Barbara Angelis - The 100 Most Asked Questions About Love, Sex and Relationships

The point of this exercise is twofold: First, it will help you understand that your prior relationships didn’t just go bad. There were specific unhealthy behaviors and love habits that caused the relationships to fail. Second, by paying attention to these unhealthy love habits, and committing on paper to new, healthy behavioral choices, you have a great chance of avoiding the old mistakes that would hurt you again. Throw in some good books, tapes, or seminars on making relationships work, and you will have a great foundation to go forward into this new romance with excitement, enthusiasm, and high hopes.

I’ve been dating a man for nine months who won’t introduce me to his family or his friends. I know he has children from a former marriage, and I haven’t even met them. Most of the time, we spend alone at my apartment or his condo, and when we do go out, it’s always at the last minute. He claims that he is a private person, and that he doesn’t want to bring other people into our relationship, but something doesn’t feel right to me. What does this mean?

I hate to be the one to tell you this, but this behavior means just what you secretly suspect it means—that your boyfriend is ashamed to be seen with you or associated with you, and is hiding you from the people in his life. It could be that, for some reason, he doesn’t think you’re “good enough” to be an official girlfriend—maybe you don’t look the way he thinks you should or come from a background he thinks is acceptable. This may sound terrible, but it’s nothing compared to the second possibility you need to look at: Your boyfriend may be married or involved with someone else, and is cheating on her with you! Thus, the sneaking around, staying inside, and keeping you isolated from the rest of his life. The signs all add up, don’t they?

I’ll bet you’ve known this deep inside yourself, but haven’t wanted to face it, because it means confronting him and, if you have any self-respect, ending the relationship immediately. And respect is the key word here. He obviously doesn’t respect you—his behavior is totally disrespectful. So once you’ve broken up with him, you need to ask yourself some difficult and confrontational questions: Why did I put up with this kind of treatment for so long? What in my emotional past attracts me to men who treat me like I’m not important? What are some of the ways I kept myself in denial about something so obvious? How can I begin to heal my own emotional wounds so I don’t get hurt like this again?

It’s time for you to love yourself enough to know you don’t deserve to be treated like some awful secret too grotesque for the world to see. The man who is lucky enough to be with you should be proud and honored to have you in his life, and excited about showing you off to everyone he knows. And the sooner you get rid of this character you’re with, the sooner you’ll meet a partner who will treat you like the wonderful human being you are.

Even though I know that many of the problems in my relationship are caused or aggravated by some past hurts from my childhood and from painful love affairs, I still can’t figure out how to let go of the past. My husband has his own issues, and between the two of us, I wonder how we’ve survived this long! Is there a way to heal the past so it doesn’t sabotage our relationship?

This is one of the most important questions any of us can ask ourselves: How can I identify and heal any unhealthy emotional patterns formed in my past so they don’t sabotage my adult relationships? In fact, you’ve just taken the first step in healing yourself: acknowledging the existence of your emotional baggage and expressing a willingness to get rid of it! Sadly, most people in the world will never even admit that their past experiences are emotionally handicapping them in their present lives, and therefore will never have the opportunity to experience what I call “true emotional freedom.” I define emotional freedom as the freedom to live as the person you want to be, and love as much as you want to love. It’s freedom from the past to be all you can in the present.

In order to heal the past, you have to understand what I call your “emotional programming.” Your emotional programming is simply a set of decisions you made about yourself, others, and the world in general when you were growing up.As an infant, you came into the world like a blank slate. Even though you were born with a certain set of genetic predispositions, you had no experiences yet to affect you either negatively or positively. But each day that you are alive, you collect experiences, and each one teaches you something about yourself and other people. You are either treated well, or treated harshly; you are either loved or neglected; you are either praised or put down.

Each of these experiences helps you form a decisionabout yourself, about people, and about life. For instance, if your parents had an unhappy, turbulent relationship, and as an infant or small child you heard constant fighting, you might have unconsciously decided: “I have to always be good, so I don’t make people I love unhappy,” or “It’s not safe for me to express angry feelings.” Here’s another example. Let’s say your father was emotionally distant and not there for you. You may have unconsciously decided “I can’t count on the people I love,” or “People who love me abandon me.” Each experience you have as a child helps you make certain decisions, until you have a collection of decisions you have made about life. This collection of decisions or beliefs is called your emotional programming.In the same way you would program a computer with basic information, and the computer would use that information to do tasks or solve problems, so you program your mind with this emotional programming. For the rest of your life, this “program” affects how you think, how you behave, and especially, how you react to circumstances that remind you of your painful childhood experiences.

The majority of this emotional programming occurs when you are still very young. Psychologists estimate that:

Between the ages of 0-5 years old you receive 50% of your emotional programming

Between the ages of 5-8 years old you receive 30% of your emotional programming

That means, by the age of 8 you are 80% programmed psychologically.In other words, 80% of the decisions about yourself and others have already been made.

Between the ages of 8-18 years old you receive 15% more of your emotional programming

So by the time you are eighteen years old, you’re 95 percent complete! That leaves 5 percent for the rest of your life. This may not seem like much, but it’s that 5 percent that I work with when I help people make changes in their lives. And the good news is that you can use that 5 percent to understand and change the other 95 percent!