5

Improving Relationships

Immature love says, “I love you because I need you.”

Mature love says, “I need you because I love you.”

—ERICH FROMM, The Art of Loving

What sages and mystics have purported for centuries is now being studied by neuroscientists and psychologists. Our own personal worlds are a reflection of who we are and what we think, feel, and dream. Our thoughts and emotions also have a profound impact on the people we draw into our lives. It is not surprising that in changing our inner worlds, we also profoundly change the people we attract into our lives. By changing ourselves, we essentially transform our relationships.

Everybody’s soul correction includes improving their relationships in one way or another. In this chapter, we will focus on four of the most common relationship soul corrections: mirror images, repetition compulsions, poor boundaries, and lack of self-love and/or self-care.

MIRROR IMAGES

“I love beautiful women!” Sebastian told me as he leaned back in the leather chair in my office and began to catalog his conquests. He loved his wife (though hers was not the first name that came up), his adorable one-year-old twin daughters, his revolving door of mistresses, and his countless one-night stands. Since college he had made a habit of sleeping with at least one woman a night when he went out of town. He never remembered their names or kept their numbers. Although he “loved” them, they meant nothing to him.

A business colleague had recommended that Sebastian come to therapy to find out why he kept attracting women who only cared about his money. Since Sebastian enjoyed complaining about how all the women he loved tried to manipulate him, he was glad to give therapy a try.

As attracted to his exceptional wealth as he was to their exceptional beauty, Sebastian’s gorgeous mistresses inevitably asked for favors: a car, an apartment, jewelry, and spending money. It was truly amazing to hear how many women wanted nothing from Sebastian but his money. Yet he had been using them as well. Sebastian was exploiting women who exploited men. Sebastian and the women he attracted were perfectly matched. It was my suspicion that, whatever wounds he hid beneath the highly polished facade he presented to the world, these women shared the same wounds. But introspection on that level was of no interest to Sebastian, who preferred to play the victim. “It’s the women,” he would say. “All of them are out to take advantage of me!”

As Sebastian’s case illustrates, the world is our mirror. Everybody we attract into our lives is a reflection of us in some way. Rabbi Yisroel ben Eliezer, also known as the Baal Shem Tov, elaborated on this point in saying, “Should you look upon your fellow man and see a blemish, it is your own imperfection that you are encountering—you are being shown what it is that you must correct within yourself.” If a certain person has come into our life, they have something important to teach us about ourselves. Recognizing the mirror-image nature of relationships is the first step in improving our relationships.

When the image we secretly hold of ourselves does not match the people we attract, it surprises us. But it shouldn’t. In the 1960s, Dr. Maxwell Maltz, a renowned plastic surgeon, discovered even when his patients were visually transformed with a whole new face, the old doubts and insecurities that they hoped to escape still haunted them. It was only through soul corrections—or what Maltz thought of as an “emotional face-lift”—that their psychological scars and negative beliefs about themselves could be transformed.

Dr. Maltz wrote that who we think we are “has been built up from our own beliefs about ourselves. But most of these beliefs have unconsciously been formed from our past experiences, our successes and failures, our humiliations, our triumphs, and the way other people have reacted to us…”1 From these we shape a sense of ourselves, but this may not be the most authentic version of who we are. By transcending past patterns that may have once been adaptive but no longer serve us today, we engage in the second relationship soul correction: resolving repetition compulsions.

REPETITION COMPULSIONS

Marina and Jacqueline both tended to compulsively draw partners into their lives who repeated old patterns from their childhoods. No one consciously sets out to find a romantic mate with the same qualities as an unreliable or abusive parent. Yet it happens again and again, in repetition compulsions, unless we can become conscious of the pattern and break it.

When Marina turned forty, she fell in love with a woman for the first time. Although she had never particularly thought of herself as gay or bisexual, there was just something about Andi that captured her heart.

Unlike the healthy, stable men Marina had dated throughout her life, Andi was elusive and unpredictable. She seemed to take life by storm, savoring every moment to the fullest. Instead of going out to dinner and a movie with a quiet stroll home, Andi took Marina to pop-up jazz clubs on the far side of town, where she danced and flirted shamelessly into the night. Marina saw that Andi was selfish, capricious, and unreliable, but she still couldn’t get her out of her head.

