Rewrite your love story to truly belong…

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Healing your relationship with your family of origin helps you stop making excuses about why you are the way you are.

No one can unconditionally meet your needs, but you can source unconditional love, commitment, and respect from within.

By looking at how your family shaped your dating and relationship habits, you can develop self-compassion and become someone who attracts your deepest desires. Don’t rely on family members to change how they behave.

No matter how other people in your life relate to you, you can unlearn patterns of behavior. This liberation allows you to show up authentically.

With a deeper understanding, you can come home to yourself and harness your parents’ legacy.

All of us experience unmet needs as children. We feel we didn’t receive the love, safety, belonging, attention, or respect we craved. Not getting what you need poses a potential death threat to a small child. These unmet needs create insatiable desires that carry over into adulthood.

The unconscious part of you that was terrified of death suffers until you acknowledge its pain.

The Impact of Parental Patterns

Modeling behavior from caretakers is a natural response to growing up. We deeply ingrain these habitual patterns in our bodies, believing that if we don’t adopt them, our family won’t love us, we won’t be safe with them, and we won’t belong.

Our subconscious drives our choices when we fear judgment, punishment, or rejection. This can shatter our self-expression and confidence.

Growing up in a violent family may teach you that keeping the peace makes you vulnerable to aggression. It could also teach you that the only way to survive is to be a peacemaker or lover, denying the part of you that stands up for yourself.

If your mother was unavailable growing up, you may treat yourself harshly without realizing it. If your father is truly loving, it will be easier for you to love yourself.

Parents learn to accept love in ways that make them feel safe—their patterns of relating.

Creating New Patterns

Finding new ways to react in line with your true nature is the key to breaking old habits. Give your nervous system a sense that you can have your desired reality without dying. Death is a false fear that prevents us from relearning how to live in embodied self-expression on a neurological level.

Demanding love, respect, and attention is a huge turn-off.

No matter how loving your partner is in a romantic relationship, they’re never going to be unconditionally caring. When we look for someone to fulfill our needs externally, we can find ourselves in toxic cycles of dependency.

At its core, the desire for love, attention, and safety is completely understandable. The choice to evolve wakes up higher powers and emotions within you. Giving you the ability to maturely ask for what you want from others and attract safe love.

Resistance to embracing your true self comes from places in the body that play a protective role, trying to keep you safe through survival strategies. Focus on the areas of your body that react with pain, anger, sadness, or fear when your relationship triggers you.

Maybe you just found a picture of the guy you’re dating at a party with another woman. She’s married, but still, he didn’t invite you!

Does this cause pain in your heart, a lump in your throat, or discomfort in your stomach?

This kind of behavior can be very triggering if you experience abandonment as a child. Your unmet need for love and recognition could be the unconscious driver behind your reaction.

You can create a space in your body to help you master your emotions. Try this to rewrite your inner love story:

Tune in to the discomfort and ask your body what it needs.

Listen to and acknowledge the hurt, accepting it with love.

This connects you to the pain of the past, letting you invite it into the present.

Offer that area of your body a new role in service to your true safety and belonging.

This is how you start to become the ideal parent for your inner child.

Developing Your Inner Caregivers

Developing your inner caregivers will empower the part of you that knows unconditional love, compassion, and respect. You can show up for any unmet needs a partnership is triggering.

Pull all of these aspects of your psyche into your awareness, give them a voice, offer them love, and move on. This practice enables you to source power consistently regardless of your internal state.

Sometimes, a spiritual connection to some external source of divinity can support the unconditional feelings you crave. Or you may find power in the connection you have to your soul.

It’s different for everyone.

These connections provide us with a sense of safety, reminding us that we have always belonged simply because we are here. It’s a lifelong commitment to yourself to unlearn patterns through developing a loving relationship with yourself.

At times, your inner child will object to having your needs met by you or a higher power. A part of you may still hope your parents meet those needs. This is a natural and primal desire that can trigger rage, sadness, and despair. Healing is difficult.

In a quiet, private space, explain to your inner child that while you can’t change your parents or rewrite the past to reflect perfect situations in which they met all your needs, you can fill those needs yourself now.

Reassure the conscious part of you in pain:

“We could wait forever for Mom and Dad, but they can’t really fix this. So, if you want love, safety, and belonging, I can give them to you. I can support you unconditionally. You will always belong to me. You might not want it from me, but I’m going to keep giving it to you.”

Establish a strong psychological presence of inner masculine and feminine figures who will hold you in all of the love, safety, and belonging you need.
Your inner caregivers can be a mother and father, king and queen, or god and goddess.

In surrendering to whatever power you choose, you open up your receptivity to receive an infinite source of unconditional love and respect. It’s a lifelong practice.

This is how generational transformation happens. Altering your inner reality allows you to raise your own children differently and see the world with fresh eyes.

Perhaps this is what Mahatma Gandhi meant when he said, “If you want to change the world, start with yourself.”

Recognizing Painful Patterns in Relationships

If your relationships are painful, it may be a sign you’re attempting to satisfy your deep, unconscious, unfulfilled needs through sex and romance.

Breakups can be extremely painful for anyone who experienced abandonment as a child because the feelings resonate deeply. These struggles can manifest when you use your sexuality to fulfill your need for recognition and validation. Sex cannot satisfy your need to feel worthy.

It should be a container for authentic expression.

Your parents’ lack of sexual celebration will teach you that being sexual is dangerous. Parental actions that deny, punish, ignore, or threaten certain aspects of us lead to self-loss. Repeated signals that we won’t receive love if we express a certain part of ourselves cause us to suppress this self.

We then construct a false self to replace the lost part of ourselves, which transforms into a shadow self.

If you got into trouble for masturbating as a child, you may have suppressed the part of yourself that values pleasure. You might replace that natural way of being with control and judgment, creating a false identity. Then, if people say you’re no fun, you might deny the false self you’ve made to hide your truth. Your shadow self appears to counteract your judgment and shame around sex.

Maybe that looks like hypersexuality to counteract the false identity.

Celebrate, love, and connect with your shadow self. Don’t disown that part; pull it towards you and give it a place at your table. To create a space for the lost self to emerge, invite the parts of you that you normally push away to have a voice in your awareness. This dismantles the framework that hides your true nature.

Once you let your false self have a voice and stop taking it so seriously, you will start to get a taste of your lost self. There may be a flavor of hedonism underneath!

Give yourself time to tap into your primal and limbic systems to resurrect the lost self, releasing the desire to maintain a false identity.

Final Thoughts

The more you create the reality you truly desire, the more you can let your family and the past be. The more you let them go, the closer you are to liberated self-expression.

You are the only savior who can make yourself whole.

When your family no longer triggers you, and you approach them with centered compassion, that’s proof of transformation.