“Internal reflecting” guides us to dig in, evaluate, and give
thanks. We need to take the time to ponder ideas, gather insights that might
have eluded us during the busyness of our lives and slow down to look inward
and receive the Light. I hope this week’s newsletter is a little piece of Light
that you are open to receive.
Awhile back I got a book written by one of my favorite
spiritual writers, Thomas Keating. It’s called The Human Condition: Contemplation and Transformation. Profoundly, he reminds us that we spend much of our
lives looking for happiness through avenues that can never produce it. We create
our misery by “looking for love in all the wrong places,” as the song
goes. Nothing can be truer when it comes
to pathology. Pathology is wired to produce misery, not happiness. Everyone has
the same response to pathology—they are harmed, miserable, and eventually try
to flee. It’s a true indicator of seeking happiness from a source unable to
deliver it.
Your idea of happiness was probably initially developed around
the relationship or the fantasy that was painted for you about him, the
relationship, or your future. Instead of understanding that happiness had been
sought from someone who, by the nature of their disorder, could never deliver
happiness, you were held captive in the compulsion of repeating the same
scenario with him. You tried to find happiness in the very person who is
hard-wired to NOT produce happiness!
Not all of this seeking happiness in the wrong place is the
result of his pathology. Some of it is the result of our own unknowing about
where happiness is found. It is not found in someone else. Instead, happiness
is found inside our self, rooted in our own spirituality through God. It isn’t
about them. It is about us.
Keating says, “What we experience is our desperate search for
happiness where it cannot possibly be found.” The key to our happiness is not
lost outside of our self. It was
lost inside our self when we began
looking for it in someone else. We need to look for it were it can actually BE
found.
The chief characteristic of the human condition is that
everyone is looking for this key but nobody knows where to find it. The human
condition is thus poignant in the extreme. If you want help as you look for the
key in the wrong place, you can get plenty because everybody else is looking
for it in the wrong place too! They are looking for it where there is more
pleasure, security, power, and acceptance by others. We have a sense of
solidarity in the search, yet without any possibility of finding what we are
looking for.
The religions of the world have discovered the insight that
(non-pathological) human beings are designed for unlimited happiness, the
enjoyment of truth, and love without end. This spiritual hunger is part of our
nature as beings with a spiritual dimension. Here we are, with an unbounded
desire for happiness and not the slightest idea of where to look for it.
While we may certainly recognize that looking for happiness in
alcohol or drugs is looking in the wrong place, do we recognize that looking
for happiness even in relationships can be the wrong place? Certainly looking
for love in pathology would never produce the key you were seeking, because it
cannot be found there. But sometimes people even look for happiness in what
appears to be the RIGHT places—marriage, children, higher education, careers,
and service to others, only again to find that they are still seeking happiness
in the wrong direction.
In religious language, the word, repent means to “turn away from.” I like that concept even from a
psychological growth standpoint. As you find your own path of recovery from the
aftermath of the pathological love relationship, your recovery calls you to turn away from the very thing that has
produced so much pain for you—the relationship, the choices, the person. In
essence, in order for you to find happiness in yourself, in God, and in your
own (often single) life, you must “change the direction from which you are
seeking happiness”.
This is especially true when everything in you wants to turn back to him, to the routine, to the
perceived comfort—just to get through the tough times. Changing the direction
from which you seek happiness is embracing the truth that happiness cannot be
found in pathology. God did not create you for pathology. He created you for
Himself—for peace, love, and joy. It’s
not, and never will be, there in pathology.
Over the years, I have become pretty good at picking up on
those who will “get it” and move on and never repeat the pathological love
relationship dynamic again, and those who WILL, unfortunately, not change the
direction from which they are seeking happiness. They might change the FACE
from whom they seek happiness, but they are still facing the same direction
seeking it.
Although there is much turmoil in the world right now, be
reminded again that we can always change the direction from which we have been
seeking happiness and focus on a brighter future for our self and with our
self.
(**If we can support you in your recovery process, please let
us know. The Institute is the largest provider of recovery-based
services for survivors of pathological love relationships. Information about
pathological love relationships is in our award-winning book, Women Who Love Psychopaths, and is also
available in our retreats, on-on-ones, or phone sessions. See the website for
more information).