What she didn’t realize was that Andi had been dishonest from the start. She said she’d broken up with her girlfriend, Gabrielle, and wanted an exclusive relationship with Marina. It turned out that she was still living with Gabrielle, who knew nothing about their alleged breakup. To make matters worse, Marina discovered that when Andi canceled their dates at the last minute, she was going out with other women.

After Marina told her it was over, Andi kept calling and texting, trying to persuade her to come back. Although very clear that there was nothing to come back to, Marina herself couldn’t understand why she still wanted so badly to make it work.

As we explored this pattern, I remarked on the striking difference between Marina’s relatively stable relationships with men and the highly unstable relationship with Andi. That’s when Marina told me about her parents. Marina’s father had always been a gentle, kind, honest man, whom Marina had always been able to rely on. By contrast, her mother was capricious, explosive, dishonest, and completely unreliable. Since childhood, she had flitted in and out of Marina’s life at whim, very much like Andi.

Like all children, Marina naturally felt a yearning to be close to her mother and secure her love, regardless of her mother’s bad behavior. Because she could not repair the relationship with her mother, a part of her had been eager to try again with a similar kind of person. But, as Freud observed one hundred years ago, a repetition compulsion is doomed to fail. The only solution is to accept the loss, which for Marina would mean grieving the loss of the relationship she had yearned for with Andi. As painful as it may be, it is ultimately less painful than living the same sad story over and over again.

Jacqueline too was repeating the wrong story. A twenty-seven-year-old veterinarian, she claimed she wanted a good relationship with a man, yet she kept drawing abusive men into her life. At the beginning, the man would always be charming, charismatic, and chivalrous. He would wine and dine Jacqueline at the finest restaurants and adorn her with expensive gifts from exclusive stores. But as she became more attached, a pattern consistently emerged: the men became controlling, then emotionally and sometimes physically abusive.

As we began to work together, I learned that Jacqueline’s father had been an alcoholic. When he came home late at night, he often beat his wife and children. Every time Jacqueline got involved with a similar kind of man, her unconscious mind was seeking to repair that important relationship with her damaged, abusive father.

For Jacqueline, breaking this cycle of abuse was one of her soul corrections. Fortunately, she was honest enough with herself to admit that this pattern was putting her life in danger. If she did not succeed in completing this soul correction, her next relationship could kill her.

By allowing herself to explore this pattern with me in therapy, Jacqueline began to see the pattern vividly. Since Jacqueline was a spiritual person, I encouraged her to pray for the help, guidance, strength, and courage to break this pattern in her life.

In her dreams, Jacqueline’s late, beloved grandmother appeared, telling her it would all be okay. The following week Jacqueline dreamed that a peaceful, loving man she had never seen before took her hand. We both agreed it was a good sign.

Dreams may have many meanings. One possible meaning of our dreams is to represent our wishes for the future. The presence of these two dreams told me that Jacqueline’s unconscious hopes, as represented by her dreams, were now in alignment with her conscious wishes. Prior to this, her unconscious hope was betraying her conscious wishes, which may be why she continually drew abusive men into her life. Jacqueline’s dreams evidenced an important step toward resolving her repetition compulsion.

The next part of our work involved Jacqueline finding her voice and beginning to take responsibility for the men she was drawing into her life. Jacqueline began to see that she was not a helpless victim here; this was not “happening to her.” She was creating it. That awareness allowed her to free herself from the victim mentality she had identified with for so long.

In the past, Jacqueline had unconsciously chosen men like her father because they felt familiar and exciting. She loved being wooed by them. The strength and charisma they appeared to possess was intoxicating. With every single one of them, there had been red flags warning her to turn back, but Jacqueline had closed her eyes.

Jacqueline and I talked about how her relationship with her abusive father had left her feeling unworthy of love. In order to take back the power she had given him to make her feel unworthy, she felt she needed to confront him.

Her father was now much older, weaker, and less volatile than he had been in her childhood. And now Jacqueline was an adult. But her father still seemed as scary and sinister as ever in her mind. So she needed courage to take this step.

