If you’re tormented by feelings about your partner’s past and other relationships, what can you do? Read on…
Michelle writes:
I try so hard to make peace with the fact that my boyfriend experienced having children with another woman before me.
I find myself comparing myself to his ex-partner, feeling threatened by his relationship with his kids, feeling (irrationally) angry at him that he had kids before I was in his life, worried that he has a stronger bond with his ex than with me just because they share children, and sad that if and when we have our own children, it won’t be his first time.
I love him and don’t want my feelings about his past to wreck the present, but can’t seem to ease the pain that these facts seem to cause me.
I wonder if using Focusing might help me to accept this pain and transmute it into something to help me grow and better love myself, my boyfriend and his children.
Dear Michelle:
I am so admiring of you for being aware of the issue of your feelings about your boyfriend’s past, and for being determined to work on this in yourself.
One of the great things about Inner Relationship Focusing is that it allows us to turn toward and work with our feelings without being taken over by them.
You’ve tried dealing with your reactions by telling yourself they are irrational… and obviously that hasn’t worked!
Feelings such as you describe are understandable… but they could lead to the very outcomes you are worried about. And such feelings can’t be changed by deciding to feel differently, can they?
Using Inner Relationship Focusing, you will come into your body awareness, feel the support beneath you, and then invite one of these emotions into your awareness… using the language that we call Presence Language.
Like this: “I am sensing something in me that feels threatened by my boyfriend’s relationship with his kids.”
Now pause to sense the “something that feels threatened” somewhere in your body… and be gentle to it.
Notice how different that is from telling it that it shouldn’t feel that way!
I’m guessing that this is probably a very young part of you. Its longing to feel special to someone might come from early in your life.
And what it needs is for YOU to be with it now… with kindness and compassion… not telling it that it is wrong… but putting a gentle hand there where you feel it in your body, and letting it know you really understand how much it is longing to feel special.
And then keep listening to how IT feels.
It’s this inner relationship that has the power to totally shift these painful feelings… and that lets YOU be the strong calm self that can love freely from a wide open perspective.
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