Break the Grip of Past Lovers by Jumana Sophia

Author:Jumana Sophia
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781938289965
Publisher: Hierophant Publishing

Taking Responsibility for Your Own Behavior

The first warm day of spring can feel like a revelation, especially for those who live in a colder climate. Spring invites you to throw open your windows for some fresh air and light, and you may feel the urge to tackle deep cleaning and larger organizing projects that have been sitting through the winter.

This chapter is an invitation to experience your own energetic spring-cleaning, as up until this point, we've explored past relationships from the perspective of what your partner “did wrong” in the relationship. Of course, the other important factor at work here is your own words and actions in past loverships, as these also contribute to a strong and lasting grip on you. This is an opportunity to face the mess that we collect and hold on to—to take inventory of ourselves. When we engage in this kind of gentle ownership of our behaviors, we can accept our whole selves and put underlying expectations and emotions in their proper places with care. With the windows open, we can move forward with even greater clarity. To do so, we will look at the kinds of things you said or did, or things you neglected to do, and learn how to own these and put them to work on your journey of healing and wholeness.

No relationship dynamic is ever one-sided. For every time you have felt neglected, there may well be a time you were neglectful. Power struggles, manipulation, criticism, withdrawal of attention—each of these is often a two-way street. When you look at your part in past relationship woes, you may feel regret. Regret is a powerful teacher, and you can harness it in a constructive way to keep you aware and help you grow—so long as you know how to work with it.

Regrets leave a certain amount of bound-up energy in you—they can pull at your attention, waiting to be seen, understood, loved, and accepted. Regrets can also come with a sense of loss, grief, sadness, or longing. Our exploration into regret will help you reckon with the choices you made and liberate any energy that may still be bound up by those choices.

When you feel wronged in a relationship, it's easy to focus on the flaws or the lack of integrity in your former partner. Sometimes you will focus solely on the behaviors that are most evident, like an infidelity, but this can prevent you from important self-reflection about your own lack of integrity, even if it played out in small ways. If you want to be fully free and to move into healthy intimacies from this point forward, it is absolutely necessary that you get very honest with yourself about how you contributed to the disintegration of love and trust in your relationship. In other words, you can't really get anywhere until you are willing to own your part.

Once again, it's important to remember that this process is about self-reflection and not self-abuse. This might be the trickiest moment we've encountered so far—since looking at your own actions of course fires up your inner critic.

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