The night before the confrontation, I had Jacqueline do an important soul visualization exercise. When she went to sleep, she would call on her father’s soul to meet her own soul. All she had to do was put forth this intention before she went to sleep, as if in a prayer. I told her to ask for whatever soul reconciliation needed to happen between her and her father’s souls to occur that evening, before they met the following day.

Anytime you ask for soul reconciliation, it is important to add “for the greatest good of all involved,” as opposed to specifying a particular outcome you want. If you say something like, “I want Dad to realize just what a jerk he was all my life, feel horrible about it, and finally apologize to me!” the request will not be coming from a good place, but from a place of pride and ego. Instead, asking for a soul reconciliation would go something like this: “Please allow my father and me to heal our relationship for the greatest good of all involved.”

By having her soul communicate with her father’s soul prior to the meeting, I believed the most difficult work would already have been done in the “upper worlds” when she saw her father the following day. All she would have to do was follow suit in this world. As above, so below.

The exercise itself was profoundly cathartic for Jacqueline. This was the first time she had done soul work of this nature. She was shocked by how powerful it was.

When Jacqueline showed up at her father’s home the following day, the very first thing he did was hug her! Jacqueline was shocked. Jacqueline’s father had never hugged her or any of her siblings. Then both she and her father began to cry.

From seemingly out of nowhere, her father began to apologize to Jacqueline for all the ways in which he had failed her. She stood there listening and crying, absolutely dumbfounded. It was the first heart-to-heart conversation Jacqueline and her father had ever had.

Hours later, Jacqueline left for home and slept better that night than she had in years. Within a year Jacqueline drew into her life a very different type of man, one whose energy matched that kind, gentle energy of the man in her dream.

Exercise: Soul Visualization and Reconciliation

As you lay in bed before you go to sleep tonight, visualize your day tomorrow from start to finish. Do you have any challenging upcoming meetings, discussions, or confrontations that may benefit from a soul reconciliation exercise?

If so, invite the soul of the person or people with whom you will have the challenging meeting to join you tonight. Speak to the soul of this person from your own soul: honestly and authentically.

Ask for a soul reconciliation between your soul and theirs. Put forth this intention, as if in a prayer. Ask for whatever outcome you would like to come from the meeting, and make sure to add to the end of your request “I request this outcome or an even better outcome for the greatest good of all involved.”

While it’s important to put forth your ideal intention for the meeting, the outcome may be something even greater than you can imagine or visualize, as occurred in the case of Jacqueline, so adding this last clause opens the gateway for some divine intervention.

As with Jacqueline, our current relationship struggles are the product of childhood wounds that will echo throughout our lives. In the practice of Imago Therapy, co-developed by marriage therapists Dr. Harville Hendrix and Helen LaKelly Hunt, the Latin word “imago” refers to the unconscious image of familiar love.2 That image can be a portal through which we can see both the wounds of childhood and our relationships as adults.

Our unconscious desire to repair the wounds of our childhood as a result of needs not met by our parents is to find a partner who can give us what our caretakers failed to provide. Whether our childhoods were happy or fraught with danger, our hearts dream of unconditional love. Each time we re-create an old wound, we hope for and expect a different outcome.

We seek to heal the wounds of our childhood by unconsciously re-creating the same wounds and triggering the same difficult emotions with our significant others in our adult lives. If our parents were overbearing, we may draw overbearing partners into our lives. Or else we may ourselves be overbearing to our partners. If our parents were neglectful or abusive, we may draw in abusive or neglectful partners, or ourselves be neglectful or abusive to our partners. If a parent abandoned us, we may repeat this pattern in our romantic relationships either by repeatedly abandoning our partners or living with a deep-rooted fear of abandonment.

In this way, how we are loved as children often impacts the way we are able to love ourselves and others as adults.

CULTIVATING SELF-LOVE

In our society, we often focus on beautifying ourselves on the outside by focusing on our bodies, hair, clothes, makeup, smiles, gestures, careers, achievements, partners, and homes. On the inside, we work to beautify ourselves through therapy, yoga, meditation, reading, poetry, art, and culture. So why does the self-hatred epidemic persist?

Part of the problem lies in our tendency to yearn for what we lack instead of being grateful for what is already in abundance. In reality, there is so much that is right in everybody’s life. Most of us have eyes to see, ears to hear, food to eat, a bed to sleep in, legs to walk, clean air to breathe, clean water to drink, among many other things. These are simple things we take for granted. Yet we are consumed by obsessions about what we lack.

