You cannot be in relationship with someone else if you are not in correct relationship with yourself. Without emotional clarity, there is no bridge to cross, and you will find yourself feeling lonely even if you spend all day with your partner. The solution is knowing and accepting yourself first, with all of your warts and of course the beauty too.
In marriage counseling and couples counseling I find that most people coming through my office don’t know what they are feeling. Rage, or anger is the easiest emotion to experience, but it is never the primary feeling. Anger is always a secondary affect to hurt, shame or anxiety. Before a couple can be intimate with each other, they first need to learn how to be intimate with themselves. You can’t share your feelings with your significant other if you don’t even know what you are feeling. Couples counseling from this therapist’s perspective is about learning how to be in right relationship with yourself first, so that you can then invite the other into your emotional world.
When you lack clarity around your emotional experience, hurt or anxiety typically get fused with anger. Instead of expressing the primary and more vulnerable emotion, couples turn to anger and rage. Anger is the ultimate separator. When one comes at another from a place of anger, what they are doing is unconsciously and often unwittingly seeking to push the other away. When you are hurt, you seek separation in an attempt to protect yourself. Unfortunately, pushing the other away is usually the last thing we want to do in a relationship.
One of the unique aspects of being human is that we have the capacity to think about thinking, to be conscious about consciousness. No other species has the capacity. Our philosophies and art are created out of this unique aspect of being human. This quality can also help us to begin to separate from our emotional worlds in order to see which parts of us are triggered in any given situation. By developing this perspective, we can begin to have an inner dialogue with parts of us that are typically younger, and in many cases, running the show in our relationships.