If You Want To Be A Winner In Love, Be An Emotional Recycler! Part 2

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If You Want To Be A Winner In Love, Be An Emotional Recycler! Part 2

This show is for everyone, not just for the love addicts out there. If you want to have a healthy relationship, whether you are in or out of one, you will profit from this show as it will change the way you relate with anybody around you. We’ll be talking about reason number two of why it is so vital to overcome love addiction. First and foremost, if love addiction runs your life, it means that you are not. It means that love addiction stands in the way of a lifetime of happiness. Let me tell you that once your life is no longer controlled by love addiction, the level of happiness will be so much higher!

If Love Addiction runs our life, it means that we are not! Click To Tweet

If I look at the quality of my life compared to when I was still an addict, now I smile for no reason very often and I receive gift after gift from life. I’m able to fully focus on my projects, my life and myself instead of running after love. Love shows up in so many different ways that often surprise me. It’s a totally different quality of life. There’s so much more emotional freedom, so much more energy to create, to make things happen and to contribute instead of losing myself in someone else again. Apart from that, there are other important reasons why it is so vital to overcome love addiction. These reasons not only concern us as an individual but they concern the world, the people in our life and our surrounding. By overcoming love addiction, we contribute to a much healthier world on so many levels.

Let’s look at reason number two why we have to overcome love addiction. If you overcome love addiction and you want to create more peace and love in your relationships, in your life and the world in general, you are healing yourself. Therewith, you can help others heal as well, but we have to do that work on ourselves first. Some people bypass that step and go directly into trying to heal others, which only shows that they still live in denial, the very nature of love addiction. For that reason, we cannot even blame them as they are most probably not aware of what they’re doing. Once you’ve done your work to a fair amount, you can become what I call an emotional recycler, a space holder and therewith create more union connection and happiness. An emotional recycler has the ability to feel instead of acting out and as an emotional recycler, we can recycle someone else’s act out back into love and compassion.

Emotional Recycler: Once we heal ourself, we can help others heal too!

As an emotional recycler, you inhabit the ability to hold space for someone else’s act out. This does in no way mean that you repress your feelings. You will experience painful feelings when someone acts out on you, attacks you and hurts you, but you choose to take responsibility and feel what gets triggered in you instead of reacting out. I talked about how people who have been hurt in the past often pass on their hurt instead of feeling the pain they actually carry inside of themselves. I also want to remind you that acting out is often in an involuntary process. We don’t mean to pass on the pain or react out on someone else, but because we are deeply hurt ourselves, everything that comes on top will just spill over. When we, human beings, perceive a threat of losing love by feeling rejected or abandoned, we go into fight or flight mode and that happens in our brain stem that is guided by instinct. Meaning, it happens like when you step on a dog’s tail, he might bite you even though he usually is the most loving puppy.

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If you want more on getting the best out of your life and relationships, check out our new brand The Royal Path where you find everything about personal growth, deep healing and emotional liberation.

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Let’s first look at why emotional recyclers are able to actually hold space instead of involuntarily act out. For one, they have felt enough of their own pain so they are no longer triggered so quickly and intensely that would otherwise make them react out. Number two, they are able to own and take responsibility for what might get triggered in them and consciously decide to go feel instead of reacting out. Number three, they truly understand that we need to help each other heal and they want to be of service to others in order to help heal the world one human at a time. Number four, they are able to distinguish reality from old feelings and pain. What does that mean? When we get triggered, there are always two components. The reality of a situation, in other words, what is true in a situation and there is another part which is simply feelings that get triggered. In other words, the trigger we experience has one part that is real. Yes, someone is hurting us. Something that is happening is not right and we want to respond to that with awareness. After all, we will never tolerate wrong or even abusive behavior.