At the same time, we often focus on the qualities in ourselves that we lack too. Every time we do that, it makes it harder to love ourselves and find the fulfillment we so desperately crave. Sadly, self-hatred is one of the most common issues my patients contend with. It is more than just an epidemic in therapy practices. It is a societal ill that has taken over our culture.

When I first met Diana, she was a successful model whose face had appeared on national magazine covers for years. With her six-foot-two height, confident smile, and the grace of a ballerina, she was a sight to behold as she crossed her never-ending legs in my Eames chair.

She asked me for help with a problem I hear often from my patients: “I cannot stop comparing myself to others!”

As a child, Diana had been constantly bullied for her height. Since her father was a star basketball player in college, she was destined to be tall. But Diana always bemoaned the fact that she was taller than all the boys and winced when her classmates called her “giraffe.” For years, she cried herself to sleep at night and dreaded going to school the next day.

Somewhere along the way she made the welcome transition from the ugly duckling to the beautiful swan that every sports team captain in high school wanted to date. By the time she graduated, she was voted “most likely to succeed.”

Still, Diana was plagued by the feeling that she was not beautiful enough. An innocent stroll down a city street turned into a series of slights and insults in her own thoughts. This woman had more fashionable clothing; that woman had bigger breasts, a more shapely figure, whiter teeth, more confidence. It went on year after year until Diana finally sought my help. Change occurs when the pain of staying the same begins to exceed the pain of changing oneself.

In our work together, we focused on finding out where Diana’s habit of constant self-comparison had originated. Diana’s mom, Janice, had the same habit. Janice felt she had to always look absolutely perfect. Not a day went by when she was not preoccupied with manicures, pedicures, Botox, breast enhancements, liposuction, chin lifts—anything to keep up with the competition. Thanks to her frequent visits to the plastic surgeon, Janice looked thirty when she was fifty. No one ever believed she was Diana’s mother.

Clearly Diana had adopted some of her mother’s attitude. She never felt beautiful enough. She always sought to “improve” her looks, focusing on perceived flaws. Her friends obsessed over beauty in similar ways, reinforcing and even magnifying her own self-criticism. In our sessions, we began to challenge the narratives Diana had created for herself around beauty, femininity, and perfection.

Over time, Diana began to realize how maladaptive and downright painful some of her deeply held beliefs had been. She started slowly pulling away from the so-called mean girls who had been posing as her friends. Instead, she befriended people who she did not feel were always comparing themselves to her. It was difficult at first to not fall back into the habitual behaviors and thought patterns Diana had known all her life. Through vigilance, courage, and determination, she repeatedly picked herself up when she would slip back into her old ways.

As she changed, Diana began to attract very different friends into her life. These friends seemed to have no need to be perfect all the time, or gossip behind each other’s backs. With a change of friends, she effectively found a support group for a change in her value system. Anytime she lapsed into self-criticism or perfectionism, her new friends laughed her out of it.

Although Diana can still fall into her old habits of self-comparison, it is no longer an obsession for her. Her new mantra is “I love and accept myself exactly as I am.”

Exercise: Identifying Self-Criticism

Sometimes we deceive ourselves into thinking that our self-critical thoughts and behaviors are helping us implement positive changes in our lives. But the result is often the opposite. The more we criticize ourselves, the more we keep ourselves stuck in our old patterns. Change is difficult to implement in a climate of self-hatred. Moreover, loving and accepting oneself fully and completely does not imply complacency and stagnation, as some people may fear. It does not mean that we don’t want to grow and change.

Quite the opposite is true. Usually, self-love and self-acceptance are necessary prerequisites for creating real and lasting changes in our lives. It is possible to love ourselves fully and completely exactly as we are, while at the same time work toward growing and evolving into the person we wish to become.

In this stream-of-consciousness writing exercise, we will begin to identify and release our self-criticism. In the exercises that follow, we will replace the self-criticism with self-love and self-compassion. Set your stopwatch and write for five minutes without stopping on the topic Identifying Self-Criticism. The questions below are included as guideposts.

