“In our disease defense system we build up huge walls to protect ourselves and then – as soon as we meet someone who will help us to repeat our patterns of abuse, abandonment, betrayal, and/or deprivation – we lower the drawbridge and invite them in. We, in our Codependence, have radar systems which cause us to be attracted to, and attract to us, the people, who for us personally, are exactly the most untrustworthy (or unavailable or smothering or abusive or whatever we need to repeat our patterns) individuals – exactly the ones who will “push our buttons.”
This happens because those people feel familiar. Unfortunately in childhood the people whom we trusted the most – were the most familiar – hurt us the most. So the effect is that we keep repeating our patterns and being given the reminder that it is not safe to trust ourselves or other people .
Once we begin healing we can see that the Truth is that it is not safe to trust as long as we are reacting out of the emotional wounds and attitudes of our childhoods. Once we start Recovering, then we can begin to see that on a Spiritual level these repeating behavior patterns are opportunities to heal the childhood wounds.”
“I spent most of my life being the victim of my own thoughts, my own emotions, my own behaviors. I was consistently picking untrustworthy people to trust and unavailable people to love. I could not trust my own emotions because I was incapable of being honest with myself emotionally – which made me incapable of Truly being honest on any level.”

Codependency is an incredibly insidious, treacherous dis-ease. It is a compulsively reactive condition in which our ego programming from childhood dictates how we live our lives today. As long as we are not in recovery from our codependency, we are powerless to make clear choices in discerning rather someone we are attracted to is a available for a healthy relationship – we are in fact, doomed to keep repeating patterns.
Emotionally we are drawn to people who feel familiar on an energetic level. That is, people who, on an emotional vibrational level, resonate with us as being familiar. It feels to us as if we have a strong connection to those people. In other words, we have an inner radar system that causes us to be attracted to people who resonate vibrationally in a way that is familiar on an emotionally intimate level. We are attracted to people whose inner emotional dynamic is similar to our most powerful and earliest experience of emotional intimacy and love – our parents.
No matter how much we are making an effort on a conscious level to not pick anyone like our parents, energetically we feel a strong attraction to people whose inner emotional dynamic is similar to our first experience of love. It was very important for me to get aware of the reality that if I met someone who felt like my soul mate, I had better watch out. Those are exactly the people who will fit my patterns – recreate my wounding.
It was very important for me to recognize the power of this type of attraction. And also to realize, tht on a Spiritual level, these people were teachers who were in my life to help me get in touch with my childhood wounds. It was vital for me to start being aware that if I met someone who felt like my soul mate it did not mean we were going to live happily ever after. What it meant was that I was being given another wonderful, and painful, opportunity for growth.
Becoming conscious of these emotional energetic dynamics was a very important part of owning my power. My power to make choices, to accept consequences, to take responsibility for my choices and consequences – and to not buy into the belief that I was being victimized by the other person, or my own defectiveness.
Recognizing unavailability in the other person does not mean that I have to let go of the relationship – at least not immediately, it could be something I will decide to do eventually.
What is so important, is to let go of focusing on that person as the cause of, or solution to, my problems. As long as we are focusing on the other person and buying into the illusion that if we just: work a little harder; lose some more weight; make some more money; do and/or say the right things; whatever; that person will change and be everything we want them to be.
Codependents focus on others to keep from looking at self. We need to let go of focusing on the other person and start focusing inside to understand what is happening. Our adult patterns, the people we have been in relationship with, are symptoms – effects of our childhood wounding. We cannot solve a problem without looking at the cause. Focusing on symptoms (which our society is famous for: war on drugs; war on poverty: etc.) will not heal the cause.
The reason that we get involved with people who are unavailable, is because we are unavailable. We are attracted to people who feel familiar because on some level we are still trying to prove our worth by earning the Love and respect of our unavailable parents. We think we are going to rescue the other person which will prove our worth – or that we need them to rescue us because of our lack of worth. The princess will kiss me and turn me from a frog into a prince, the prince will rescue me and take me to live in the castle, syndrome.
We need to own our own worth – our own “Prince or Princess” ness – before we can be available for a healthy relationship with some one who has owned their own worth.
It is not possible to love someone enough to get them to stop hating, and being unavailable, to them self. We need to let go of that delusion. We need to focus on healing our self – on understanding and healing the emotional wounds that have driven us to pick people who could not give us what we want emotionally. We need to develop some healthy emotional intimacy with ourselves before we are capable of being available for a healthy relationships with someone who is also available.

