Love's Edge: Why Relationships Fail and How to Fix Them

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
     -Dylan Thomas

This is an idea I am passionate about and have been thinking about for years now, so I am happy to finally begin to share it. The question is what is at the heart, the center, the core truth, of why love relationships fail. And I am only thinking of relationships where two people truly have love for one another. If there is love, then where does it go wrong?

The answer is simple, though resolving it is not. The answer is what I call Love's Edge. Love's Edge is the line inside us between where we love ourselves, and where we don't. I experience it and witness it more like an over and under, or outside and inside. On top or outside, we love ourselves, and down deeper and deeper inside we still love ourselves, and then, somewhere in there the love stops, and we reach a place at our core where we don't love ourselves. We all have it. Some of us have touched that core, and worked to heal it, and may have experienced great love and bliss for ourselves in a moment of truth. But for all of us it is still in our bodies, and is a life's worth of work to heal.

So here is what happens in love relationships: We fall in love, and get closer and closer. The love deepens. The love penetrates further into us. The other person sees more of us, loves more of us. At some point, their love for us reaches the edge of our love for ourselves. This is the moment when relationships get into trouble. All relationships reach a crisis at the point when our lover loves us more than we love ourselves. 

When the relationship reaches Love's Edge, there are three basic reactions. We can either fight, flee, or hunker down. These are the possible strategies of a person who is cornered. Fighting might show up as defensiveness, or direct and unexpected attacks. Fleeing is usually disconnecting from the relationship by cutting it off. Hunkering down is emotionally growing cold or becoming stoic.

Many strange dynamics arise at Love's Edge. One curious one is when the person whose edge has been reached begins to distrust their lover. The lover then tries even harder to make them feel loved, and the distrust worsens, which is usually mysterious to the lover. "If I could just love you enough, you would trust me," they think. And the more they try, the worse it gets, in a downward spiral. Why? Well, what is the person at their edge thinking? It can go something like, "You say you love me, but I know the truth. The truth is that I am not lovable, so you are lying." What they believe to be the truth about themselves, and what their lover are saying, are incongruous. So they conclude that their lover is lying, not that they are living with an untruth inside.

What is the way out? The fourth option when cornered is surrender. The only way out is to acknowledge our edge, and work with it. After all, we are in relationship to get to Love's Edge, so we can see it, and heal it. 

When a relationship is in crisis, it is a great starting point to ask, "How am I not loving myself right now?". I always find it wonderfully freeing and a great relief when I ask the question, and find it in myself. Because then I can clear out the old pain a little more, and feel more fully the love that I am and the warm glow of the love my lover is giving me. We live thinking down deep inside we know the truth of who we are, and we develop strategies to hide that truth, but it is an untruth, or even a lie. The truth---that we are pure love---always sets us free because the real truth is always beautiful. The real truth is always beautiful.

So again, the way out of the crisis is to first acknowledge Love's Edge inside us. This is the key from which all else follows. It may be the hardest part. It gets easier the more experiences we have of acknowledging it and going through the process where we get relief at the end. Then the next time is not so scary, since we know the way to happiness is by crossing this scary edge.  The second step is to notice when we hit it, and be able to say "This is me not loving myself". The third step is to take the knowledge that Love's Edge is at best an illusion that has been created inside us through something painful we lived through as we grew up, and at worst a huge lie, and carry it with us as a light into the darkness of the places where we don't love ourselves, the places we got hurt, and use it to power the courage we may need to face those old painful places.

And what better time and place to do our healing work than with someone who truly sees us, truly loves us? That is relationship at its best. That is what we are all here to do. So do not go gentle into that good night. Go with the grace of knowing who you truly are. And take your lover with you.

How to let go of your anger and find forgiveness and peace

Lately I've been thinking a lot about forgiveness. I had a good moment recently where my heart really opened, and I found a path to letting go of my anger, and finding peace. Here is what I found:

If you are angry at someone, and find you cannot forgive them, it is because you cannot see the pain they are in. You cannot see the pain inside them that led them to act in a way that hurt you. When you see the pain inside them, you will see the truth of them. You will witness the truth of their pain, you will be filled with a tremendous sadness. Your heart will open, and you will experience compassion. In this moment you will find forgiveness and your anger will dissipate. You will no longer want to make them understand what they did to you, and you will know longer want to retaliate. You will love them and set them free. The truth shall set you free. You will experience relief from your own anxiety created by your resentment, as well as the pain they inflicted upon you.