Questions for Reflection

1. Identify three things about yourself of which you are critical.

2. When did you begin criticizing yourself for each of these three things?

3. Has this self-criticism produced any sustainable positive changes in your life?

4. How has this self-criticism affected your self-worth and ability to love and accept yourself?

5. How would your life be different if you replaced self-criticism with self-love?

PRACTICING SELF-CARE

For Diana, learning to stop comparing herself to others and surrounding herself with supportive (rather than competitive) friends was vital for cultivating self-love. For another patient, Bella, learning to love herself meant acknowledging that she was as important and worthy of care as all the other people in her life.

Everyone loved Bella. On top of being a devoted wife and mother of two boys, she also had a challenging career as a clinician and researcher in oncology at a prestigious medical center. Yet no matter how busy her life was, she unfailingly attended to the needs of others.

Bella was exceptionally good at taking care of all the people in her life, but not so good at taking care of herself. I have seen this pattern many times in my practice with physicians and other caregivers. For people in service professions, it is easy to forget that devoting your life to helping others should not mean sacrificing your own self-care.

After six months of feeling absolutely burned out and empty inside, Bella came to see me. “What would it mean to you to take radically good care of yourself?” I asked.

As soon as the words left my lips, Bella looked as startled as if I’d told her Martians had landed on Fifth Avenue. Amazingly enough, this woman who had devoted her life to finding myriad ways to take care of others had never thought about taking good care of herself.

In our subsequent sessions, we explored this question. Once she turned her attention to it, Bella had a host of ideas. After all, it was her specialty! Soon she was taking concrete steps to implement her answers: getting more rest every day, making time for herself, meditating, reducing her research responsibilities so she could focus on the clinical work she loved, and enjoying an occasional leisurely lunch with friends.

In the years since, Bella’s energy has changed in remarkable ways. When she was out of sync with her own implicit core values, caring only for others but neglecting herself, she was constantly feeling drained. By caring for herself, too, she removed the obstacle that was obstructing the power of her authentic self.

Today it’s possible to tell at a glance that Bella is no longer feeling tired and empty. Her life is every bit as busy as before, but now she is radiant.

Bella was always a kind, caring person. Yet it took concerted effort for her to truly care for herself the way she deserved. It is ironic that the most beautiful people among us often find it the most difficult to feel love and compassion for themselves.

For Bella, learning to love herself meant learning to care for herself as much as she cares for the others in her life. For Diana, it meant individuating from the beliefs, ideas, and self-perceptions held by her mother. We can only love others as much as we love ourselves. By cultivating our capacity for self-love, self-care, and self-compassion, we also enhance our ability to love others more fully and completely.

Exercise: Cultivating Self-Love through Mirror Work

For this exercise, you will need a mirror and a quiet place where you can feel safe and not be disturbed. This exercise, inspired by Louise Hay’s Mirror Work, will take one minute of time.3 I recommend that you do it at least three times per day for one week to achieve the full benefit.

Look into the mirror. Look straight into your eyes. Look straight into your soul. Now say the following affirmation:

I love you.

I approve of you.

I know you are doing the best you can.

You are perfect just as you are.

I love you.

Regularly repeating affirmations like the one above is a powerful way to change our deeply held unconscious core beliefs. Doing this exercise may feel uncomfortable at first. Negative thoughts may surface. It may feel false or even cheesy. These are all good signs, because it means that you’re going outside your comfort zone, and this is precisely where change begins. I recommend taking the time to journal and note whatever comes up for you in doing the mirror work and affirmations above.

ESTABLISHING HEALTHY BOUNDARIES

The final relationship soul correction we’ll discuss in this chapter is individuation and boundary setting. For any healthy relationship, it is important to know who you are and what you believe, separate from what others expect from you and would like you to believe. In relationships with friends, lovers, husbands, wives, loved ones, and even ourselves, we all make constant adjustments, drawing and redrawing the lines between “us” and “them.” This give and take in relationships is natural.

When Andrea came to see me, her soul correction was reflected in an unusual complaint: she felt too close to her daughter. All mothers and daughters have to learn to negotiate the delicate boundaries between them. On some level, they must ask themselves, “How close is too close? How far is too far?” Over the course of life, they delicately dance the dance to figure out the answers to these questions in hopes of finding a healthy balance that allows both of them to thrive and prosper.

