Breaking an emotional connection

Relationships change. We need relationships in order for us to grow and learn. Usually a relationship fulfils some kind of need, be it physical, emotional, material, financial. When your needs are being fulfilled you develop some kind of an attachment to the person or thing that is fulfilling that need. When we outgrow the need, the relationship changes. We tend to attract those who in some way resonate with our emotional patterns, even as we feel attracted to those whose emotional patterns touch or trigger something or some response within us.

An emotional attachment to a person or thing would mean that the relationship was fulfilling an emotional need within you. You use that person or object as a means to connect to some emotion or belief you feel or have inside you. Read that over again and realize that the emotion arises from within you. Be it the emotion of being loved or abused, feeling secure or insecure, free or not free, tied down, happy or sad, criticized or cherished, victimised, controlled, cheated, betrayed whatever. Realise that no matter what you feel, the emotion is yours and that you have chosen to feel it. The person or relationship is a means for you to connect with your own self.

When you lose the person or the thing that fulfilled the emotional need within you, you feel the pain of disconnect and it throws you off balance. This is true even in a victim-abuser relationship. The victim needs the abuser to validate their sense of anger and pain. Very often the emotional relationship becomes a co-dependent relationship be it being abused or loved and protected to the point of suffocation. Emotional connectors often like the drama or melodrama that is created by emotion.

To break the emotional connection, you would ideally need to change the pattern or behaviour and the underlying belief you hold. Our emotions are connected to our beliefs. You would need to identify what emotional need that person or relationship fulfilled within you.

Try completing the sentence in as many ways as possible:

I feel hurt because______________________________

Example:

I feel hurt because I do not feel loved, or I feel hurt because I no longer feel insecure, or secure, or I feel hurt because there is nobody to pay me compliments, or I no longer have anything to complain about.

OR

You can ask yourself some questions like these:

• Did you feel loved and cherished?
• Did you feel secure, if yes, in what way? or did you always feel fear that you would lose this?
• Did you feel angry most of the time or did you feel peaceful?
• Did you feel controlled or did you feel like you could be yourself?
• Did that relationship satisfy a need for complaining or criticizing – so that the absence of that person led to a situation where you had no reason to whine about something?
• Did you need the relationship to end abruptly so that you would feel abandoned? (This would be because you have a belief that everyone you love abandons you)
• Did that relationship satisfy a need for you to be needed?
• Did you feel betrayed?
• Did that relationship make you feel intelligent or totally dumb?

As the answers come up, accept and feel the emotions that come up with them and let the emotions go.

Once you have identified that connection, then you can set about changing it or breaking it.

In other words, you need to connect with your own emotions; the emotions and needs that underlie the pain or the hurt or the sense of loss.

When you have identified that emotion, for example let’s say you felt loved, so the person or relationship was your connection to love; and with the absence of that relationship you feel disconnected from love, and that you need to find another connection to love. You then start to reach out to people in order for you to get over your pain. You can instead reach into yourself to connect with your love. Instead of showering that love upon someone else, shower it upon yourself and let your pain heal itself.