Losing Your Self in Your Relationship

The true purpose of any healthy relationship is to become more of Who You Really Are. Through providing a reflection of different aspects of your Self, your mate serves to facilitate your process of developing yourself to a greater degree. Sometimes, your coming together serves as a reminder of Who You Are - sometimes it becomes your Wake Up Call!

In all cases, you strive to complete yourself through your being dynamically and romantically involved with another. Essentially, you are being provided with the opportunity to "find your Self" as you grow in love with your partner.

Why then are so many women doing the opposite, and rather than becoming, they're actually losing themselves in their unions with men? Why would any woman feel that her total self-denial would lead to her greatest happiness?

What is the seed that gets planted in a woman's mind that allows her to go down this dead-end path? What takes place in a woman's psyche that informs her of this as a viable choice? Is this what women really want? Is it even what men really want?

I believe the origin of this belief system is in our conditioning. We learn early on, through our parents, our peers, our religions, and society at large, that "Woman is here to serve man." Sometimes, this message appears fully in its subservient splendor. Sometimes, it's subtle and appears to be just about taking care of the man you love.

Either way, it becomes almost a natural tendency for women to place themselves in a role of caretaker - for their children, for their friends, and for their mate. In this manner of giving of yourself to that which you view as more important than you are, you slowly but surely begin to lose your Self.

You lose who you truly are - to the process, and to the relationship, and to the person you're immersing yourself in. Instead of becoming part of a greater whole by merging in a healthy manner, you're systematically negating yourself out of existence. Lost in your relationship, lost in your man, lost to yourself, lost to your essence.

You begin to live your life only for others without any gain to yourself. By gain, I mean growth and evolvement. When you are not growing, you become stagnant and stuck in a slow dying and decaying process.

It may take a while before you recognize the signs of your deterioration, but notice if there's a moment during your day where you give yourself a time-out. Do you commit yourself to stop and think about you, independent of all others? Do you even know what this means any more?

The truth is, if you are operating in this lost mode, nobody who truly cares about you is benefiting in the long-term. They may be getting their immediate needs met, but keep this in mind - while you are lost in them, they don't actually have YOU!

In Loving Light,
Dr. Pamela