may arise? Many people believe that authentic love is not possible between parents and children, and that it is doesn’t suffice when it comes to living as a couple and that it does not indeed lead to happiness within the couple. We simultaneously distrust love while adamantly denying any possibility of it ever happening.
EVOLUTION THROUGH RELATIONSHIPS
Although we now banish to the past a time when we would have been likely to sacrifice ourselves by doing anything within our means to remain within the family dynamic without love or happiness, there are still traces and remnants of that past that condition our way of forming relationships nowadays. Many more, on the other hand, have completely unshackled and disencumbered themselves from any cultural or religious influence, so as to create all kinds of free and sporadic relationships with no strings attached, but even so, they still can’t claim to have found that which satisfies them. We’re trying to go at it in a different way, but are unsure of just how to approach it. We can only admit to the need to form relationships in a different way and to overcome the unhappiness that relationships seem to bring us.
That is why I propose, through the Conscious School ®, the possibility of deeper investigation into these issues that are so significant for human life. The students of this school no longer want the old and unhappy relationships of the past, in which there was neither consciousness nor honest dialogue. For those of us who are consciously evolving, the act of living hypocritically is by now a thing of the past. Many are coming out of boring, lengthy or meaningless relationships, where there was violence, and many others are rethinking and considering living alone and away from anyone for fear of being subjugated or invaded, but there are also more and more people who are indulging their need to create new and satisfactory human ties.
Deep down, relationships betray the conditioning that dominates our lives. Therefore, to rethink our way of forming relationships we must first examine what it is that conditions us, fundamentally the ideas we have concerning love, sex, family, partners and children. Stemming from this we find all the material which we need to build our lives, so it imperative that we be well equipped with consciousness, clarity and depth.
Alberto José Varela
