For those of us who have experienced pain in past relationships, it is quite normal to feel fear in the face of a new relationship. This may be fear of intimacy, or fear of commitment, or fear of rejection or abandonment. I personally have experienced all of these.
I have been married and separated/divorced twice. My key emotions when I thought about relationships with men were pain, sacrifice, abandonment and feeling emotionally unsafe. I had developed the beliefs from my experience that love doesn’t last, and that no man would ever truly love me. I struggled to trust men to care for me emotionally, and my habitual pattern had been to mold myself into someone I thought would please the key male in my life while at the same time wanting desperately to be accepted for who I truly was.
Getting into a new romantic relationship is usually incredibly triggering. Being in a relationship stirs up our deepest needs and anxieties. You can think you are doing really well with your personal growth and self-love, but then find that getting into a new relationship brings a whole lot of fear and insecurities roaring back up into your face.
This happens to me, and below I have described four ways in which I manage this.
1. Dial It Down
I am a deep thinker and feeler. I become very easily associated in the emotions of past and present experiences, and for me they are often dialed up to high level. Abraham Hicks talks about using soothing statements like “nothing matters very much”, and “there’s nothing serious going on here”. One way to dial down high emotions of fear and insecurity is to place your hand on the center of your upper chest, which is the area of the heart and thymus (and the heart and higher heart chakras), and start repeating statements such as:
All is well
Everything is okay
There’s nothing serious going on here
Everything is working out for me
Whatever I choose will be right for me
This is a new experience
I can create something new
This helps you to dial down the emotion, and to see that this doesn’t really matter as much as you may have felt it did and to see that this is simply an opportunity for a new experience. It isn’t a life or death situation, and nothing horrendous is likely to happen. Often, we can treat the decision about whether or not to date someone as a be-all/end-all decision, rather than simply an explorative venture.
2. Accept the Feelings
The most effective and healthiest way to dial down your feelings is to accept them and love yourself for feeling them. The sensation of an emotion is actually a chemical reaction in your body and biologically this usually lasts no more than 90 seconds. When we acknowledge our emotions and allow them to be positively and fully expressed, then they flow through us and are completely resolved. When we attach additional thoughts and meaning to our emotions, and keep replaying the thoughts and memories that generate them, or we resist our emotions by thinking they are somehow wrong or inappropriate or simply too scary to manage, then our emotions become stuck in our body, intensify, and express themselves in unhealthy ways.
When you love yourself for the fear you feel, then you create space for it to subside naturally. Choosing to love yourself for whatever you are feeling creates a sensation and action of release in your mind and body. In my book 10 Steps to Happiness I describe this process in more detail as the Trigger Body Love process. The short form is to simply identify what you are feeling as a word or a sensation in your body, and then to think or say “I love myself for feeling . . . [word or sensation that describes the emotion].”
3. Reframe Your Viewpoint
Another way to reduce fear and insecurity about getting into a new relationship is to re-frame how you are looking at the situation. Instead of focusing on all the painful things you have experienced in the past, or on your fear of experiencing them again, acknowledge that in this moment you are okay, and that even if you experience emotional pain again, you will still come through okay. Acknowledge how you have survived and learnt and grown before, and that you can do so again if need be.
If you fear not just getting hurt yourself, but also hurting someone else, then you can also choose to believe that not only will you be okay if the relationship doesn’t work out, but that the other person will be too. You can use the following focus statement as a mantra: “I am not responsible for the feelings and responses of others when I act out of love and respect for myself.”
Look for the positive learnings you have gained from your past painful relationship experiences. One of the things I was afraid of was making a wrong choice, and to once again gravitate towards a man who had similar characteristics to my father and previous husbands. I was afraid I was going to repeat my old relationship patterns. I re-framed this to focus on the fact that from those experiences I had learnt more each time about how I needed to grow in myself in order to attract something different into my life, and also what characteristics to look for in others that were red flags that a relationship with this person was not going to be healthy and fulfilling for me. My past relationships have not been mistakes or failures, they have been valuable learning experiences which built my ability to create better and better relationships moving forward. You can re-frame your past experiences by asking yourself reflection questions such as:
What did I learn about my patterns of thought and feeling from this relationship?
