How to Stop Repeating Unhealthy Love Patterns | Sheleana Aiyana

0:00Hi, my name is Lewis Howes, and welcome to The Daily Motivation Show.

0:10Why do you think we repeat these negative patterns in relationships so frequently? You know, we have a bad experience in one relationship, we look for someone new, and then it repeats. And then we do it again and again. Why does that happen for people? We're looking for a resolution. In the back of our minds, we might not even be aware of it, but we're looking for a resolution to that thing that happened, or to that story that said you're not lovable or that story that said you have to fight to earn love somewhere in our minds we're looking to prove that story true or we're looking to complete the process and so we look for somebody who matches the template so that we can perhaps do that work and typically it hasn't worked out what we don't realize is that our partner is doing that exact same thing but with the self-awareness and the willingness piece if we're both aware and we're like okay we both do have some stuff to work on here.

1:03Here's what I've got to work on. Here's what you want to work on. Do you want to do this together with that frame? Then we really can get on the same track together and team up and do that healing work. Otherwise, it just does repeat endlessly. And it's easy to just blame the other person. Well, there's something wrong with you. I'm just going to get rid of you and go and find my soulmate. Right. The next person. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. What was the best thing you did before getting married the second time? Yeah. That really supported entering the marriage? The thing that I love that we did was we created shadow vows.

1:39Shadow vows? Yeah. And those were sort of, we also called them ownership vows. So we wrote our sacred vows to each other, but then we also did ownership vows. And so at our wedding, we had a different type of wedding where we had everybody actually sat in a circle on the floor. Only the elders in our community sat on chairs. and we had all of these plush rugs everywhere. We did a cacao ceremony and a group meditation and then we stood in front of our community and we had spent a month negotiating our shadow vows and essentially we were calling out the parts of ourselves that were not yet healed or some of the worst things that we're bringing to the relationship.

2:15Things you don't like about yourself. Or the ways that we show up in a crappy way with our partner, which there is always ways, you know? And so we did that, we wrote it down and we shared with each other and we also allowed each other to give feedback before we did this. Oh my gosh. And we used that. We did that in front of our community. We stood and we owned, you know. Holy cow. You know, I own that I'm going to project my unhealed father wound onto you sometimes, you know, and I promise that I'm going to always come back to love. That's the kind of vows that we said. And so it was very vulnerable and intimate, but everyone in our community got to witness, this is the true Shalina and Ben.

2:51These are the things that they're working on. we're not painting this perfect picture. And then they vowed to hold us through that. Then every year, what we do is we take our shadow vows and we go through them together and we say, oh, I think I've actually worked really well on this one. Maybe we should take this one off the list. Maybe that one has been completed. Or maybe we need to add this to the thing, you know? Maybe we need to work on this one. And so we actually reassess our vows. We sort of use it as like a template to check in, do a temperature check. That has served us very well. and we've guided other couples through that as well.

3:26What do you think are the key distinctions to conscious relationship and healthy love? Willingness, again, you know, being willing because we're not going to be perfect and we're going to fall off track and we're going to fall into old patterns. But the willingness to repair, you know, the Gottmans, they talk about this a lot too. Repairing is so important, being able to take ownership, being able to apologize. And, you know, being willing to see our part, being willing to see the ways that we are contributing to the breakdown of the relationship and also acknowledging that to our partner, you know, sort of revealing our vulnerability underneath the defensiveness.

4:05And that's one of the things that I tell people when they say, oh, you know, you and Ben must just eye gaze all day and, you know, have these sacred practices. And, you know, well, sometimes we do that now that we have a daughter. We'd never do that right now. You know, we have a baby, but it doesn't really look like that. It's really just about being present in each moment and doing your best and doing your best to love your partner as much as you can. And remember that they were once a child. Like, we have little photos of each other as children on our altar in our bedroom. And that helps. And it takes work to come back to that innocence over and over.

4:41And to me, that's what conscious relationship is about. Why do you think so many people are struggling today in relationships? Is it wounds? Is it they haven't healed? Is it they have a bad model of relationships from their parents? Probably all of it. Is it, you know, social media? What do you think is hurting people today in relationships? Everything you just said. Social media is a tough one, right? Now we have these human meat markets where you're supposed to go shopping for a partner and you're grading them based on what? Their photo? Looks. And so much of it is energetic, right? And you don't know who this person is.

5:12I'm the kind of person who, I don't care if you're a supermodel. unless I can feel you, I don't actually even know if you're attractive or not. And so for me, it's really about that deep spiritual bond. We're shopping in these human meat markets for people and it's not working. And it can even become addictive. And of course, we don't have many templates for healthy relationship. We don't see it much in the media at all. It's a lot of chaos. And we also, many of us don't have elders anymore either. We don't have those people who can support us and guide us or who can remind us how to come back to love when we need help in our relationships.

5:50So, so often something gets hard and we just throw the relationship away because we don't know what else to do. My hope is that through this work that I'm doing, that you're doing, that we're all aiming to do is that people feel that they have a container they can step into so that they can stop glamorizing the idea of the perfect relationship and just start learning how to be happy. Why do you think so many people struggle with feeling loved and lovable? It's the age-old question, isn't it? I think we're born, and all of a sudden, we have these human fallibilities where we struggle to believe in ourselves.

6:30We struggle to believe that we're good enough. And it seems that it's built into the human condition in some ways, that we come in with these stories. And, you know, some traditions believe, you know, You cut the umbilical cord and you're separated from spirit or from God or whatever you'd like to call it. And so in the human realms, you know, we're going to be experiencing this type of suffering. And I feel that a lot of that can be nurtured in childhood. And it seems that no matter what, we all come out with some sort of insecurity or pain story or trauma or life lesson to work with. We all have something to learn.

7:07and we're not here to interfere with people's paths so much as we are here to just encourage and be loving along the way. And that goes for being a parent too. We can't change their life path, but we can interfere with it. And so the most loving thing we can do for everyone that comes into our lives is to honor their experience and to do our best to be kind while we're on the journey.

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