A Paradigm Shift for Relationships

Sometimes when I read people’s stories, people who have undergone similar moments of transformations as I have, I find it inspiring to hear about the struggles they used to have… And how those struggles are a thing of the past.

I’m writing this not to make people go like “yay go Pete!” But to actually bring possibility and maybe direction to anybody who may be struggling with what I used to struggle with.

Just some context. A fundamental paradigm shift in the mind touches every corner of our experience. That which is always present, the mind, thought, feelings… This is the common denominator of all experience. As such it isn’t exactly a far stretch to say that a deep insight into how thoughts and feelings work will affect the way we see and respond to all aspects of the human experience.

I think I’ll write a few of these to represent different aspects of life and how a mind transformation can affect them at a practical level. But for today I’ll specifically share about how this paradigm shift transformed my relationships.

Prior to this transformation, I had about 7 years of relationship experience with 3 people. Each person I have had amazing memories with. Moments of true connection and dare I say love. However, the backdrop of these relationships was plagued with insecurity. Control issues, jealousy, feelings of unworthiness, etc.

This manifested in many different ways. Let’s go over the symptoms.

In my first relationship, a huge percentage of my time was spent being insecure. In this phase of my life the insecurity manifested more in the sense of being needy. I just wanted her to give me all of her attention. When she wasn’t giving me attention I felt she didn’t like me. Of course at the time I didn’t realize I was creating that within my own mind. It felt so real that at times I would feel utterly worthless.

This insecurity I felt in myself was also projected on to my girlfriend at the time. And so it sort of ping ponged between “I’m not good enough for you” and “you’re not good enough for me”.

Many of our fights and arguments stemmed from this underlying insecurity. And it was kind of like a virus that turned what could have been a beautiful relationship into one that was steeped in insecurity with only momentary glimpses of beauty.

After that relationship ended, I developed a certain degree (not very much) of self awareness. But my focus was more on my behaviour than the underlying insecurity.

In my 2nd relationship, I wanted to get the neediness out of me because I saw it as weakness. So I acted (tried to act) like I didn’t care about anything. Of course that created a sort of repressed anger which had a bubble up at some point. And even at that, I could never really truly be authentic about how I felt because in my mind if I was transparent about my true emotions then the relationship would fall apart like the last one.

I was still deeply affected and struggled a lot with jealousy but I tried my best to just suppress it. This to me seemed like the better option of two. The insecurity I believed to be simply part of life, or at least who I was, and so I was modulating and controlling its expression so it wouldn’t destroy my relationship. It did come out in anger though, as repression has a tendency to.

My third relationship was kind of continuation of that, but even moreso, I was very rarely myself. I had perfected ( okay maybe not perfected ) the act of being someone who simply did not give a fuck about anything. Of course this was just a cover to not show the ugly face of insecurity which I still felt deep down.

Throughout the these relationships, I struggled with being controlling. The controllingness was expressed differently in all relationships, but it was as consistent as the insecurity. Also consistent was the fear of loss, and the guilt that came along with being responsible for a failing relationship, and of course the jealousy.

Not to say that there weren’t beautiful aspects to each of them. There definitely were. The relationships weren’t terrible. I have so many amazing memories from all of these relationships. I just thought it was just normal to struggle with jealousy and insecurity. I saw it as a biological possessive instinct.

Eventually that 3rd relationship ended which leaves us with the current one.

At the beginning of my current relationship, having been immersed with some of the west coast ideas of self-acceptance and authenticity, I became more transparent about it. Rose and I were reasonably good at holding space for each other and allowing us to express how we were feeling. There was always a sense of “moving through” issues, though those issues seemed to be recurring. And so we would end up having to “move through” the same issue over and over again.

There wasn’t as much repression in this relationship, or pretending, and so there wasn’t as much anger. But that didn’t really make the insecurity much better. Jealousy still played a reasonable role in the relationship. Same with underlying feelings of fear of loss along with some control issues.

