Episode # 9- Relationships

On this episode, we discuss the concept that relationships are the thoughts we have about people.

We explore the ideas that we can let people be who they are, and that they are just there for us to love.

Choosing love is always an option, and always the best option.

Learn how in this episode.

 

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Transcript:

This is Betsy Jensen, and you are listening to Unstoppable Body and Mind—Episode 9–Relationships.

 

In this podcast we learn to upgrade our brain and understand the power of our thoughts, to heal and to create the results we want in our life. Become the person in control of your healing and make peace with your life.  Become unstoppable, body and mind.

 

Hello, today we are going to talk about relationships. So, this might be a new way of thinking about relationships for you. It was for me, definitely. A relationship you have with a person is basically the thoughts you think about that person. So relationships are kind of all in our head. If I think that I'm in a difficult relationship or a toxic relationship, or if I think my husband loves me or if I think he doesn't love me or if I think my boss doesn't respect me, all of those are just thoughts. They're sentences in your brain. They're not facts.

 

Here's an example to show how relationships are in our head. You might have one friend that you really love and adore and think is awesome. And other people might not feel that same way about her. She's the same person, whoever she is. But different people could have different thoughts about her, and therefore a different relationship with her. 

 

People might have different thoughts about a relationship. This happened to me in college, actually. There was this guy who was flirting with me and I thought we might go out. We would talk on the phone. And after about a week, he told me that he got engaged. So yeah, my thoughts about this turning into a potential relationship were obviously different than what he was thinking. 

 

I feel like I have have a relationship with mentors or influencers in my life. People like Brooke Castillo or other musicians that I really like, because of what I listened to from them. I feel like I know them or that I can relate to them. I love what they stand for maybe or feel like we're like minded. But I really don't even know who these people are. They're more like just a projection of my thoughts that I put on them. 

 

Literally, your brain has its own system to interpret and make sense of the world and all the sensory input that it receives. It's like this filter that your brain has to process information. And the thoughts that are produced by the brain are also affected by your personal filter. I love this analogy from Byron Katie.  In Loving What Is, she talks about our mind as a projector. If we have dirt on our lens, so like bad or insecure thoughts about ourselves, then everything we see will have dirt on it. So we look at all these people and see the things we want to change in them, the ways we want them to act differently, the things we want them to do or say, when really what we need to do is clean the dirt off our own lens.

 

I have three teenage boys right now. And it's fascinating to have them get into these long discussions verging on fights. They'll get so upset about the way that someone does something or says something. And it's obvious that they think it should be a different way. They should have said it differently. For example, one time they spent an hour arguing about a movie they saw and one of my sons said he really liked the movie, but there was this part about the childhood that he thought they should have explored more and spent more time on. Then the other one said, “Well, if you think they should have done it differently, how can you say that you really liked the movie?” And the younger one just likes to debate and kind of verbally spar. And the older one, I could just see him becoming more and more frustrated, he would not give up on trying to convince the younger one that he said it wrong. 

 

Negativity often begins when we have expectations, and then we're upset when they're not met. And we use them as an excuse to feel bad. If we're already thinking negatively about ourselves, our brains will look for and see that negativity in others. And then we may feel that negativity ourselves in our emotions because we're blaming or judging or criticizing. 

 

Remember, Joe Dispenza talks about how our cells can actually become addicted to certain hormones or neurotransmitters. So if your cells are used to a certain amount of cortisol, and they're feeling depleted, then you'll look around in the environment for things to make you angry. And you'll think thoughts about things or people or what they did or said, so that your cells get that hit of cortisol. As your cells get more and more used to it and they replicate, they grow more receptors for those higher demands of cortisol. 

 

If we're not conscious, we can become more and more negative. This takes a toll on our body because the chronic stress on our cells can lead to break down and disease. As we know from the model, our thoughts create our feelings. Negative thoughts create negative emotions. So why are we choosing to feel disappointment or anger or frustration rather than love? What if we could get ourselves addicted to love? Love feels great. And in fact, love is always an option. 

 

We don't have to expect people to behave in certain ways for us to be happy. Love is not an action. Love is a feeling, and since our feelings come from our thoughts, we are the ones in control of our feeling of love.  What people do or say or how they treat us:  that all goes in our circumstance line. It's a circumstance. It's a neutral fact. And we determine what we think about it. And that determines what we feel. 

