Hey there, this is Clay with www.ModernLove.Life and this is the relationship inner game experience. And today we’re gonna be talking about what it means when you dream about your ex. There are a lot of resources out there for interpreting dreams, you know, they say if you dream about, I don’t know, a crow that it’s a bad omen or something like that and I don’t really adhere to a lot of this stuff specifically because when I was in Grad school I had a professor who was a clinical psychologist and somehow somebody in the class asked him about the topic of dreams and he said that all of that stuff is pretty much not, something that you need to be paying attention to any way because each of our subconsciouses is structured in a unique way. It’s not as if one thing universally symbolizes the same thing for all of us, right?
Because we all have our own different interpretations of things and we all have our different associations with things. And one thing that he told me is that in dreams you are essentially every, every person and every major object in the dream is actually a representation of a part of you, a part of your own consciousness, of your personality, of you essentially throughout your dreams. It is your unconscious mind trying to express or come to some sort of sense of understanding and balance in your sense of self. Right? So in other words, when you dream about your ex, you are trying to reconcile certain things within yourself to help you, to integrate your experiences into your life, to help you, to redefine your identity as the person that you are.https://pof-free-online-dating.en.uptodown.com/android
So it depends on what your ex represents to you. So for example, if maybe you had a poor relationship with your ex and maybe your ex is somebody that you believe betrayed you, lied to, you, cheated on you or something like that. And you dream about your ex will, It obviously depends on what is happening in the dream. But that person, your ex in your dream could represent a part of you that doesn’t feel 100 percent in integrity with what you say you’re going to do, and so depending on how the dream plays out, it’s you wrestling with the fact that there are these dualistic parts of you and your personality. There’s the part of you that are obviously wants to do the right thing and be a good person, and then there’s this other part of you that you know is also human and sometimes make mistakes, sometimes you know, stretches the truth a little bit, sometimes does things that you’re less than proud of.
And so in that context, if you are dreaming about your ext is trying to integrate these two sides of you to sort of help it make sense to you emotionally so that you can still move forward as a full, complete person without having to carry around perhaps guilt or shame or something like that, or things that you did in the past. If your ex represents a, someone that, that you really loved, someone that you had a strong emotional connection with, then the dream about your ex could also represent you, struggling to define your relationship with the part of you that you actually love, that you actually are proud of, that you actually are most proud of in yourself, but you’re maybe not able to admit it to yourself and you’re struggling to define that relationship in the context of your own unconscious mind. Okay? So you’re trying to, really determine what your relationship is with the parts of you that you really love, you know, are you willing to accept them and love them and take them into yourself or you going to deny them and push them away and try to say, Oh yeah, I’m not that great, or something like that. Right?
And so this is how you can interpret the dreams that you have about your ex. I think it’s much more effective than saying like, Oh, if you dream about your ex, it means Martians are coming next week or whatever the, the dream interpretation, encyclopedias and all that stuff. Say I’m anyway, this is the interpretation that I got from a clinical psychologist, so I’m probably gonna put a little bit more weight in that than maybe some other sources, but with that being said, let’s go ahead and get over into our questions and answers for this week from modern love association members. Let’s see what people are talking about.
Let’s see what sorts of questions they have this week. Our first question is from Ryan. Ryan says, hi, clay and Mika.
I came into my relationship with my ex a few years after a blind side divorce. My life has been a whirlwind during and since my divorce until a few weeks ago when I graduated from a very rigorous graduate program and suddenly had nothing to do. My girlfriend now, my ex and I had done passive, no contact for a month in June, but she contacted me and I immediately started trying to fix the relationship.
It was too much, too fast and she backed way off. She was between test drive and riding the Dragon. When I found your ESP program and the last message she sent to me before I went, no contact was quote, I enjoy talking to you and hanging out, but as far as relationship status, I feel we’re more friends than lovers.
Right now. My emotions have shut off and I don’t know how to turn them back on end quote. Her emotions weren’t always shut off. It happened after a long stretch where I was emotionally unavailable.