When a mother and her daughter are each living authentic lives, it is much easier to know what appropriate boundaries feel like. In this case, Andrea had a very poor sense of who she was. Giving birth to Francine when she was only sixteen years old, Andrea didn’t have a chance to grow up herself before becoming a mother. Now, fourteen years later, Francine was a boy-crazy teenager while Andrea, at thirty years old, was a completely devoted, loving, and caring mother. Andrea’s own mother had been narcissistic and prone to alarming outbursts of emotion and blame. Andrea knew she wanted to rear Francine differently, but she didn’t know what to do, except to love her with all her might.

In her eagerness to make up for her own childhood, Andrea completely lost herself in her role as a mother. It was not uncommon for her to tell her friends that Francine was “her life.” If Francine stayed out late with friends, Andrea couldn’t sleep. When Francine failed a test or had a fight with a boyfriend, Andrea suffered more than Francine did. When anything went wrong in Francine’s life, Andrea would have a panic attack.

Andrea confessed that her attachment to her daughter had become so overwhelming that it plagued her day and night. The boundaries between them had merged until she could no longer tell where she left off and her daughter began. Both of them were caught in a pattern of overcare and codependency that was making them miserable. For Andrea, it had become truly incapacitating. Moreover, it became overwhelming for Francine to see how emotionally affected her mother was by her decisions. Francine would feel like she had to walk on eggshells around her mother and limit what she shared with her. Together Andrea and I began to work toward giving Andrea her life back.

Over time, Andrea began to gain insight into her codependent relationship with her daughter. But insight alone is not always curative. For some patients, insight into their self-sabotaging patterns is indeed the catalyst for making different choices and meaningfully changing their lives. For others, however, insight is just the first step to finally liberating themselves from the chains that bind them.

For Andrea, insight led to curiosity: if her way of doing things all these years wasn’t working, what other choices did she have? This important question highlighted Andrea’s recognition that she did indeed have a choice in how she behaved with her daughter. She was not destined to repeat the same self-sabotaging pattern the rest of her life.

Andrea and I identified female role models in her life who have healthy boundaries with their daughters. Andrea began to study their behavior like an anthropologist: What did they do differently? How did they respond when their child was upset? How did they set healthy and appropriate boundaries with their child in times of stress? After studying some of the behaviors of her role models, Andrea began to try some of their behaviors on for size. She started limiting her phone calls to Francine to once daily (whereas in the past they sometimes spoke four or five times a day). She also stopped asking Francine quite as many questions about her personal life. These behavioral changes were excruciatingly difficult for Andrea to make, and it took many iterations of trial and error for them to stick.

As I often tell patients, changing yourself is the most difficult thing you will ever do. But Andrea persevered and ultimately was successful. By giving Francine some more space, Andrea was able to create more space in her own life as well. The result of Andrea’s boundary setting with her daughter was a healthier relationship that was still loving, supportive, and very close yet no longer codependent.

For Kimberly and her mother, Donna, the question was the same—how close is too close?—but the conflict manifested in a very different way. Kimberly was a seventeen-year-old high school student with a history of anorexia. Her father, Clarke, was a writer and stay-at-home dad, while her mother, Donna, was an investment banker and the family’s primary breadwinner. Clarke was a kind and caring man, always engaged and attentive, while Donna was more emotionally aloof, always keeping her distance.

Donna, too, had a history of anorexia. Between them, Kimberly and Donna developed a very strange, destructive pattern, where only one of them would be anorexic at a time. Kimberly would starve herself for months, avoiding food altogether or forcing herself to throw up, until she was dangerously pale and sick. She would urgently seek out medical help, to her mother’s relief. And then, just as Kimberly’s anorexia started to improve, Donna’s anorexia would worsen. And so it went, around and around. Neither one of them admitted to being aware of it, but the pattern was obvious from the medical records alone.

Since Donna’s anorexia was more serious, she was often hospitalized and required the use of feeding tubes. She only began to recover as Kimberly started to show the signs of the disorder herself. Although they never spoke of it, Kimberly gradually learned that she needed to stay sick in order to keep her mother alive. If she ever got healthy enough to let go of her eating disorder, she unconsciously believed her mother might die!