Not that seeing the origin of their motivation excuses it, for it is still an unacceptable way to live, but you will find forgiveness. Most importantly,  you will be at peace.

What is so freeing about seeing the negative beliefs someone is acting from is that you know it’s not true. You know they are lovable, or whatever the positive version of their negative belief is. And that is the sadness: seeing that someone is walking through their life carrying such a painful thought inside themselves that is a lie. To you, their painful belief is clearly untrue. They got it stuck in their heads way back somewhere when they were just a little boy or girl, when someone did something out of their own pain and the child thought it was about them, and formed this belief about who they are. Or aren’t. So when you are at peace again, it is your job to hold them only in the light of what you know is true about them: release them from their painful belief by forgiving them, otherwise you hold them there with your resentment, and reflect to them the love that they truly are and you have for them.

What will the truth look like? It will take the form of an underlying belief that they carry. This belief will be a variation of one of the many self-negating things we say to ourselves. In relationships, it often looks like “I do not believe you truly love me.” Underneath that is a belief that has nothing to do with you, but just about them, like “I am not loveable, worth loving, or deserving of love.” Out of this belief, things that happen that bring up the pain of this belief will be turned into a victim vignette, about how “you did something to me”.

The truth will look something like this: “When you got mad at me and called me names, what is true is that when I did not meet you at the time I said I would, you took this as evidence that I do not love you, which is a fear that you carry all the time, because you do not really believe that I could love you, because you do not believe that you are worth loving. That makes me very sad, so I love you and forgive you.”

When someone hurts you, it is impossible in the moment to not be hurt by them. That is, if you are in any kind of love connection with them, where your heart is open to them, especially for nurturance, then you will be vulnerable to their attack. This is the nature of relationship. You cannot be open to receiving love (in the form of tender words and physical contact, validation, encouragement) and be immune from their devaluations of you (physical and verbal attacks, dismissiveness, bullying). This is how it is. Do no seek to be immune from anyone in your life who loves you.

Here is what you can do: breathe, slow down, feel the pain, don’t respond. You have just been hurt. As soon as you can, find the peace of mind to see the pain they are in. That means that you say to yourself “here is the truth”, and then speak to yourself the truth of what is going on inside them at the level of the painful beliefs they carry. Forget about for the moment what their aggression brought up in you. First you must release them from your anger and resentment and bring you to a calm place. Then you can look inwards and see how their aggression hooked to some painful belief in yourself. When you see what it is, speak to yourself the truth of your painful beliefs. Then speak the truth of not the lie of your painful belief, but the truth of who you are, the love that you truly are. And speak it of the person that hurt you too. Then you will be free.

Note the difference between acting the victim and being victimized. The first is a lie created to blame others for your pain, while the second is the truth about how you have been subject to another’s violence. When someone acts with violence towards you you are victim. You really have been hurt. Your heart or body was open and therefore vulnerable, and you got hurt. It may be true also that they dug into an old wound of yours, but that does not deny the violence you experienced, only intensifies it. The lie arises when acts that are not violent bring up old feelings of pain in you, with associated painful beliefs, and you say that someone has just hurt you---when you are playing the victim, you cannot distinguish between someone else acting out their pain resulting in violence towards you, or your own pain that arises because you are already in pain. That is key: when you are playing the victim, it is because you are already in pain, and you interpret non-violent acts through the vision of your pain. When you are victimized, it is someone elses pain raining down upon you. 

When someone is hurting you, they are acting from the part of them that was hurt by someone else, likely a long, long time ago. Set them free by speaking the truth---at first to yourself, so that you can find forgiveness and peace. And then you will find you can act from the truth and love them in the way they deserve, and may have been waiting for their whole life.