Recently I notice a shift within my own head as I move on
from healing from a bad relationship to thoughts of creating a good relationship
in my life.

The process so far has been interesting, entertaining,
challenging at times and quite emotionally wearing, as I test it all out in the
relationship marketplace. 

And then it struck me that I am still behaving in accordance
with an old belief that relationships are emotionally wearing.

It was precisely that belief that helped propel me into my
abusive marriage. 

All these years on, I believe I deserve better. I believe I have a right to better. Still,
at a level so deep that I hadn’t even registered it, my expectation was
still alarmingly negative. 

   

It goes without saying that that kind of expectation is very
powerful in shaping reality.

Naturally, having identified it, I am now working at
clearing it. (Just recognizing it feels
like a liberation in and of itself.)

But I don’t suppose that I am the only one unwittingly
engaged in this kind of process. 

Most of the women I work with are intellectually aware of
positive beliefs and affirmations. They
know the difference between a constructive mind-set and a destructive
mind-set. They know how they want to
be. Yet it is not how they are. 

The reason for that is a lack of focus on healing the
heart. 

However heart-driven we are by nature, pain will eventually
drive us into our head as we seek whatever respite we can have. It’s not particularly pain-free and we may
still feel as if we are totally ruled by our heart, yet that is not the
reality. 

Shedding that pattern of filtering emotion through our head,
in the interests of self-justification
or safety, is not a process that happens spontaneously. But it is perfectly possible. 

It is, I believe, all about reclaiming our own
identity. 

Abused women speak constantly of what they are not, not what
they are. They speak of their past
projected onto the future. They are
stuck with a picture of themselves at their lowest possible ebb that they graft
onto the unknown future.

They are wrong, of course, because the future has a
wonderful way of disproving our projections. 

But we are remarkably slow to realize that our future
possibilities are whatever we choose for ourselves.

Recently I read these words: “What you share is what you
create.” Hold that thought! The expectations you share about yourself
with other people are what you will create in your interaction with them. 

Let me rephrase that slightly: the expectations we have
shared about ourselves with other people are what we have created in our
relationship with them. That can be
worrying and hard to swallow. It’s also
empowering. 

Simply by changing what we share, we change what we
create. Obviously, it’s essential to
know quite what we share, especially the treacherous expectations of the kind
that I recently uncovered in myself.

Once uncovered, there are tried and true techniques to
eradicate those nasty little critters. 

You see, I may have had some hellish expectations but I have
a very powerful belief that it really is possible to change very quickly what
is not working. 

In fact, human beings, even tramatized, abused ones, have an
extraordinary capacity to envisage how they would prefer to feel and relate and
then to create that new way of being. 

With that in mind, what do you want to share? What do you choose to create?