I have lived love's romantic illusions. People I have fallen in love with for some unreasonable irrational need to experience it. The object of my affection may not even care or even know the feelings that exist in me. But that magnetic pull, to go through that swampland and come out of it wiser and more aware of the things that appear to drown the soul. The entanglements become the learning ground. To invest ones energies and focuses on the unreal is a journey the human soul must make. Find the illusions and know them well.

Be attentive to the one you choose to see as your paramour and ask yourself, "Is this really the one or is this only a passage, an initiation? Is this my freedom from being so consumed by romantic and sexual passion that I cannot think or tend to the daily demands of life and living? Is this love in its pubescent stages of evolvement?" Perhaps this is part of finding love to be none of the above or one of its forms of expression.

Is there some need in me that has not completed itself? Some childhood relationship needing that final dot at the end of the line? An unrequited love that this child I was still wants to recreate and make it end happily ever after? The only "happily ever after" I need is the one that enables me to say ... "This one is not real or this one is my unfinished business. This is something I have to complete and learn from, moving on from there." Now that I know the terrain, I can differentiate between real and unreal. I can find love to be a solvable mystery that my soul knows to be the plan.

Love was never meant to be personal. That validation I sought as a child, from someone I worshipped and adored as my lesser god and upon whom I depended for my self-acceptance and self-esteem. Their approval and praise would send me soaring while their disapproval sent me to the depths of despair and into self-hatred, self-loathing and self-rejection. I sought redemption through needing to please and placate those lesser gods. I lost myself in the process and they become the shapers of my personality and decided my fate. My life, taken over by the need for their approval, demanded obedience to their images of what would make me acceptable. This is the preamble to choosing abusive and controlling relationships.

Ultimately the goal is to develop my own unconditional self-love and self­acceptance. That no other god but the God within me can define who and what I am and what I am to become in the world. In this time I spend with my "self" questioning, I can know myself with the intimacy necessary for me to see myself as a whole and complete person. 

As a child, there were no memories of experiencing that I could access to know myself. I was dependent upon my caretakers and family to share their view of me. They often simply added to my confusion, giving me a false and untrue impression of myself. I sought to create a place that would give me a sense of belonging. Every new place I came to meant trying to belong. As I grew to maturity, the need to belong seemed to be the only goal to achieve. Even to belong to someone.

The bottom line is that I belong to no one, and every space I enter, I enter as whole. I am complete and there is nothing to achieve but my full self expression of talents and abilities. It is not a matter of being successful. We are all born to succeed and it is only the traumas, the false impressions of ourselves, that keep us from being all that we have been created to be.
 

~ Gemma Halpern

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