I sent a version of this message to a friend recently and they found it helpful. I was wondering if it might be helpful to someone else as well.
“So, what's clear to me is that, with that person –insert name
of a person you feel incredibly attracted to but who hurts you with their
behaviour or words or bad treatment and you know it’s unhealthy to maintain a relationship with them but feel like
you can’t stop-, you are living out your infant self's experience. That infant
sensed the love/potential love/lack of love of its mother/father/caregiver/etc. and then that mother/ father/ caregiver/etc., because of
their own trauma and life experiences, acted in unloving ways. The infant, having no way to understand why this happened, assigned the blame to itself. The infant took on the belief: "It's
because of something that I am or I do or that emanates from me that the person
went away/treats me badly/won’t interact with me/harms me/speaks to me that way".
If you can take that information deeply in, the truth that you (as that infant and, as an extension, the you of today) TRULY deserve the love, attraction, attention, warmth, care, etc. and NOT the abandonment/bad treatment, you will be able to explain to those people kindly that their behaviour and bad treatment of you is no longer allowed and walk away from the relationships where that is not respected.
The truth is, it never had anything to do with the qualities that that infant had or didn't have nor anything it did or it was or it emanated. This is where "I’m not worthy" (or insert your most damning belief about yourself here) comes from. It's simply not true. You may appear “not worthy” but only to people who have similar issues to that caregiver's. You are somehow the mirror for those issues in their own lives that they don't know how to deal with.
Any other person who loved children and didn't have the particular emotional baggage that your caregiver had would have looked at that infant and loved it completely, accepted it entirely and never, ever abandoned it, always tried to fulfill its needs, always treated it well and you would never have believed that you are not worthy. The abandonment/bad treatment only happened because of your caregiver’s internal experience... we can't know what exactly but some combination of... intense emotions (ex. shame, fear, anger, distrust, disgust, grief, etc. ad infinitum), beliefs about themselves or others, beliefs about the world and its safety and their past trauma and experiences.
I feel that seeing this type of intense, difficult, love relationship through a karmic lens instead of a psychological one might be detrimental. Through that lens, it might appear that you are somehow "responsible" for that person treating you the way they do. Some interpretations of “karma” permit or expect bad relationships or treatment from others as “the other side of the coin” for things you “did/said” in a past life or lives, something you have to learn, something you need to change or do. From the psychological view point, it was NEVER about you - the infant you. The only thing you need to do or change is your level of love for yourself. When there is true self-love, chronic bad treatment or abandonment are never attractive.
The problem of how those people your are attracted to see you is all theirs, the decisions are all theirs and relate only to their own past and inner experiences. What I'm trying to say is that what makes you seem not worthy to that person is not something that comes FROM YOU but rather something that comes FROM THEM, hits you (you are a mirror) and bounces back in their own face which causes them to have a negative reaction. There is a big difference.
It's important to understand that you cannot change their internal
experience, you only have the power to change your own.
From the moment you can believe that, you will know in your heart that you can have the love without having to put up with the abandonment/bad treatment. When the truth of your worthiness becomes clear to you (if you had been welcomed by an emotionally and mentally healthy caregiver this would have been clear from the start), then that belief/issue of “unworthiness” (or whatever your personal painful belief is) will be truly healed. If not this time, then the next relationship or the one after that or the one after that.”
Wishing each and every one of you that deep healing!