One thing she would often tell me that I never realized until now was that I must love myself in order to fully be able to love her. I have harbored a lot of hurt from my divorce that has led me to have subconscious feelings of not being worthy of love. I never realized how much those emotions can bleed over and affect others.
I have been doing the 10 minutes of affirmations in the mirror, but I still feel the deep seated doubt and lack of confidence when it comes to romantic relationships. Can you please share some other mental practices or exercises we can do to build self esteem and truly learn to love ourselves? Thank you for everything. I deeply appreciate your program.
Warm regards, Ryan. Okay, Ryan, so first of all, I’m sorry that you had such a difficult experience with your divorce and I’m sorry that it left you feeling so poorly about yourself emotionally and in regards to your own self love. When it comes to self love and self esteem. This really is a very important part of having a great relationship with another person and this is something that a lot of people often overlook because they’re focused more on thinking that you know if you send the right text message or if you have the right body language or if you pretend like you’re cool and confident and fake it till you make it, that somehow that will compensate for really not giving a damn about your own self and that’s not really how things work.
As you start to hold yourself in higher esteem, you’ll start to have higher standards for yourself and you start to have higher standards for yourself. You’ll start to interact with people in a different way and that will really spill over into giving you better results in your love life. And also in other areas of life as well too, but this is really more of a dating and relationship podcast. So we’ll talk primarily about that. I’m glad that you found some of the exercises in the course to be helpful.
In addition to that, we do have a book that I wrote called the self esteem solution. You can go ahead and check that out on Amazon. I think. I don’t know. I think it’s like $5 or something like that. and you can go ahead and read through that.
It has a lot of information on what you can do to help you in regards to your self esteem. But just some basic things that I would recommend to you are to practice pushing yourself out of your comfort zone in ways that move you towards what you want. So oftentimes there are things that we want in our life that we don’t give ourselves permission to go after because we don’t think that we’re worthy of them. We don’t think that we’re worth the bother or whatever it might be. And so we just don’t do it.
And we choose to stay in our comfort zone, which might be, you know, just, Oh, you know, I’m not, I’m nothing special. I’m just going to have a microwaveable dinner tonight, or something like that. I’m not worth the effort of cooking a nice healthy meal for myself or whatever it might be.
And so as you start to move towards treating yourself like you actually gave a damn about yourself, you will probably encounter some resistance that could take the form of anxiety, that could take the form of fear that could take the form of laziness, that could take the form of complacency, that could take the form of anything. And if you recognize this, if you recognize that, hey, there’s something that you want, you want something nice, but you’re not willing to put in the effort for it because it’s just you or something like that, then that is an opportunity to dig down deep and push yourself out of your comfort zone and go for whatever that is. Again, I don’t know what that might be for you.
I don’t know if that’s treating yourself to a nice dinner. I don’t know if that’s a doing something nice for yourself, like I don’t know, getting a massage or getting some sort of Nice thing for yourself or whatever, but maybe you might consider doing something like that. Okay. And that is a great way to build the habit of treating yourself well and build the habit of pushing yourself out of your comfort zone, especially towards outcomes that you actually want in your life. Okay, Ryan.
So I hope that helps you out. And if you want any more additional advice for this, please check out the self esteem solution over on Amazon. It’s written by me. It’s available currently only in kindle form, but once things settle down a little bit with our business, I’m going to hopefully look into getting that published as a physical book. You know, the past couple of months have been really tough just because we’ve had the baby come.
And uh, right now I’m getting back into working full time, but uh, you know, there’s a lot of repair work, a lot of catching up. I have to do with things before it can actually start to seriously tackle some other projects that I have wanted to do for a long time and one of those is to get the self esteem solution and be loved for who you are published as physical books, so that’s something that’s going to becoming hopefully sooner rather than later as I start to get my bearings again. But yeah, go ahead and check out that book if you want some more advice and keep us updated on how things go moving forward from here. Our next question is from C, c says my ex and I were together for about a year and a half and since the breakup we have talked almost everyday and I really do want to get her back.
