by Katherine Woodward Thomas
What are the reasons you tell yourself why you’ve not yet found The One?
What do you say to your parents when they wonder why another year has gone by and you’re still single?
What are the things you say to yourself about dating and love, when another weekend lurks, and you’re frantically trying to fill up your time with activities, just so you won’t feel lonely?
Consider the things you believe in your heart about love, without stopping to wonder if it’s even true—those statements that just roll off your tongue, or that you repeat quietly to yourself to lessen the dull ache of loneliness and rejection.
Can you relate to any of these?
Men don’t know what they want. They aren’t even looking for a real relationship.
No one’s really there for me. No one cares about my feelings and needs.
It’s too late for me. I already lost the love of my life.
No one believes in marriage anymore. Everyone just wants a casual relationship.
There are no good men left out there. The good ones are already taken, or gay.
The kind of woman/man I want doesn’t like me.
I have a bad picker. I only attract narcissists/losers/control freaks/cheaters.
Sound familiar? Most people think they know the the reasons why their past relationships haven’t worked out, and why they’re still alone.
I know because that was once me. Always trying to figure out why I was the one who was still single, when so many of my friends were already happily married.
I struggled to find real love up until the age of 41.
My reason?
I wondered if maybe men really didn’t like powerful women.
Or if maybe all the good ones were already taken…
Or I was afraid that maybe my parents’ crazy relationship had messed me up too much to find love in my adult life…
Why We Cling To Our Reasons, Excuses, And Stories
I clung to my reason for 20 long years.
Whenever someone would ask me why I was still single, or why none of the men I dated had proposed to me yet, I’d shrug and say that I just hadn’t found the right person yet.
And then secretly wonder if there was something wrong with me.
Why couldn’t I find men who were open and available to love me the way I wanted to be loved? Was I too much? Maybe not enough?
When we struggle to find love, we try to make sense of it by telling ourselves all sorts of stories.
We think, “Others are lucky in love, but not me,” or, “Everyone always leave me,” or, “The people I like never like me, and the ones who do, I don’t like.”
(In my case, it was, “I’m all alone in life. No one has my back.”)
These stories sap us of optimism and motivation as we sink into the mire of hopelessness.
As much as these stories cause us distress, we become attached to them. We cling to them like they’re mantras. They’re the default place we go within ourselves whenever we experience a new disappointment in love.
We feel absolutely powerless in the face of these stories, and begin to believe the sad story that it’s our fate to be alone in life.
Yet, what would you say if I told you that you yourself were the author of that sad story, and that it was the story itself that was actually keeping you single?
Here’s how that happens.
The 2 Unconscious Ways You’re Sabotaging Your Love Life
Your reasons, excuses, and stories for why you haven’t yet fallen in love with The One are powerful psychological saboteurs that are getting in the way of your love life!
How is this possible? Two ways…
1 You engage in habitual and unconscious patterns of behavior that are designed to validate your story.
When you tell yourself a story with a lot of emotional energy attached to it, you start to behave in ways that then validate that story, therefore reinforcing it and giving it more power each time.
For example, let’s say that you secretly believe that no one cares about your needs or feelings. To compensate, you then organize around the feelings and needs of others. You become disconnected from what you want and need to the point that you don’t even know what you want and need any longer.
In other words, you literally “train” others to be selfish and narcissistic. You may think you’re just attracting narcissistic partners, but the reality is that you are the source of the other person’s selfishness because you don’t ever acknowledge or express your own needs and feelings to them—due to the story you’ve created about others not caring about your needs and feelings.
It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Or, let’s say you don’t feel valued by others. To compensate, you give more than you should. Perhaps you give more of your time, affection, and attention in order to feel valued. Maybe you even jump into bed with those who haven’t demonstrated that they even care much about you. Then when they ghost you, or don’t want to pursue a real relationship with you, you end up feeling more undervalued, and the cycle starts all over again, and gets reinforced each time.
Your unconscious, habitual patterns of behavior are creating the very conditions which reinforce the story that leads to the negative consequences that keep you in pain, confusion, and disappointment in love.
2 You blame your psychology for your painful patterns.
A lot of us have connected the dots between the things that happened to us in childhood and the problems we’re having in our close relationships today.
However, most of us are stuck in the analysis of why what’s happening now is happening, and the earlier origins of our problems and triggers.
Despite knowing the origins of your issues, you may still feel powerless to make the changes you want to make in your life today.
What actually does evolve your stories and allow you to make changes?
Taking full responsibility for how you show up inside of your story!
For example, if you felt neglected as a child because your single mom had to work because your dad left the family, you may have internalized that as you are all alone because everyone always leaves you. Now, as an adult, you may have a tendency to emotionally withdraw at the first sign of any kind of challenge or difficulty. This withdrawal signals to the other person that it’s time to leave.
You’ve now created a self-fulfilling prophecy.
It’s not what happened when you were a child that is the problem. The choices and behaviors you’re making today are causing your struggles. In this example, choosing to employ a pre-emptive strike against being rejected—by rejecting first—causes the relationship breakdown.
The Real Issue: We Can’t See What We Can’t See
These two ways we sabotage, or block, love are so ubiquitous that most of the time, we can’t even see we’re doing it.
They’re operating in the background of our consciousness. Many of our behaviors and responses are on autopilot.
Here are a couple of examples of how you make unconscious choices based on the stories you’re telling yourself…
You look away when an attractive man makes eye contact, because you assume you’re not good enough for him…or that he probably just wants to hook up sexually…or that you can’t ever attract the good ones, so why try?
If you are emotionally anchored into your story and overly-identified with the feelings you have about it, you will tend to show up in ways that will co-create evidence for that story.
Whatever you think, you will unconsciously make it so!
Right now, it may seem to you that it would be difficult or even hopeless to break the cycle and stop the sabotaging behavior, but I assure you, it’s not.
I’ve spent the last almost two decades teaching a powerful process that helps you uncover all your false stories—or what I call False Love Identities—and create new choices based on the vision you have for your love life (not based on the tired, false, and love-sabotaging stories you’ve been repeating).
I know this process works, because it worked for me, and it’s worked for thousands of people since I started teaching it.
I’m confident it will help you, too.
How To Stop Getting In Your Own Way, SEE The Truth, And Generate A New Vision For Love
By the way, once I recognized how much I had clung to my false story and had been generating the reality of “I’m meant to be alone,” I was able to make completely different choices and choose different behaviors.
I stopped believing that I was meant to be alone in life, and consequently organically stopped attracting unavailable men—who could only validate that I was ultimately on my own in life.
That’s when things completely turned around for me.
I reconnected with a man that I had dated six years earlier, who for years I’d thought of as the one that got away, and we were engaged in only a few months and married the next year.
When our daughter was born the following year (when I was 43!) I finally realized my vision of love and had the family I’d always dreamed of.
You too can achieve your dreams. But first you need to uncover all those false stories and love identities that are creating the very reality you’re fighting against.
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Lots of love and bye for now,