At the time of writing this, I feel I would loosely gauge a good relationship by how much is time spent in warm feelings versus time spent in conflict, disconnection, anger, etc. There is no shame for feeling these emotions when you do feel them, in my opinion. But understanding where they come from is a different thing.

I only have compassion for my past self and all other humans who struggle with this stuff. It’s not really something you would choose to do if you felt you had a choice. Nobody wakes up in the morning and says “I think I’ll ruin the day by being insecure”. It seems as though the universe just hands it to us and we just have to deal with it the best way we can.

Since my paradigm shift over two years ago, warmth has been the overwhelming majority of our experience together.

This started when I realized something. In one instant, my life changed.

To put this in words would not do it justice because words and concepts are not realizations. They’re just ideas.

A realization is something that truly unlocks something profound, buried in the depths of you. Like finding a light switch in a dark room. Talking about the light switch is not the same as turning it on.

What I didn’t see throughout the last decade or so of relationships was that I was creating my insecurity. It wasn’t being handed to me, I was literally using the power and freedom of thought to make up ideas that were making me insecure.

Every single moment of insecurity I had experienced had been a shadow of insecure thinking I was having in the moment. But I couldn’t see that. It looked so real to me, and felt so real to me. I literally had no idea.

The irony is I was having control issues, yet I was controlling my mind such a way to create torment in me. I was using a divine gift, a spiritual gift, to make myself feel like crap.

I made up stuff in my head, thought I was seeing the truth, and then felt terrible. This is why I talk about truth with a capital T sometimes. Everyone sees their own individual and unique reality based on their thinking. That’s a lowercase t truth, despite the fact that it feels true. We each live inside our own personal reality. But that can change as fast we change our mind. This is difficult to see from the inside.

How we feel is only ever showing us how it feels to think what were thinking, it’s not showing us how the world feels or how a situation feels. It shows us how it feels to experience the meaning we are making out of it. This brings ownership of the experience back to the mind, where it’s never left. It’s taking all the projections in the world and seeing that they are happening within your own mind, from thought.

Thought determines how you feel at any given moment. Nothing else.

But seeing that is only half of it.

Many of us spend years in therapy trying to dig up the roots of our belief systems, look in the past, yet most of us don’t really feel like we make much progress. It’s an endless search.

There’s a missing piece. The next realization is that when the mind is quiet, when control is surrendered, the natural movement of thought takes over, which to say that the default movement of thought energy is cleansing. This is the ordinary miracle we can all experience.

There is nothing we need to fix because we are all fundamentally well. Feeling insecure while you are playing with insecure thoughts is wellness. That feeling is feedback. Healthy feedback, bringing to your awareness what you’re choosing to do in that moment with your freedom of thought. You have living wisdom actively working in you. It’s never stopped. It guides your mind for you if you let it.

We are all fundamentally mentally healthy. The only sickness in the mind is the belief that something other than thought is creating how you feel. That is healed in one instant. The moment any human being sees the power of thought, they immediately wake up and find peace of mind where it’s always been: underneath a thought they were taking seriously.

There’s nothing you need to do, because warm feelings are actually the default. Every being in all existence is one thought away from peace of mind. That feeling of joy is never denied from anybody. Like the power of thought, it is a spiritual gift. It is our natural inheritance. We can only veil it. But once we see that the furthest we can get away from that beautiful feeling is by holding up a veil of thought, all we need is the willingness to let go. Then we fall back into the timeless now where we experience a lovely feeling.

Now, when insecure thoughts come up for me, what do I do? Nothing. I am using my gift, my freedom of thought, to make myself feel insecure. I just didn’t see that before.

Now my relationship is just warmth, intimacy, happiness, joy. Rose and I rarely have any kind of insecurities or bad feelings come up. And when we do, we usually laugh at them together. Sometimes we get caught up in them, but soon after we realize: “it’s just thought!”