I need to start ANC, but we have planned on doing things together in the upcoming future two weeks from now. Should I tell her that I just need to take a break from talking to her for awhile? How do I go from talking every day with her to just not at all for awhile. Thank you.
It depends on what these events are with, with your ex, you know, if it’s really something important for both of you, like I don’t know, the, the wedding of a mutual friend or something, I would probably just a grin and bear it and go through with it. If it’s something kind of trivial, like, oh yeah, you want to see a movie together that you’ve both had been looking forward to or something like that. Then maybe you might consider delaying that or canceling that plan or something like that. But really what you want to do is to check in with yourself and say, okay, do I really need to take some time away from being in contact with this person to improve my relationship with myself, to improve my ability to connect with other people and all that stuff. I mean, because to be completely honest with you, a lot of times people will just go directly to no contact as like a default thing.
It’s like whenever something happens, I need to go into no contract. Whenever I have a bad situation happened between me and my ex, I need to go to no contact whenever my ex doesn’t text me back and you need to go to no contact. Whenever I find out that my ex has a rebound partner, I need to go to no contact. Right? So make sure that you’re not just going to no contact as your one tool because again, if you only have one tool and that’s no contact, then you’re going to be in for a tough ride.
Hey there, this is Clay with www.ModernLove.Life and this is the relationship inner game experience. And today we’re gonna be talking about what it means when you dream about your ex. There are a lot of resources out there for interpreting dreams, you know, they say if you dream about, I don’t know, a crow that it’s a bad omen or something like that and I don’t really adhere to a lot of this stuff specifically because when I was in Grad school I had a professor who was a clinical psychologist and somehow somebody in the class asked him about the topic of dreams and he said that all of that stuff is pretty much not, something that you need to be paying attention to any way because each of our subconsciouses is structured in a unique way. It’s not as if one thing universally symbolizes the same thing for all of us, right?
Because we all have our own different interpretations of things and we all have our different associations with things. And one thing that he told me is that in dreams you are essentially every, every person and every major object in the dream is actually a representation of a part of you, a part of your own consciousness, of your personality, of you essentially throughout your dreams. It is your unconscious mind trying to express or come to some sort of sense of understanding and balance in your sense of self. Right? So in other words, when you dream about your ex, you are trying to reconcile certain things within yourself to help you, to integrate your experiences into your life, to help you, to redefine your identity as the person that you are.
So it depends on what your ex represents to you. So for example, if maybe you had a poor relationship with your ex and maybe your ex is somebody that you believe betrayed you, lied to, you, cheated on you or something like that. And you dream about your ex will, It obviously depends on what is happening in the dream. But that person, your ex in your dream could represent a part of you that doesn’t feel 100 percent in integrity with what you say you’re going to do, and so depending on how the dream plays out, it’s you wrestling with the fact that there are these dualistic parts of you and your personality. There’s the part of you that are obviously wants to do the right thing and be a good person, and then there’s this other part of you that you know is also human and sometimes make mistakes, sometimes you know, stretches the truth a little bit, sometimes does things that you’re less than proud of.
And so in that context, if you are dreaming about your ext is trying to integrate these two sides of you to sort of help it make sense to you emotionally so that you can still move forward as a full, complete person without having to carry around perhaps guilt or shame or something like that, or things that you did in the past. If your ex represents a, someone that, that you really loved, someone that you had a strong emotional connection with, then the dream about your ex could also represent you, struggling to define your relationship with the part of you that you actually love, that you actually are proud of, that you actually are most proud of in yourself, but you’re maybe not able to admit it to yourself and you’re struggling to define that relationship in the context of your own unconscious mind. Okay? So you’re trying to, really determine what your relationship is with the parts of you that you really love, you know, are you willing to accept them and love them and take them into yourself or you going to deny them and push them away and try to say, Oh yeah, I’m not that great, or something like that. Right?
And so this is how you can interpret the dreams that you have about your ex. I think it’s much more effective than saying like, Oh, if you dream about your ex, it means Martians are coming next week or whatever the, the dream interpretation, encyclopedias and all that stuff. Say I’m anyway, this is the interpretation that I got from a clinical psychologist, so I’m probably gonna put a little bit more weight in that than maybe some other sources, but with that being said, let’s go ahead and get over into our questions and answers for this week from modern love association members. Let’s see what people are talking about.
