Emotions:
The quality of your relationships and the quality of your life is proportional to the quality of your emotions. Emotions play a fundamental role in your everyday life. Of the hundreds of emotions, we can label, we generally only experience a handful of emotions regularly and of the emotions we experience often, generally 60% are negative emotions.
If I put this generalised statistic into numbers: At best, you would experience a range of about 20 emotions on a regular cycle. That would mean that 8 of your emotions are positive and 12 of your emotions are negative. At worst, you would experience 6 emotions regularly and 4 of them would be negative emotions such as anger, resentment, bitterness, and anxiety.
Another way of looking at it is that 60% of your life would be negative. And when all you do is focus on the negative feelings, then it would create a perception or a subjective reality that your whole life is negative and miserable.
By design, human nature needs someone or something to blame for our miserable state. So we internalise the problem and blame ourselves, we blame circumstances, we blame God, we blame our spouse. We project outward onto our external world, for the source of our internal experience.
Because I am a relationship expert and, for the purpose of this blog, my focus is on your strategy in blaming your spouse for your all your pain and suffering. If your spouse was the cause of all your negative emotions and unhappiness, then you will never be happy. You would always be looking for a “new” spouse to create a different experience, however, your spouse is not the source. So no matter what partner you had, you would end up in the same unhappiness. This is because the problem moves with you into the new relationship. These “problems” become habits.
Habits are wired into your neurology from childhood and become a part of who you are. If you have not seen it yet, who you are being internally, is the source of your negative or positive emotions.
If you consider a baby that is newborn up to a few months old, you will observe that they have no bitterness, no animosity, not judgement, no resentments, no anxiety. Babies have only two states, either they are at peace, or they are in discomfort. In a state of peace, babies are naturally curious, adventurous, present, non-judgemental, unthreatening. In a state of peace, babies are easily lovable, approachable, and playful.
In a state of discomfort, babies express themselves without compromise, until the discomfort is complete. Of course, the only way babies can express themselves at this stage of development is to cry, scream or moan. This then presupposes that all other emotions are learned behaviours and habits. If this is true, then we need to unlearn and breakdown our learned emotional habits and move back towards a more authentic version of ourselves.
Babies are extremely authentic. When you unmask your true essence from all your learned behaviours, habits, desires, fears, and expectations and allow your authentic self to be revealed, and yes this is the most vulnerable state we could allow, then we too would return to our original state of peace. In this state of peace, we too would be curious, adventurous, present, non-judgemental, unthreatening, fearless, lovable, approachable, and playful. To me, this sounds like a state of love.
Any other state other than love implies you are being your mask. Have you ever seen Jim Carry in the movie called “The Mask”? Now imagine he was in a relationship with another woman who wore a mask as he did! Could you imagine the chaos that would ensue in that relationship? And that is exactly what happens your relationships. Two inauthentic masked individuals, pretending to be authentic in the hopes to create a state of love. It just cannot happen. It is impossible! It’s like adding water to oil and expecting a loaf of bread.
Our masks are developed as the results of learning to survive and navigate all the uncomfortableness-es of life. We develop strategies and behaviours to survive socially, economically, emotionally, and physically. We then perpetuate these child -strategies into adolescence and adulthood and then habitually find ourselves in a never-ending cycle of emotional crises management. Then you add a partner into the space who is also wearing a mask and in crisis management or to call this crisis what it is, “avoid uncomfortableness” mode. This is why we see so much disaster in relationships, why there is so much hurt and pain in relationships.
In contrast, if you had two authentic individuals in a relationship, the natural outcome would be a state of love. Either you would be in a state of peace, or you would be in a proactive state of dealing with the discomforts of life, as partners and not projecting blame for your discomforts.
Marriage then is the journey out of the mask (ego) and back to authenticity. It is not a love story. It is an adventure epic. Adventures can be perilous, fraught with dangers and challenges and opposition. No adventure is smooth sailing. Relationships are designed to be fraught with dangers, challenges, opposition, and perilous obstacles. Marriage is designed to move us back to our authenticity.
Marriage then is a spiritual journey, and all spiritual journeys lead us to God, lead us back to love.
I wish you courage to commit 100% in totality, no back doors, to your voyage.
Brandon