Haunted Days and Haunted Nights ©2007 Patricia Wall
Published Town Crier Sep 2007
Every relationship has good days and bad days. A serious problem occurs when you have an interaction with your partner that leaves you haunted by painful words. The pain might occur because something critical was said, or something that wounds you very personally, or you feel there is a conflict that has no positive resolution.
It can feel as if there is no way to escape this pain. As time goes by and more wounds are accumulated, it can feel as if there is no way to have real happiness in your relationship. The only way to escape the pressure and turmoil of old pains that get buried under day-to-day life is to learn to reprogram your subconscious to exorcise the haunting wounds of your past.
When you work with your subconscious mind, you can remove the pain from a memory. You retain your recollection of the event, but it can stop hurting you. Learning to use such tools allows you to have a true fresh start, and a potential for happiness and forgiveness that is not possible when these lingering pains continue to hurt you.
The challenge you face is to be willing to stop hurting. Sometimes old hurts become a score-keeping process in a relationship, and the old pain is dragged into every conversation and interaction. Through the subliminal signals of your subconscious, old pain creates a toxic undertone in your voice and body language that sabotage your efforts to have healthy communication or intimacy. It invades your days and your nights, eating away at your potential for happiness and undermining your efforts to make things better.
When someone you love says something critical it’s like being stabbed. Love is meant to include the good and the bad, the benefits and the warts of who you are. It’s too easy for a conversation that has degenerated into an argument to also degenerate into criticisms that lay blame for a problem. Something said in the heat of the moment may cause pain that lingers, and keeps recurring in your thoughts, until you feel haunted by those painful words.
When it feels as if love has excluded or judged some part of who you are, it creates a persistent wound that penetrates to the core doubts in your self-esteem. How can you feel loved by a person who has made you feel bad about yourself? It doesn’t matter how heated the moment was, or how serious the words were, the doubt created is like a worm that crawls through your self-worth and your faith in your relationship.
A worm of deterioration will be created when something wounds you personally. This is the kind of injury that creates major damage, such as lies, betrayal, conflict of morals or values, or being treated as if you have little priority or status in your partner’s life. Even if you work hard at making your relationship better, the poison of the past is underneath your efforts, like a flawed support beam that can’t hold up a home. Despite your efforts to forgive, the memory sneaks back into your thoughts, and disturbs your sleep, as the haunting continues.
Another worm of rot is launched when a conflict occurs that seems to have no good solution. Compromise is a normal part of life, but when you feel as if your perspective is not a priority, or your requirements are not respected, no compromise can feel right. Instead of making a compromise, you may feel as if you were sold out, or devalued. Sometimes there’s no apparent solution to a conflict because nothing is going to work.
Any worm of deterioration continues to damage a relationship long past the end of the conversation where it was born. It’s hard to protect the joy in your relationship from the wear and tear of life’s challenges. By removing the pain from your painful memories, you can reclaim your potential for happiness and master your life. Are you willing to be free of pain?
|