We can help each other heal when we hold space for someone else’s act-out instead of reacting out. Click To Tweet

That is the neutral part of the situation. However, every trigger is also connected to feelings and these feelings might be old feelings that don’t even belong to the situation that’s happening and that part is not neutral. If we react from a non-neutral part, it always means chaos. It’s like a memory of an old feeling. If that old feeling is a big feeling, meaning it’s a feeling that you have felt repeatedly in your childhood then these feelings can make things seem pretty real. When that happens, the neutrality of our reaction will be stained with these feelings, and that is when we overreact. When we make a drama, instead of dealing with a trigger in a mature way, that’s when we react out unconsciously instead of responding to a situation with awareness. If we want to respond with awareness instead of reacting out, we have to feel the feelings that get triggered before responding. By feeling these feelings, we learned to distinguish what is what, what is real and true, and what are just feelings that got triggered in a situation. If we do that, we ensure neutrality in our response. Meaning we respond to the degree that is real and adequate and don’t overreact.

Distinguishing feelings from reality in a situation allows us to not over react in our response.

I want to make an example. Your partner is flirting online with a girl. They message each other and he tells her she’s so beautiful and that if he was not in a relationship, he would want to go out with her. Maybe there’s even some light sexting going on. Feeling your fear’s coming up, you automatically log into his account because you feel something is off here and you’re reading the texts. You get massively triggered, you feel disrespected. You’re afraid that he might leave you. You might think that he likes her more or he fancies her more. You might think that you’re not good enough and so on. When this happens, we should tell our partner that this is an unacceptable behavior and that you won’t tolerate that. You can show you’re hurt and your pain vulnerably, but what happens often instead is that it creates major drama. Voices become loud and we engage in very destructive behavior by making them wrong, shaming them, punishing them or screaming at them.

That is all acting out. It’s not responding with awareness. Why? Because a part of the feelings that you feel might also belong to older feelings that are already imprinted in your system and they get triggered. No woman that is in her power that knows her worth, that stands grounded and loves herself would ever doubt herself. She would say to her guy, “You doing this is not how I imagine our relationship to be. I did certainly not sign up to that. I’m taking some time to figure out how I think and feel about this.” Once she did that, she’ll take the necessary consequences to keep her standards or she would say, “I’m not interested in being with a guy that is secretly having an online affair with another woman. I respect and value myself too much for that.” She wouldn’t be afraid to be alone, to leave, to make her point, to communicate her standards because she knows her worth.

No woman that knows her worth and stands grounded would ever doubt herself. Click To Tweet

Because of our deep-rooted feelings of not being good enough and the fears of abandonment kicking in, we’re in a situation where love is at threat. We behave impulsively and involuntarily. If you went into your room with all of your feelings and you dive into that fear and pain fully and as long as you need to, your system will come down and relax. You can go back and respond with awareness. That is the difference. For some of us, we can do that on our own or with some help and I’ll soon be releasing something for you that will help you with this. For some, that pain that will get triggered will go deeper and they are best served to contact a therapist to work through it.

As long as we have much residual pain but are unaware of it, we cannot be neutral and we cannot respond with awareness. The moment you realize that you are being triggered and you deal with the triggers before you respond, you have a great chance to turn around every act out back into love. That is why I call it emotional recycling. Even enemies can become best friends when applying this concept. We can help each other heal when we hold space for someone else’s act out instead of reacting out. It demands a high level of awareness and a fierce courage and commitment to take full responsibility. Be aware that if someone acts out on you, it has hardly ever much to do with you. It’s them being unable to feel the pain beneath their act out.

What would they have to feel if they did not act out? If you start to understand that and you want to be of true service to your partner and others, you’ll recycle their pain through you taking responsibility for your pain. Maybe at first, you don’t always want to give it to that person. That has maybe more to do with you not wanting to give it and with the urge of having balance in giving and receiving or with pride and ego. Let me tell you something, be the bigger person. Being the bigger person will help you evolve. That is a choice. When someone acts out on me and I’m aware in the very moment, which is mostly the case but not always, then I go into, “How can I serve this person? Clearly, she is in pain.” That allows me to hold space for that person, not react to her and then go to my feelings later.