Let’s see what sorts of questions they have this week. Our first question is from Ryan. Ryan says, hi, clay and Mika.
I came into my relationship with my ex a few years after a blind side divorce. My life has been a whirlwind during and since my divorce until a few weeks ago when I graduated from a very rigorous graduate program and suddenly had nothing to do. My girlfriend now, my ex and I had done passive, no contact for a month in June, but she contacted me and I immediately started trying to fix the relationship.
It was too much, too fast and she backed way off. She was between test drive and riding the Dragon. When I found your ESP program and the last message she sent to me before I went, no contact was quote, I enjoy talking to you and hanging out, but as far as relationship status, I feel we’re more friends than lovers.
Right now. My emotions have shut off and I don’t know how to turn them back on end quote. Her emotions weren’t always shut off. It happened after a long stretch where I was emotionally unavailable.
One thing she would often tell me that I never realized until now was that I must love myself in order to fully be able to love her. I have harbored a lot of hurt from my divorce that has led me to have subconscious feelings of not being worthy of love. I never realized how much those emotions can bleed over and affect others.
I have been doing the 10 minutes of affirmations in the mirror, but I still feel the deep seated doubt and lack of confidence when it comes to romantic relationships. Can you please share some other mental practices or exercises we can do to build self esteem and truly learn to love ourselves? Thank you for everything. I deeply appreciate your program.
Warm regards, Ryan. Okay, Ryan, so first of all, I’m sorry that you had such a difficult experience with your divorce and I’m sorry that it left you feeling so poorly about yourself emotionally and in regards to your own self love. When it comes to self love and self esteem. This really is a very important part of having a great relationship with another person and this is something that a lot of people often overlook because they’re focused more on thinking that you know if you send the right text message or if you have the right body language or if you pretend like you’re cool and confident and fake it till you make it, that somehow that will compensate for really not giving a damn about your own self and that’s not really how things work.
As you start to hold yourself in higher esteem, you’ll start to have higher standards for yourself and you start to have higher standards for yourself. You’ll start to interact with people in a different way and that will really spill over into giving you better results in your love life. And also in other areas of life as well too, but this is really more of a dating and relationship podcast. So we’ll talk primarily about that. I’m glad that you found some of the exercises in the course to be helpful.
In addition to that, we do have a book that I wrote called the self esteem solution. You can go ahead and check that out on Amazon. I think. I don’t know. I think it’s like $5 or something like that. and you can go ahead and read through that.
It has a lot of information on what you can do to help you in regards to your self esteem. But just some basic things that I would recommend to you are to practice pushing yourself out of your comfort zone in ways that move you towards what you want. So oftentimes there are things that we want in our life that we don’t give ourselves permission to go after because we don’t think that we’re worthy of them. We don’t think that we’re worth the bother or whatever it might be. And so we just don’t do it.
And we choose to stay in our comfort zone, which might be, you know, just, Oh, you know, I’m not, I’m nothing special. I’m just going to have a microwaveable dinner tonight, or something like that. I’m not worth the effort of cooking a nice healthy meal for myself or whatever it might be.
And so as you start to move towards treating yourself like you actually gave a damn about yourself, you will probably encounter some resistance that could take the form of anxiety, that could take the form of fear that could take the form of laziness, that could take the form of complacency, that could take the form of anything. And if you recognize this, if you recognize that, hey, there’s something that you want, you want something nice, but you’re not willing to put in the effort for it because it’s just you or something like that, then that is an opportunity to dig down deep and push yourself out of your comfort zone and go for whatever that is. Again, I don’t know what that might be for you.
I don’t know if that’s treating yourself to a nice dinner. I don’t know if that’s a doing something nice for yourself, like I don’t know, getting a massage or getting some sort of Nice thing for yourself or whatever, but maybe you might consider doing something like that. Okay. And that is a great way to build the habit of treating yourself well and build the habit of pushing yourself out of your comfort zone, especially towards outcomes that you actually want in your life. Okay, Ryan.
