by Katherine Woodward Thomas
So much about finding love can feel beyond your control.
In almost every other area of your life, you feel capable and as if you have agency to make things happen. You can save up for a house, go out and get a new job, and master a new life skill.
But when it comes to finding your life partner, you feel totally adrift and powerless.
This magical love is just supposed to appear in your life, and then after that, it’s actually supposed to be easy as you ride off into the sunset!
Yet after all the disappointments you’ve been through, you may find yourself asking, “What are the chances of this really happening for me?” Especially after all you’ve been through!
Actually, if you take to heart what I’m about to tell you, the chances are huge. Enough to actually expect a miracle in your love life—a relationship so different and so fulfilling, it will be like a bolt of lightning.
Sound too good to be true?
It’s not for the hundreds of thousands of singles I’ve helped finally call in “The One.”
Here’s how you can be one of them.
Your Power To Create A Miracle In Your Love Life (No Matter What Your Past Has Looked Like)
I get it that when you look back on your history, you may sigh. You may cringe. You may despair.
But like the stock market, past performance is not an indicator of future results—IF you invest wisely.
In terms of your love life, investing wisely is about taking radical personal responsibility for how love has gone for you up until now.
In other words, you give up blaming circumstances and making excuses for why it’s been so hard for you to find love.
You look to understand how you yourself are showing up that’s literally perpetuating your single status.
Because as much as you may want love, there are parts of you that don’t fully trust it.
There are a lot of reasons why this might be so.
And one of the biggest is how you’ve been hurt in the past, and how you don’t fully trust opening yourself up to being hurt again in the future!
These incompletions often live as a sense of victimization. Someone did something unfair or unkind in the past and you’re still struggling to let it go.
Yet in order to be free to open your heart up again, you’re going to have to let go of blaming anyone and become curious about your part in what happened.
If you’re still incomplete with a past relationship, it’s probably for good reason. Someone did something really, really hurtful. They treated you poorly in ways that have been hard to fully get over!
Yet even if you were seriously wronged by a former partner—even if it was 97% their fault—you really want to look at your 3%.
Because the way you showed up in that relationship—is the only part of that puzzle you have any power over.
And until you can identify the lesson you learned from that experience, and make a promise to yourself to never do that again, you won’t be able to trust yourself to be close to someone in the future.
So this is where we want your focus to be—on your 3% of what went down between you, and how you actually co-created the dynamic.
It’s the only way to put power back in your hands and change your life.
How Your 3% Changes Everything—And Causes You To Create A Radically Different Future
When we go through bad relationship experiences, especially a very painful one, our attention is usually on what the other person did or didn’t do that was hurtful—on what the other person should have done differently.
If you’ve ever felt this way, my guess is you had good reason.
People sometimes do bad things. They lie. They break their word. They play power trips. They are selfish. They betray us. They speak to us in ways that are disrespectful and minimizing and hurtful. They gossip about us and badmouth us to others. They humiliate us, devalue us, and are abusive.
It’s not that you are not right that you’ve been horribly wronged.
But without looking at your part in the dynamic—however small it was—that small part will keep you forever stuck.
The Question You Must Ask: “Did I Play A Supporting Role?”
We always want to be curious about our part, even if we have to dig a bit to see it clearly.
For example, if you were in a relationship with someone who was narcissistic and self-absorbed, you want to ask yourself who you were being in that relationship that encouraged them to keep their focus on themselves? You want to notice how you yourself often deflected attention away from yourself, and even dismissed your own feelings and needs as unimportant, by putting your whole attention on them. It’s important to see that inside of desperately wanting this person to like you, you made yourself indispensable by anticipating their every need and desire. That you over-gave constantly because you were trying to prove you were good enough for them to love you.
In doing this, you were chronically self abandoning and disappearing yourself—so much so that there was no YOU left to love. Then the other person just mirrored back to you your own dismissive and disrespectful ways of mistreating yourself…by mistreating you as well.
See, if you stay stuck in taking stock of their flaws, then you may well miss your own. Which means that on a very deep level, you’ll know that you’re likely to do it again, and you may sabotage your chances for love moving forward.
That’s why you want to do your best to see clearly your 3%. So you’re free to love again because you know that that unhealthy, unsatisfying, dynamic will never ever happen again.
While it’s hard to look at your part, it’s harder still to live a life without love.
It only takes a small, focused effort to really investigate how you’ve been responsible in the way you’ve co-created your unfulfilling relationship dynamics to date. Yet once you do this, you’re finally free to create an entirely new, transformed, and positive love-filled future.
The Peril Of Dismissing Your 3% (Pay Close Attention)
When you don’t take personal responsibility for your part in your relationships, you will forever feel as if finding healthy, happy love is as hard as climbing Mt. Everest.
The obstacles to love will feel bigger than you are.
As much as you may want love, you’ll find yourself covertly sabotaging it, or maybe creating push-pull dramas to try to keep your heart safe from being hurt again. Or maybe you finally give in to a new relationship, only to recreate an old painful pattern once again.
You won’t even be aware of the negative patterns you’re helping to perpetuate, because you’ll still be blaming the other person! And because of this, you’ll fail to make the necessary changes to trust yourself to love and be loved again in your future.
Because the moment you take radical responsibility, you automatically open the door for the growth that needs to happen in order to avoid repeating tha t painful dynamic with someone new.
That may mean learning to identify what you feel and need in a relationship and discovering effective ways to express that. Or learning how to set healthy boundaries, negotiate for your needs, stand up for yourself. Maybe learning how to self soothe so you can tolerate the anxiety that someone might get angry with you, or even leave you if you say something that could disappoint them…
These are the relational skills that actually keep relationships healthy and vital, and which you are going to need in order to trust yourself to love fully
Make A 100% Change In Your Love Life Right Now
Sometimes it’s not easy to see your part, because the wrong that’s been done us is so glaring. It’s hard to turn toward that 3% that was us.
Yet there’s gold in seeing that 3% clearly. Because your whole life can change when you do.
Once you’ve released your past, and awakened your power to create a miracle in your love life, you can become magnetic to the fulfillment of your deepest desires in love.
It’s the recognition that you are indeed the source of your experience that restores power back into your own hands, lifts you out of resignation, and inspires you to the possibilities you possess to create a radical change in your love life—so that you are liberated to manifest the love you both desire and deserve to have!
Lots of love and bye for now,
P.S. However much someone hurt you—even if what happened was 97% their fault—they didn’t do it alone. However small the part you played, you must identify it if you want to stop repeating it.
I tell people: You can get your lives out of that 3%. And indeed they do.