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If you want more on getting the best out of your life and relationships, check out our new brand The Royal Path where you find everything about personal growth, deep healing and emotional liberation.

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The problem is that we all carry a lot of anger and pain inside of us. When an act out happens to us, it is so tempting to react out. We can get rid of all that pent-up anger inside of us. We also have a lot of feelings around not having been treated fairly at some point in life. We secretly and subconsciously walk around with this, ” I’m going to give it back to you,” attitude. How many times has a child experienced hopelessness, being naturally in a subordinate position to his caregivers because it is not being heard, respected and validated in its feelings, but forced to just follow what the caregiver orders them to do?

If you do respond with more anger and more hate, realize that it will only feel good for a moment. The fact that you just created more separation will remain. Do you want to get rid of your anger? Great. Use the trigger and go to your room. Imagine the person is there and get all of your anger out. It will do it. Trust me. Whether you do it in front of him or her or not doesn’t matter. The thing that matters is that you do get it out. Once we make the decision to feel instead of acting out, it can be quite difficult in the beginning. The reason for that is that you still have quite an amount of unresolved feelings inside of yourself. This will not necessarily allow you at the moment that someone acts out on you to be the bigger person. Why? Because your pain is still too big and it will speak for itself. You reacting out will be an involuntary act in the beginning. It’s impulsive. You have almost no control over it.

Only once you have felt enough of your pent-up pain and anger, it will become easier and easier to not be so triggered anymore. That is when you will start being able to hold space for someone else’s act out. In a relationship that comes very handy. Then awareness will be bigger than the compulsive act outs and with awareness always comes choice! Through holding space for other people’s act outs, the act out does not have anywhere to go and it bounces right back to the initiator. This will make the person having to deal with their feelings instead of passing them on and therewith missing a chance to heal something within themselves. If an act out is not being received, it has to go back to where it came from. This in itself has a profound effect on the initiator and will change the dynamic immediately. I’m not talking about the idea that we should hold space for someone that acts out violently or even physically on us. In this case, we get away as fast as we can and make sure that we’re safe.

Be the bigger person - it will help you grow more. Click To Tweet

We rather discuss the subtler emotional act out such as, for example, passive-aggressive behavior, gossiping, belittling, acting out anger or frustrations. These subtler act outs are what destroys relationships because you start resenting each other and mostly we’re not aware of it. The resentment goes so deep that we are already past any resolution. Once you have felt enough of your pain, you will no longer be triggered so easily and you will no longer act out on the level that constantly hurts other people. Therewith, it creates more destruction and disconnection. When you no longer act out unconsciously, you can be of real service for others.

To me, being of service gives me great fulfillment, it makes me happy. I feel very connected and I feel love when I get to do something for someone else that clearly serves and helps them because being of service is a life lived with dignity, integrity, and compassion. It is a must-have in this age and time. Humans have been evolving ever since their beginning of existence. We kept evolving not only physically but also our brain kept evolving. Our ability to be aware keeps evolving and so on. To me and I say this clearly, our next step in evolution is to be a fully alive feeling being that is able to own and express their feelings, be vulnerable and stand in their truth.

From that place, we allow everyone else to do the same. I will soon be offering a membership site where people who want to feel instead of act out and work through love addiction can sign up. Where you learn what it means to truly feel instead of acting out. Where you can ask questions and be supported by others. Not that I am much into gurus, but Ram Dass said it perfectly, “We’re all just walking each other home.” Tune into our next episode as I’ll be speaking about the third reason why we have to overcome love addiction. Speak to you then!

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If you want more on getting the best out of your life and relationships, check out our new brand The Royal Path where you find everything about personal growth, deep healing and emotional liberation.

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Important Links:

• Addicted to Love Podcast on iTunes
• Get our 30 days no contact survival guide here
• Our Retreats
• The Royal Path
• Free ebook How to heal for good with 0% spiritual bypassing