What did I learn about what I want in a relationship?
What did I learn about what works well?
What did I learn about what characteristics I want in my desired partner?
If you have been dating a series of people, but none of the encounters have been evolving into long term relationships, it can feel frustrating. Focusing on the negative aspects of what you have experienced like the things that didn’t work, the things that hurt, the decisions you made that didn’t bring about the result you wanted, or the seeming lack of possibilities/available good partners, keeps you stuck in low frequency emotion and attracts more of the same thing. To attract something new you have to find a way to lift your thoughts and feelings. You have to choose a positive re-frame and focus. For example:
I’m learning more about what I want in a relationship with each experience I have.
I’m getting better and better as I learn.
Lack is an illusion that comes from focusing on what I am currently experiencing. I can create something and someone new.
Each time I experience something I don’t want it stimulates a stronger, clearer desire for what I do want, and focusing on that desire will attract its manifestation to me.
As I sift and sort and learn and grow through the relationship experiences I am having, I am becoming a match to a better and better partner.
See dating encounters as travel-stops on the way to getting to your desired destination of a deeply, fulfilling relationship. They are not the destination, but they are valuable, nourishing and enjoyable aspects of the journey on the way to what you fully want. View each date as a separate opportunity for an experience, have fun with it, celebrate whatever you receive from it. It may not lead to a long-term committed relationship, but be open for enjoying it for what it is. Instead of getting stuck in disappointment, appreciate what you gained. For example, you could be thankful that you:
Made a new connection
Had fun
Learned new things
Had new experiences
Practiced your relationship skills and got better
Uplifted someone
When you are clear about where you really want to go, you become more discerning about where you stop off along the way, and your route is shorter and more direct. You only make stops that you perceive will be of value or interest to you. Being clear on your destination prevents you getting caught up in side journeys that don’t serve you because you can quickly perceive that they are not where you want to go. This is what happens when you take the time to think through your Ideal Partner Applicant Description. It gives you clarity about the kind of fulfilling relationship you want to create and helps you to journey to this goal in a less stressful, more efficient, and less damaging, way.
4. Adopt a Beginner’s Mind
The concept of a beginner’s mind can be found in Buddhism and refers to having an attitude of openness, eagerness and lack of preconceptions in your approach to an experience or task. Often we attach and overlay all our past relationship experiences onto our current one, and see the new through the filters of the old.
There are two downsides to this: firstly, the fear that comes up, and secondly, in focusing on the old and attaching it to the new you energetically recreate the same type of patterns of experience. This is in essence trying to create a new solution from the old thinking which created the problem. And that doesn’t work.
“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” – Albert Einstein
In order to create a new solution, you need to come to the issue with a new mind – a beginner’s mind – one which has let go of preconceptions and is open to something new and different. Using “what if” statements can help to relax your mind to play with this concept. You could ask yourself: “what if this was the first time I had ever experienced a situation like this?”, or “what if this was a new type of experience?”, and then explore into what that would be like.
Another thing that I find helpful is to visualize all my past painful experiences, my ‘baggage’, as a trolley suitcase with wheels that I can either choose to hold onto and wheel around with me, or to park and walk away and leave behind.
For more on what fear is and seven more practices to manage it effectively then you can download and read my free ebook called How to Make Fear Your Friend.
This article is an extract from my free ebook How to Attract a Great Partner and Create the Fulfilling Relationship You Desire
If you have fear of a new relationship and you try any of these processes I would love it if you leave a comment and let me know if they helped you.
If you want to know more of the processes I use to grow my own self-love then take a look at my book 10 Steps to Happiness. This book is essentially a summary of the processes I used and refined as I embarked on my journey out of depression, illness, marital separation and fear, and began to create true happiness and fulfillment in my life.
0 Comments