Each of us has an "emotional home" — the set of feelings we grew used to in childhood. That, not common sense, is usually what picks our partner for us.
How do we choose the person we love?
In my previous post I wrote that a woman may subconsciously choose a man much older than herself in order to feel a certain form of the fatherly love she missed out on in childhood.
Very often we choose the person we love subconsciously.
How does that work?
We all have our own unique “emotional home”. These are the baseline feelings we’ve been used to since early childhood. Those emotions are far stronger than common sense, logic, or even a person’s conscious choice.
When a girl, for example, grew up used to relying only on herself, then as an adult she may SUBCONSCIOUSLY choose a man who gives her exactly that emotion. He leaves her one-on-one with most of her problems and never gets involved.
Another example. A girl grew up controlling and looking after her younger sister or brother. Entering adult life, she may SUBCONSCIOUSLY choose a man who needs looking after, and her maternal instinct will be 100% fulfilled in that relationship. Of course, in a family like that there will be no respect, no sexual attraction and no financial wellbeing — but there will be the familiar emotion of over-parenting another person.
If we ask women like this whether they want to nurse, control and carry the family on their backs, they’ll tell us in horror: “Of course not! I want a strong, intelligent man I can relax and trust beside.”
But the subconscious is far stronger than the conscious declarations of our mind. So we choose the people who supply us with our baseline emotions:
Used to feeling guilty — we’ll choose someone beside whom we constantly feel shame and guilt.
Used to feeling rejected — we’ll choose someone for whom we come 145th on the list of priorities.
Used to relying only on ourselves — we’ll choose someone who has no interest in taking care of us.
Used to feeling wronged — we’ll choose someone who wrongs us constantly.
Used to our efforts going unnoticed — we’ll choose someone who masterfully devalues everything we do and never thanks us for anything.
This list could go on forever, but the outcome is always the same: we didn’t choose our partner by accident. They match our inner subconscious needs.
The good news is that the baseline feelings in our emotional home can be “reflashed”. That’s one of the things we work on in the Emotional Intelligence course at the New Lifestyle school.
If we can work out in practice how our emotional home is built, we can also work through those baseline emotions and detach ourselves from the negative ones. After that, entirely different people start coming into our lives.
It also happens that within a family one partner starts developing actively while the other stands still. That’s trouble. That’s why we invite all our students to go through our programmes together with the person they love (at no extra charge for them).
A family where one person has gone far ahead and the other has stayed put may not survive it.
So it’s good when both people are ready to work on the relationship and grow.
With the right work, almost any family can be made happy.
Do you agree that we don’t choose the person we love by chance, and that they match our subconscious needs?
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