 

We don't get the feeling of love from other people or how they treat us. How crazy is that? I never realized that I thought love was out of my control. Either someone loved me or they didn't. And I would always just try to act in certain ways to get love. Because that's how I thought you did it. But we get the feelings of love from thoughts we think about people. Remember, love is always an option, so we can feel good whenever we want. Feeling love does feel better than those lower vibration emotions. 

 

Why would we not choose to feel love towards someone if love feels amazing? Why are we denying ourselves that feeling? We get stuck thinking we can't love a person because of what they did, that they don't deserve it from us. But really, not feeling love is only hurting you. If you're feeling anger or resentment or disgust, you're really only hurting yourself. Now loving doesn't mean that you unconditionally approve of behavior. You might need to take action to protect yourself at times, or in order to get the results that you're wanting in your life. 

 

We will talk about boundaries soon. Because there may be times that you need to limit your contact with someone. But you're basically never trying to get someone to act in a certain way. Once you allow adults to act however they want, which they're going to anyway, so allow isn't really an accurate word to use. But mentally, you're allowing them to act like they want without you making it mean something and then if you need to, you can choose to remove yourself from the situation. You may limit your contact with someone. But you're doing this in a clear, loving way, not a punishing or controlling way, like you're trying to manipulate that person into acting a certain way for you. Loving someone means when you think of that person, you just have feelings of love, because love feels better.

 

Knowing this is the secret to all relationships:  your relationship with anyone else is determined by your thoughts about them, and you're the one in control of your thoughts. You can let other adults be exactly who they are. Let people forget, leave messes. They might lie or cheat or steal, they might too loudly. They might say things you think are mean. Or they might do things you think they shouldn't have done, but don't have expectations that they need to fulfill to make you happy. That is a feeling you create for yourself. In fact, that's your job to make yourself happy. What if you think about the people in your life and your relationships as them just being who they are and being there for you to love. You don't have any expectations that they have to be worthy of your love, that they have to do certain things or say certain things or act certain ways. 

 

If you have a dog, imagine the love your dog has. That's a good example to me of unconditional love. My dog goes out of his mind when he sees me. He is turning in circles and wagging his tail and jumping all around. In fact, we need to get a trainer because he goes so crazy when he sees people—he's so excited. And it doesn't matter to him what we look like or if we've been paying him attention or not. Or if we've barely just petted him five minutes ago, but then we're walking through the room again. He just gets excited every single time. 

 

What if you could allow your spouse to just be whoever he is. And you could show love for him because it feels good for you to do that. You could love him, and there's nothing he can do about it. I suggested this concept to someone once when we were talking about his marriage. He was saying how unfulfilled he felt because his wife didn't show these physical signs of love. He expected that she hold his hand back when he held her hand or kissed her back. And he said that he just needed these things in order for him to feel love from her. And I said, “What if she's just there for you to love?” And he got really angry with me and he said, “That makes me mad.” He did not believe that at all. And he definitely had resistance to this idea. 

 

But the truth is, once you let people be who they are, and let go of the idea of trying to control them, then you realize how much energy you're just wasting trying to get others to behave in a certain way to make you happy. Focus on working on your own thoughts and feelings to make yourself happy. Those around you will appreciate it. There's nothing better than being with someone who just loves you. They're not always trying to make you a better version of yourself, or nagging you for one thing or another.

 

And you might find it interesting how you act. When you're just loving someone, you might actually do those dishes just because you want to, not because someone is trying to guilt you into it. When you're feeling loving, you'll probably act kinder to yourself and others. That's in the model too, right? Your feelings create your actions. So you're going to act usually in a more loving way. That's just one awesome side effect. That's why unconditional love is really the best gift you can give yourself.

 

No, feeling love doesn't mean that you have to act it out. You don't have to call up your husband's acts or tell your boss that you love them. You don't even have to change how you act towards them. You don't have to act it out or even act kindly towards them if you don't want to. But you get to feel that emotion inside of you and you get to own it. You have to know that you're in control of your own feelings and others are as well. The best relationships are when both people realize that and they come together to support each other because they want to.