http://joy2meu.com/letting_go.html

Postscript from Nina:

We need to use that which comes up to heal – no longer shutting out what we feel, which is what has been keeping us from healing, but having the courage to embrace the pain, move through it, and heal.

Love, intimate personal love, brings to the surface all that from which we have been running, every single thing we have been keeping in the closets of our heart.

We have the choice, every time, to keep on running, to hide and turn our backs on these gifts, mistaking their wrapping for their contents, or to turn back and embrace our open wounds. We can choose to use these times of healing as the ground work for the steps to our greater selves, to greater understanding and compassion, and to our Christ nature.
We make the error of seeing our partners as the be all and end all since they bring with them such a radiant reflection of our most beautiful facets – yet they are but an extension of our Selves, bringers of great tidings, the tidings that love is all there is, and ever will be.

We can choose to see any sign of upheaval in our relationship as another chance to heal, or we can choose to focus on it as a negative occurrence, from which we must run.

It must be said here of course that there truly are relationships that cannot be changed, and at times like these we may need to consider the possibility that the lesson has been learned, and that we need to release the teacher.

Our obsession with stability and our need for constant reassurance comes from a place of lack, from a place of fear, and this is the reason why we tend to water a tree long after it has stopped bearing any fruit. If we are able to remember, once again, that we create our reality and our abundance, that we create our relationships as vehicles towards our expansion, we will be able to let go.

© Nina Ferrell 2009

Our function is to transform our relationships, not to fix them. We work only on ourselves, not the other person. When we are willing to play our relationship games by new rules, then they will be transformed. The new rules begin with, “what happened yesterday is irrelevant.” If we insist that we know how a person will behave tomorrow because we know how they behaved yesterday, we are insisting that our reality not change. The reason that people have to die and be reborn is because they refuse to change how they see other people. We are not looking at another person when we look at our partner. We are looking in a mirror. When we change our mind we change our relationships. There are no victims, there are no abusers, there are only mirrors.

When we refuse to repeat old patterns, when we refuse to attack or defend, when we would rather be happy than right, then other people change. Our relationships transform. If we have been true to our understanding of these principles of self creation, then we will not have to make an ego based decision to continue a relationship or dissolve it. That will take care of itself. The relationship will transform or disappear. The universe always moves us right along to the next experience when we have learned what the last one had to teach. Some folks are actually afraid to attempt a healing of their primary relationship because they think that if it were healed then they wouldn’t have an excuse to get out of it. They need someone to blame for the relationship breaking up. In fact, before incarnating, we make agreements with many individuals to resolve old karmic hang ups, or simply to learn more about self empowerment through our relationship with them. We may have a strong intuitive insight that this is not the person we contracted with to be a life-long partner. But we don’t need the excuse of a bad relationship in order to move on to our next assignment. We have an imperative to heal every relationship. Remember the illusion!

It is not someone else I am healing. It is not a relationship that I am healing. It is me I am healing! If I leave any of my relationships unhealed when I exit this lifetime, I will probably choose to come back and be in relationship with those same people again. Ouch. I heal others and my relationships not because they deserve it but because I deserve it.It may not be possible to heal past relationships face to face. It makes no difference if an old relationship partner is dead or living in another part of the world. Having the person to “talk it out with” may be the best way sometimes, but it is not the only way. The healing is for yourself anyway. Relationship healing can be done very expediently while sitting in your meditation chair all alone. Use mental imagery to “talk” to the other person. Ask forgiveness. Offer understanding. Remember that all anger which you may remember from days gone by was only a call for love.