Recently, I was working with a new client who found me on Google, so we had no history, even via knowing someone in common, to base our foundation on. As I went through the weirdness of working with him for the first time, I started bringing through info from his Guides. His greatest struggle in his life at this point was his marriage. He thought the relationship was fine because she always said it was. His wife smiled a lot and seemed happy to everyone around and she functioned the same way she always had as long as they had been together, so all seemed well. Sounds perfectly reasonable.
Except, his wife had, at some point, decided she wasn’t happy, and started talking crap about him to her friends and family, but never thought to bring him into the conversation. So, that’s a problem.
Beyond this, she had always been a very independent woman; loving, giving, compassionate, people-pleasing, incredibly responsible, worrying about everyone and everything, and taking everyone’s problems on like they were her own.
Does anybody else see what’s happening here? Yeah, me too.
This woman was raised in a house where love was highly conditional. You had to earn it, deserve it, and work for it. So, she developed a coping mechanism of working to “fix” everyone in her world. She was always worried about someone and doing everything humanly possible to take care of their problems. She is a cold medicine at 2 am at your door kind of person, which is great when you have a short list of people you’d do that for, but not necessarily the healthiest model as a rule.
As time and life have gone on, he mistook her continuing on in her way of life to mean everything was fine. He didn’t work to save her from herself, because there was no question she needed saving. Sure, there were conversations about how she took everyone’s issues on and maybe she didn’t need to do that, and talks about focusing on herself and what she needed instead of what everyone else in her life wanted her to do. It’s the typical “I care about you” conversation. But she was committed to being who she had always been, a caretaker and a fixer…someone with an internal program that told them they needed to earn being loved.
Then, something in the system broke. From his Spirit Guide’s perspective, she got so overloaded with fixing and solving everybody in her life, someone had to get kicked off the island. And, the least needy person went first – her husband.
His Guides gave us images of situations and vantage points and he sat back in awe.
“I would never believe this was possible if I wasn’t sitting here listening to it – you’re spot on”.
Yeah, well, your Spirit knows.
As we talked, his Guides spoke about how in her coping mechanism (being taught that she had to earn love by doing and being everything for everyone else) she had never really let him into their relationship. Before their kids, he was someone for her to focus on and help along in his life, his career, building a life that looked good, and of course, he loved her attention. As kids, careers, bigger houses, friends, family (the list goes on and on) got to be bigger and bigger, her capacity to control (I use this word on purpose) it all fell short and in her internal fear of not being able to be everything, she became resentful. She went after the person her fear mind could blame it on the easiest, without alienating all the people who depended on her to be everything to them. The people who fed her old mechanism.
In all of this, there was never any real room for him in their relationship, because inside herself she was always keeping the wolves at bay, she was functioning in her old habits of seeing the world as a place she needed to keep up or get left behind. He was just a way for her to keep doing her caretaking/fixing and have it look normal and happy until she felt herself drowning in the ocean of coping, and he was the weight that was safest to get rid of.
An hour later, he looked a bit shell-shocked, yet excited. “I can’t wait to share this with my wife! I feel like there is so much here we can use to get better together,” his voice trailed off, “I just hope it’s not too late”.
I hope so too.
This story doesn’t have an ending yet. I would love to report they are back on track as a couple, operating with greater clarity and awareness of what is happening on deeper levels and really letting themselves connect to their relationship. I don’t know at this point. It’s all very, very new for them.
What I trust is that things always work out the way they need to, and we all need to practice building awareness of who we are in our habitual/coping stories. These are the mechanisms that develop the window we walk through our world looking through. Our coping mechanisms develop our beliefs, our values, our sense of what is right and wrong, good and bad, everything from who we walk next to, to how we spend our money, what we do for a living, and how we care for ourselves. Everything in our life is there because of how we were taught to see the world. Our awareness of whether that lens is working for us, or not, is paramount.
Be willing to look behind the lens at yourself. Have the courage to ask the questions of why you do what you do the way you do it. Then, ask yourself if it is working as well for you as you would like. It is not about being perfect, it’s about truly being in your life, instead of just habitually moving through it.
Be mindful, and remember to leave the door open.
Forever the journey, Anne