 

Now I, of course, believe the stress that we create and the negative emotions that we can create from our perceptions of relationships can contribute to how our body is feeling and manifesting diseases or physical symptoms. And I want to tell you a personal example with me. So you've heard me talk a little bit about my ulcerative colitis. And as I began to think about the time in my life when I developed the symptoms and what was going on for me, I started to realize that I felt a huge component of it had to do with my relationship with my parents. Now, I think my parents were awesome. I think they were fantastic. They gave me so many opportunities. And I think they really did their best to give me a good foundation for teachings and a good life. But I also believe that in the course of human nature, there is a period of time that young adults tend to blame a lot of things on their parents, and often maybe even deflect a lot of their personal feelings towards their parents. And I kind of had this underlying belief from my childhood that my parents were never satisfied with me, they always expected more from me. And I really carried that into adulthood. 

 

And I think it ultimately ended in this internal contention that I had and these physical symptoms. So the time that I began developing the symptoms, I had just had my fourth child in 5½ years, and I had been working just ten hours a week, but then I returned to full-time work, so we had a lot going on. And looking back, I was definitely putting a lot of pressure on myself. Now fast forward about ten years and I began this journey of starting to figure out the link between the mind and the body for myself. And with all of the coaching tools that I was learning from the Life Coach School, I started taking responsibility for my emotions and stopped blaming my parents and my upbringing and my culture for my feelings of unworthiness. Now, I still kept having some negative or uncomfortable feelings around my parents, feeling like they maybe were judging me. And so it was actually when I was doing some work from Byron Katie reading, Loving What Is. And she says if you have painful thoughts, it's because you're thinking something that's in contrast to reality. I realized that if I really looked at the evidence, my parents had done nothing but support me and tell me they were proud of me, and in other ways help me. So another thing I learned in theory, but it took some work to apply it to myself, was knowing that what I did, or my actions, were just circumstances in my parents’ circumstance line.

 

I'm not in their model, other than what I do is in their circumstance line, and then they choose how they think, or feel or act about that. And I had to also understand the fact that we are not supposed to be happy all the time. And there was a possibility that I had caused my parents some pain because of disappointments they might have, and that I did not have to take responsibility for that. That was their model. My actions were in their circumstance line, and then they chose what they thought about it. And people are not supposed to be happy all the time. There is sadness and there is disappointment in everyone's life, and that is part of life. I shouldn't beat myself up if I had caused my parents that. Another thought that helped me was this all happened the way it was supposed to happen. That's from Byron Katie as well. Everything that has happened, happened exactly how it was supposed to. How do you know? Because that's how it did happen. So they were the perfect parents. For me, I was the perfect daughter for them. I acted exactly as I was supposed to act. And all of these things happened exactly as they were supposed to. So nothing can be said or done about it. So no need to argue with the past or waste that mental energy. 

 

So that's what led to my understanding that I was the one that was putting all of that pressure on myself, which is absolutely true. I've been doing that for years. And once I realized all of that, I began to unravel that for myself and share that information with my parents. That was a real key in helping me heal with my ulcerative colitis. And the last time I got a colonoscopy, they said I had no active disease. So, I really believe that physical and mental can be very connected. And it's our job, if our body is giving us these signals, to interpret them, and to try to figure out what it is that could be the deeper sign of what we might need to learn and what we might need to let go of. 

 

If you are struggling with a relationship right now, I want you to ask yourself these questions and write them down without filter, as if no one is ever going to read them. Maybe tear them up if you have to later. But ask yourself some questions: 

How do you want to feel about this person?

How do you want to feel right now?

Would it feel better to like this person or dislike this person? 

Do you know that you have the option to love this person unconditionally, regardless of what they do or don't do? 

What is stopping you from unconditionally loving for your own sake?

How could this person be teaching me about love?

 

And that's what I've got today for you on relationships. Now go love those people in your life for your own sake.

 

Thank you so much for listening. I hope you learned a little bit about your brain today that helps you in your life like it helped me. Please be sure and subscribe and leave a review. And, of course, be sure and share this podcast with someone you know who wants an unstoppable body and mind.