Painful relationships scream for attention. They challenge us to figure out the meaning. Do we work things through? Is that possible? Do we let them go even though there's been weeks, months, years of familiarity? Peering into darkness, into what isn't known and what isn't guaranteed, carries a certain dread of being wrong. But, we need to consider that doing nothing, purposelessly lingering in misery, definitely counts as one of the worst and most assured ways of going down a psychic dead end and waking up with a blistering emotional headache.
Old mystics purported that we only love God to the degree that we love the person we love least. Translated out of old religious speak, we might consider that truth to self urges us to take stock of what makes sense and what does not regarding the people in our life. A capacity to reach understanding hallmarks keeper relationships. If we can't, over time, reach a meeting of mind and hearts, then maybe it's time to move on.
Moving on from relationships that don't work open up potentials for new avenues of relational growth. "I was scared to death to admit that I'd been stuck for a long time. My dreams showed me as a teenager in high school, going from one emotional drama with this man to another. I knew this was happening because the relationship couldn't be unstuck. Psychologically, it was a high school crush relationship. My psyche screamed with pain." This highly conscious woman had been blindsided by emotional need, but eventually said good-bye to a go-nowhere relationship and drew a deep emotional breath, opened her mind, and trusted that just as her psyche screamed in pain it would also guide her into relational meaning.
Painful relationships indeed scream for attention; however, the good news also rings through loud and clear that where there has been darkness there is also potential transformation in the offing! In the words of William James, the father of American depth psychology, "There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision." So, the message of the day has to do with listening to life's whispers so that it needn't scream.