In this case, as in many others, a repetition compulsion was passed on from one generation to the next. Anorexia and emergency trips to the hospital were only the external signs of the compulsion. Deeper still was a massive degree of self-loathing that was nearly impossible to shake as long as Kimberly believed her mother’s life depended on Kimberly being sick.

Only by individuating from her mother was Kimberly able to extricate herself from the destructive codependency that she and her mother had unconsciously cocreated. Kimberly’s anorexia began to improve only once she went away to college, several states away from her mother.

Without a solid, intact sense of self, it is difficult to know where your self ends and where another self begins. A clear sense of self enables you to set healthy boundaries in how you treat yourself. These often manifest as self-care activities surrounding sleep, food, exercise, hygiene, alone time, and other things that one needs to be healthy and feel good. When you set boundaries in how you take care of yourself, it becomes easier to set healthy external boundaries with the important people in your life. Without a clear sense of your authentic self or internal boundaries, it is difficult to set boundaries with the people with whom you are in a relationship.

Setting healthy boundaries with the people we love can bring us closer to who we really are by clearing away old beliefs and patterns that no longer serve us. Moreover, healthy boundaries enable us to get closer to others because, as the old adage says, “good fences make good neighbors.”

Exercise: Self-Care and Healthy Boundaries

For this stream-of-consciousness writing exercise, set your stopwatch to five minutes and write without stopping, beginning with the first prompt and working through as many as the time allows. Do not censor any thoughts that come to mind—just keep writing! If you find yourself wanting to write for more than five minutes, continue to do so until you feel like you have written all that you want to say. Alternately, if you’d like to focus on just one prompt during the five minutes and do this exercise in multiple sittings, that’s fine, too. You can revisit this whole exercise as often as you’d like and look across your writing from various sittings to see if repetitions, patterns, or contrasts emerge.

Questions for Reflection

1. In what situations do you find it difficult to say no? Why?

2. How do you feel when you say no to somebody who wants something from you?

3. In what ways do you take good care of yourself?

4. In what ways do you not take good care of yourself?

5. In what situations would saying no enable you to take better care of yourself?

YOU DESERVE LOVE

Countless soul corrections are possible in relationships with others. My patients often amaze me with their incredible resilience as they go through these soul corrections, trusting that their breakthroughs will improve their relationships on every level.

As you can see, the process of soul correction begins with building a loving, supportive relationship with yourself. Only then can you draw loving, supportive people into your life, whether they are friends, family, soulmates, partners, or colleagues. As the Buddha said:

You can search throughout the entire universe for someone who is more deserving of your love and affection than you are yourself, and that person is not to be found anywhere. You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.4

Cultivating self-love involves identifying the ways in which you are lacking these qualities, offering yourself forgiveness, and learning new ways of living in alignment with self-compassion. This entails listening to yourself, getting in touch with your deepest desires, and setting good boundaries with the people in your life. And finally, it entails living your life from a space of love whenever possible. To echo the words of Mother Teresa, “It is not how much we do, but how much love we put into doing. It is not how much we give, but how much love we put into giving.”

Living a fulfilled, authentic life from a place of love does not involve perfection. We will all fall short at times, especially when it comes to acting in the service of ourselves. For this reason, I end this chapter with an adaptation of a beautiful exercise in self-forgiveness from Jack Kornfield’s The Wise Heart.5

Exercise: Offering Forgiveness to Yourself

To begin this exercise, find a comfortable place where you can sit quietly for the next five to ten minutes. Recite the following to yourself:

There are many ways that I have hurt myself and let myself down over the years. I have acted against myself, sabotaged myself, and withheld love from myself many times through thought, word, and deed, knowingly and unknowingly.

As you do this, focus on your breath and feel your heart energy. One by one, picture the ways in which you have let yourself down over the years. Feel the feelings and pain that these experiences have caused you. Realize now that you can release each of these burdens, one by one, as you forgive yourself. Extend forgiveness in saying the following:

For the ways I have let myself down through action or inaction, out of weakness, fear, or confusion, I now extend to myself complete and total love and forgiveness. I forgive myself. I forgive myself. I forgive myself.