So I hope that helps you out. And if you want any more additional advice for this, please check out the self esteem solution over on Amazon. It’s written by me. It’s available currently only in kindle form, but once things settle down a little bit with our business, I’m going to hopefully look into getting that published as a physical book. You know, the past couple of months have been really tough just because we’ve had the baby come.
And uh, right now I’m getting back into working full time, but uh, you know, there’s a lot of repair work, a lot of catching up. I have to do with things before it can actually start to seriously tackle some other projects that I have wanted to do for a long time and one of those is to get the self esteem solution and be loved for who you are published as physical books, so that’s something that’s going to becoming hopefully sooner rather than later as I start to get my bearings again. But yeah, go ahead and check out that book if you want some more advice and keep us updated on how things go moving forward from here. Our next question is from C, c says my ex and I were together for about a year and a half and since the breakup we have talked almost everyday and I really do want to get her back.
I need to start ANC, but we have planned on doing things together in the upcoming future two weeks from now. Should I tell her that I just need to take a break from talking to her for awhile? How do I go from talking every day with her to just not at all for awhile. Thank you.
It depends on what these events are with, with your ex, you know, if it’s really something important for both of you, like I don’t know, the, the wedding of a mutual friend or something, I would probably just a grin and bear it and go through with it. If it’s something kind of trivial, like, oh yeah, you want to see a movie together that you’ve both had been looking forward to or something like that. Then maybe you might consider delaying that or canceling that plan or something like that. But really what you want to do is to check in with yourself and say, okay, do I really need to take some time away from being in contact with this person to improve my relationship with myself, to improve my ability to connect with other people and all that stuff. I mean, because to be completely honest with you, a lot of times people will just go directly to no contact as like a default thing.
It’s like whenever something happens, I need to go into no contract. Whenever I have a bad situation happened between me and my ex, I need to go to no contact whenever my ex doesn’t text me back and you need to go to no contact. Whenever I find out that my ex has a rebound partner, I need to go to no contact. Right? So make sure that you’re not just going to no contact as your one tool because again, if you only have one tool and that’s no contact, then you’re going to be in for a tough ride.
That’s why we have the entire arsenal of advanced relational skills at your disposal because there are times when no contact is great, but there’s also times when you might need something else to help you create a positive emotional connection with your ex. If you do look at your situation and you say, yeah, I actually do need to take a break from being in contact with my ex, then go ahead and, and, and asked for that. Right? Go ahead and just contact your ex and say, Hey, I know we made some plans, but if I’m being honest with myself, I think I really need some time on my own to really kind of collect myself after our breakup.
I’ve noticed that my emotions have been kind of all over the place and I’m not bringing the best of myself to our interactions together. So I think I just need a little bit of a time out from being in touch with you. So much so that I can pull myself together and then of course take that time and actually pull yourself together.
A lot of times people will say they’re doing active, no contact, but we talk about in the course when in fact they’re actually just doing passive, no contact. They’re just kind of hanging out, waiting around and hoping that something changes. But again, remember active, no context. It’s about actively cultivating the advanced relational skills so that you can actually have a meaningful difference in your interactions. Okay.
So work up some sort of approach or strategy or follow the strategy that we talk about inside the ESP course. And actually do no contact active, no contact in the structured way that we talk about, and that’s probably a great way to go ahead and get started with that. Okay, so I hope that helps you out.
See Our next question is from faithful in love. Faithful in lab says hello clay. I have a question about handling jealousy and passing painful little tests. I’m wondering what the best way to respond is.
When we see our exes connecting with another person. My Ex seems to be in love with someone new is communicating this through social media, but never directly talking about it with me. Only mentioned that girl to me once as a friend.
He’ll meet soon again. We were reconnecting really well, but now I watch him lose interest in interacting with me. Instead he is talking to her more and more.
