How to Stop Suffering in Love?
117. How to Stop Suffering in Love?
You’re sick of love being a source of suffering, of your relationships pressing right where it hurts.
You suffer from the other person’s behavior and no longer know what to do to make it change?
You even start wondering if your partner is a perverse narcissist or is toxic?
In this episode I share my experience with more than 600 people I’ve accompanied and I’m going to break down what this suffering is telling you.
Your suffering points to a dysfunction in the relationship
But it doesn’t necessarily mean the other person is responsible for this suffering. What it does imply, though, is the notion of a state that lasts over time, otherwise we would simply be talking about physical and moral pain. So in this episode we’re going to dig into the 2 types of suffering: the one you impose on yourself and the one you endure, and then look at the solutions to stop suffering.
❤️ Watch my webinar on how to finally be happy in love!
The suffering you impose on yourself
This is the majority of cases, and so stopping the suffering in this case is fully in your power.
It’s not the fact that the person doesn’t commit that causes you suffering, it’s that you settle for crumbs
It’s not the unavailable person who causes you suffering, it’s that you accept entering into a relationship with someone who makes you suffer.
From experience with the people I’ve accompanied, there are often 4 main ways of imposing this suffering on yourself:
- Disillusion. This is the case, for example, when you behave as if you were in an established relationship but the other person hasn’t officially said so, when you imagine that this is THE ONE without really taking the time to assess them, when you listen to your butterflies and make big plans after a few dates. I talk about it in episode 50 The Disney syndrome. The suffering here is 100% created by your imagination because if you stick to the facts, they don’t follow and give you no hope.
- Non-alignment. I describe all the cases of non-alignment precisely in episode 5 why you don’t get what you want in love. This is the case, for example, when you accept a fling while you want a serious relationship, or when you enter into a relationship with someone you know you aren’t compatible with in the long run. Inevitably this non-alignment will create suffering sooner or later. You can try to convince your head, but your body and your emotions will not lie. In this case, you created your suffering through your non-aligned choice.
- The story you tell yourself. This is different from disillusion because you aren’t covering up the facts, but it’s your perception of what is happening that creates this suffering. This is the case, for example, when you give the most negative interpretation to your partner’s actions: if he forgets your birthday and you think he doesn’t care about you, you will suffer much more than if you tell yourself he was overwhelmed and forgot. Another example is if you have an argument or a conflict with your partner and you think it’s automatically the end. It can become your reflex to always imagine the worst, for example if he takes a while to reply it means he’s going to have another girl. (I have a meditation to help you calm your obsessive thoughts in episode 54) .In this case this suffering is created by the thoughts you feed.
- If you adopt the role of the victim in the sense of the Karpmann triangle and you give your power back to the other person. For example you suffer because the other person speaks to you badly but in fact you let them. You complain because he isn’t clear but you don’t confront him to clarify either. In this case, this suffering is created because you gave your power to the other person.
The suffering you endure despite yourself
In this category there are of course toxic people and abuse, and in that case it’s important not to keep enduring them, to ask for help and to get help to get out of this situation. If you want to know more about whether your partner is a perverse narcissist or is toxic, I also invite you to listen to episode 13 of the podcast.
There are also all your past wounds that are reactivated in your romantic relationships and generate uncomfortable emotions. In this case you didn’t choose to react this way, to feel these emotions, it’s an automatic reaction that comes from your past and is recorded in your nervous system, and it can give this feeling of powerlessness, of enduring, of not managing to get out of these patterns.
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Getting out of romantic over-adaptation
Getting out of romantic over-adaptation is a relearning that will at first require you to go against your natural reflex:
- The first step is to get into the habit of including yourself in the equation of the relationship (I talk about it more in episode 68 Empathy and commitment ) and to ask yourself what you want in this relationship, your needs, your limits, your preferences.
- The second step will require you to learn to communicate your needs to the other person, your limits, your preferences so that the relationship is satisfying for you and to make sure there is a balance in terms of adaptation.
- And finally, once you feel these first two steps are fully acquired and there is a sufficiently solid and healthy foundation in the relationship, look at the adaptations that can be an opportunity for you to grow or to develop your team spirit.
And if you need help with these steps, this is what you learn in the program Opening up to love
In every case take your suffering seriously
Because it tells you that it’s too much, too long, and that the situation or your way of doing things needs to change.
- If it’s a suffering you impose on yourself, it involves taking your power back over your love life :
- For disillusion, by confronting, for example, the facts with your expectations and your projections.
- For non-alignment, by checking your alignment in your choice of partner, in the way you communicate or act.
- For thoughts, by observing the story you tell yourself and asking whether this story serves you or hurts you.
- If you take on this victim role, by asking yourself how to take your power back.
Tell yourself that taking your power back doesn’t happen in a day, so give yourself the right not to get it perfect from the start, here are 3 other tips to give yourself the right to start imperfectly:
- If you can’t manage 100% of the correction, start with 5 or 10%, that’s already good.
- You learn through action and repetition by experiencing the benefit it brings you.
- Yogi Bhajan, a Kundalini yoga teacher, says that we “suffer so much when we think the situation we are living will never end”. What sometimes helps is to set yourself an inner deadline and commit, once this inner deadline has passed, to making a stop.
- If this suffering comes from love patterns you repeat, they didn’t arrive like that by chance or just to annoy you, they are the result of your past experiences/past wounds, often in situations where you perceived that your emotional stress wasn’t taken into account. So welcome your suffering, be kind to it and give it the care it needs by doing deep work on your love patterns. In my program Opening up to love you start with an assessment that lets you understand where this suffering comes from, which love patterns you repeat, and then we work on these patterns through the body with psycho-corporeal approaches. ( You can listen to episode 3 on love patterns)
Going further
If you’d like to dive deeper into the topic and identify your own love patterns, there’s my book Opening up to love, available in all bookstores.
And if you need help learning all this, you can join my program Opening up to love, the fruit of my 8 years of practice. You can choose the Day of the Past option, a day of Somatic Deprogramming: psycho-corporal approach to deprogram your nervous system’s automatic patterns and reprogram new relational reflexes.
Sandy Kaufmann
is a somatic therapist and coach, based in Switzerland. She is the author of two books published by Éditions Eyrolles and has accompanied more than 600 people. She is the creator of the Somatic Deprogramming method and hosts the podcast “S’ouvrir à l’amour“, ranked in the French top 50 in the relationships category.
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