She has potentially a new rebound. He is posting stuff about her on platforms. He knows I will definitely see it and I sometimes think he even wants me to see it and react. So far I completely ignored all of these signs in our communication. My Ex seems to put me through a lot of tests lately, which hurt because I’m still in love.
I’m trying to stay playful and laugh it off, which I think is the best solution, but it is not easy for me. My question is what is the best way to handle such situations and to not go back into reaction mode. Thanks. Faithful in love.
All right? So, I’m guessing by reaction mode, you’re, you’re talking about damage control mode and when it comes to damage control mode, just understand that this is a relationship that you have with yourself more so than it is a relationship with what is happening outside of you. Okay? So it’s not as if your life is going to be perfect and you’re not going to be in damage control mode. And then suddenly something bad happens and you are in damage control mode.
That, that just implies that there is more of an inner weakness in regards to your own emotional fortitude. Rather than, you know, great things happening outside of your bad things happening outside of you. If you were truly emotionally strong than you could handle most bad things that happen to you or most things that you perceive as bad without starting to go into that sort of panic, that sort of damage control mode way of being, so the best way that you can handle these sorts of situations without going into damage control mode is to understand that your reaction to things, your response to things is 100 percent within your control.
Okay, so that has to say something happens and you have a response. If you notice there is something that happens in between those two events. There’s something that happens. So there’s an event, right? So maybe you log into, I don’t know, facebook or something like that, and you see your ex post something about some new person that they are attracted to and then it’s not like you suddenly just panic.
There’s a certain chain reaction that’s happening unconsciously and automatically below your awareness that’s causing you to have that panic. Right? So what is that?
What are the thoughts, emotions, and feelings that are happening below your conscious awareness that are causing you to slip into that panic mode? What stories are you telling yourself? Right?
So maybe your ex is posting an image of them together with this new person, right? Is your mind rushing in to fill in the blanks and saying, oh look, they’re falling in love. Oh look, this is a perfect relationship. I look, there’s so much happier then than they were with me.
We’re drifting apart. We’re never going to talk again. I’m losing my chance. My window of opportunity is closing and stuff like that. You know, if you have thoughts like that, yeah, you’re going to panic, right?
If I had thoughts like that, I would panic too, because as we talk about in our compatibility code course, your thoughts create your emotions and if you’re feeling an emotional response to something such as panic, so just fear such as anxiety, that’s because you’re having certain thoughts that are causing you to feel that way and if you just take a step back and look at those thoughts and examine them and run them through the thought challenging exercise that we talk about in the compatibility code, you can start to untangle these thoughts and turn down the volume on them because when it comes to most of our thoughts that cause us to panic, they’re very extreme, right? There’s no like kind of middle ground. There’s no really being realistic with our thoughts. It’s always just these like doomsday, extreme worst case scenario kind of thoughts and yeah, if you’re gonna go through life with doomsday.
Worst case scenario, extreme thoughts. It’s no surprise that you’re gonna end up panicked. It’s no surprise you’re gonna be anxious.
It’s no surprise that you’re going to go through life being afraid. So what if you took a step back and instead of trying to control the externals, you know what to say to your ex, how to pass the test, how to destroy the rebound partner and all that stuff. What if you looked at your thought process that was causing you to feel bad in the first place? What if you looked at how you were thinking about these situations? That’s not to say that you don’t act on them one way or the other.
It’s not to say that you don’t do anything, but if you want to really handle your mindset when it comes to this, you have to start untangling these thoughts. You have to start untangling these catastrophe predictions that you’re running through your own mind. So I’d really strongly recommend the exercises in the compatibility code, specifically the ones on thought challenging and beliefs. Okay?
So I hope this helps you out and please keep us updated on how things go moving forward from here. Our next question is from Daniel. Daniel says, clay, what is an example of bad vulnerability and good vulnerability? Say if my ex or myself inadvertently brings up the topic of the breakup or it just happens so that we’re beginning to have a good conversation that’s about to get deeply emotional.
That would be a bad vulnerability example. Is that right? Would a bad example be like me admitting that I had a pornography problem when she asks what’s going on with me or would that be a good example? Okay, so when it comes to bad vulnerability versus good vulnerability, vulnerability has the potential to bring people closer together.
It has the potential to create an emotional connection as we are honest with one another, as we reveal ourselves to one another and as we really trust one another and start to exhibit trust in another person. Some people will take this and they’ll say, okay, you know, I want to get back together with my ex or I have a first date with somebody and I want that person to be my girlfriend. Right?
If you were to go into that situation and just start, you know, confessing like, Hey, I really want to get back together with you. Hey, I really want you to be my girlfriend. I’m on like the first date or or right when you’re getting back in contact with your ex.
That would be an example of bad vulnerability and the reason why is because it feels bad on an emotional level and the reason that it feels bad on an emotional level is because you’re not taking the other person’s emotional state into consideration. You are. I’m essentially using that person as a means to an end to get what you want. So for example, if you wanted to get back together with your ex and you told them so much without really considering their emotional state where they’re at, how they feel, what their hesitations, what their resistances, what their reservations about wanting to contact you, be back in a relationship with you, et Cetera.
Then they’re going to see you saying, Hey, I want to get back together with you as basically like, hey, I don’t care how you feel. I want to be in a relationship again. I want to be in a relationship with you again and I want to make that happen.
How you feel is not important to me. How you feel is not something that I’m concerned with. I’m more interested in getting my agenda met, which is to be back in a relationship with you, right? We all know that if you’re on a first date with somebody, you don’t confess that you want to marry them.
You don’t plan out the names of your children that you want to have together. You don’t propose to them, you don’t typically ask them to be your boyfriend or girlfriend on the very first date, and the reason why is because you don’t even know that person. You haven’t built an emotional connection with them and asking for such things is being more attached to your agenda, your agenda of being in a relationship, your agenda of being married, your agenda of having children more attached to that agenda than it is to actually getting to know that person.
Actually getting to know if that person would actually be a good fit for you. Right? You’re using that person as a means to an end to get your agenda met.
So when it comes to your example about having a pornography addiction, it really depends on how you present it. If it’s just like, hey, how are you doing? And you just say, oh, I found out I have a pornography addiction.
You know, that could be something that feels a little weird. It could something be something that feels a little strange. It’s not necessarily bad.
Vulnerability is just not landing in way that’s thoughtful and considerate of the other person’s emotional place. So, again, I don’t know exactly what your relationship is with your ex or whoever you’re considering confessing this too. But, you know, you might say something like, Hey, I have, I recently had a realization, I’m realizing there it’s had an effect on my life and I want to tell you about it. Looking back on our relationship that we had together in the past, I think it might’ve even affected our ability to connect and it’s, you know, it’s something that’s not easy to talk about.
But if I’m being honest, I actually have a problem with pornography and I think it’s affecting my ability to connect with people. In my ability to have a romantic relationships and uh, you know, if you, if you frame it like that, where your, where, where, where you’re simply just considering how it’s landing for the other person and you’re also being vulnerable and honest and you’re not having a hidden agenda. Then I think it absolutely could be a very positive form of vulnerability that could potentially bring the two of you closer together. Okay, Daniel. So I hope that helps you out and let us know if you decide to have this conversation and how it all goes.
Okay. So thanks and keep us updated. Our next question is from JP.
JP says, during the day, I’m happy with how my life is and I’m optimistic about the future. However, at night I’ve been experiencing sleep disturbances. I will have a dream about my ex and wake up feeling anxious.
My therapist thought that my subconscious may be trying to work through some unresolved emotions. When she probed further, I was shocked to discover that I was still really sad and missing my ex. My therapist suggested taking 10 minutes to write in a journal a few times a week about my thoughts and memories of my ex. I plan on doing this.
I was just wondering, do you have any additional suggestions or advice on how to deal with unresolved emotions? Thanks JP. The topic of the intro portion of this relationship, inner game experience episode is actually on the topic of dreaming about your Ex. So, I would definitely go and, and review that if needed be. But, it sounds like the dream portion is really you trying to resolve your own relationship with yourself and how that connects with your external experience of life.
Okay. So, again, this is, this can be very complicated and this is not something that I pretend to be an expert on by any stretch of the imagination. This is just what a clinical psychologist told me about dreams when I was in graduate school.
So I’m just going to go ahead and defer to their expertise, but in terms of how to deal with unresolved emotions, what you need to do is you need to start by being real with yourself. Start by being real with how you feel about things. So, when you say during the day you’re happy with your life and you’re optimistic about the future, is that genuine happiness? Is that genuine optimism or is it sort of more of a postured kind of happiness, a postured optimism? We talk about posturing as, as like the cliche example of like the Macho Jerk and the Nice Guy, right?
But the macho jerk isn’t really the only of manifestation that posturing can take. Posturing is really just when you’re trying to suppress how you’re actually feeling and present a appearance of something else. Whether that is, you know. Yeah, I’m such a bad ass.
Nothing can hurt me with Dylan, you know, the macho kind of attitude or another common way that people often do it is I’m always happy. My life is perfect and life is great. Things are wonderful. Um, I’m so happy.
Things are great. Uh, everything is looking rosy and wonderful, right? When in fact they are, they’re actually not feeling that way. Uh, you know, if you genuinely do feel that way, more power to you, but if you’re not actually feeling that way and you’re putting out an image that that is how you feel, then that’s actually a form of posturing.
So what you might consider doing is getting real with yourself, getting real about how you actually feel, you know, so. So maybe talk a take, take a look about how you’re actually feeling at night. Take a look at how you actually feel when you are having these dreams about your asked or, or even just a, you know, if you’re feeling down at night without being asleep, without dreaming, you know, if it’s just like at night and you’re by yourself and suddenly you start to feel sad, you might start to think about whole, how is it I actually feel, how is it I actually am thinking that’s causing me to feel this way?
What thoughts am I having that are causing me to feel this way? And start to explore those. And if you’re starting to realize that, you know, yeah, maybe I actually am sad, then maybe it’s because you need to fully feel your emotions of loss maybe from your ex or something along those lines.
And as you start to genuinely feel those emotions rather than suppress them or stuff them down, you’ll notice that you start to open up a little bit more when it comes to your emotional experience and you’ll notice that you’ll start to let go of some of those feelings. And as you start to let go of those feelings, you’ll have a more spaciousness within you that allows you to have a greater emotional capacity for a whole lot of other things. Okay? So as you can start to let go of some of these suppressed feelings, you will really start to welcome new emotional experiences into your life.
A really emotions. They don’t have to hang around forever. They only hang around forever. The longer we stuffed them down, the longer we ignore them, the longer we try to resist them. As soon as you stop resisting them and allow that emotion to come to completion in your experience, that’s when you can finally let it go.
So I hope that helps you out, JP, and I hope that gives you some advice on dealing with what you’re experiencing right now. So thank you. And please keep us updated on how things go moving forward from here.
Okay. So those have been our questions for this week. I just want to follow up with everybody and let you know that since we have streamlined the Q and A process and limited it to just five questions and it has made the production of the relationship inner game experience a whole lot easier for me and the people on team. I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but it is actually quite a lot of work to put together these episodes and it can sometimes be difficult to make sure we get this out every week. and also I’ve noticed that the quality of the questions that people are asking has also increased as well too. you know, before it was like, hey, here’s some ridiculously specific thing that I’m experiencing that nobody else in the world can relate to, you know, what do you think I should do next? And now it’s, it’s, it’s generally questions that are a little bit more relatable to to more people out there.
So I think that we’re also improving the value and quality of the relationship inner game experiences as well too. So thank you so much for helping me do this and thank you so much for helping me dial this in. I, once again, this is clay with www.ModernLove.Life.
If you like the relationship inner game experience, please go ahead and give us a thumbs up, leave a comment down below, go ahead and subscribe to the channel. consider supporting us by signing up for one of our courses over @ www.ModernLove.Life And of course, feel free to subscribe on itunes or youtube as well too. Once again, this has been clay and I hope this has helped you improve your relationship inner game. Talk to you next week.
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