How To Stop Self-Sabotaging Dating So You Can Meet Your Soulmate
Tired of the same terrible love life? Here's how to stop sabotaging yourself.
by Breston Kenya from Pexels If you're looking for love in all the wrong places, then there's a good chance that you're actually self-sabotaging when it comes to dating and romance.
If searching for your soulmate has you stuck wondering how to find love that won't break your heart again, then it might be time to look inward to why you can't find healthy relationships. It might have more to do with your own limiting beliefs and struggle to let go of the past than you realize.
You’ve likely heard the saying, “Men marry their mother, and girls marry their father.” This is just too simplistic when taking into account how complex human beings are.
Family plays an important role in your love life.
The reality is that both parents and your entire family of origin play a role in how you are hard-wired for love.
Whether you know your biological parents or not, whether you were raised by one parent or both, you learned about intimate relationships in your family of origin.
If finding your soulmate is the goal, then it's important to know your biggest obstacle to achieving it.
The key to healthy relationships lies in your subconscious mind.
Here’s the deal: You have a subconscious program driving your choices and behavior in relationships. It determines who you find attractive and who you have chemistry with.
This is the key to understanding why you struggle to make love last. This subconscious program is your "Love Imprint."
What is your Love Imprint?
Your Love Imprint the system in your subconscious mind that functions like a personal GPS setting for love.
This was created when you were a small child and consists of three parts: Your limiting beliefs, mental and emotional patterns, and behavioral strategies for giving and receiving love. All three of these parts work together in a system to block you from the love you desire.
That’s the simple explanation for a complex system that has many layers.
We needed our Love Imprint to survive as kids.
When you're born, you're physically incapable of taking care of yourself. You’re helpless, so you need someone to take care of you in order to survive. What most people don’t think about is that you also have two emotional needs that must be fulfilled in order to survive: You need to feel loved and safe.
And you'll do anything in order to feel loved and safe. You will take on any belief or behavior in order to get these needs met. That's how important they are to your survival.
You take on any belief, behavior, or strategy to feel loved and safe in your family of origin; to ensure that you fit in and they'll continue to provide for you — even if it means thinking less of yourself.
Some of us carry wounds in our Love Imprint.
Children have a unique way of taking responsibility for their circumstances. When a child is not getting what they need from a parent, the child doesn’t say some version of, “Mom, that isn’t very helpful. What I need is to be loved and told that everything will be all right.”
No child has that level of self-awareness. Instead, children ask themselves, “What's wrong with me?”
As a child, you take full responsibility for the fact that your parents didn’t have the best strategies for raising you. You took on a "wound," something that says you’re not loveable exactly as you are, and that wound births all kinds of limiting beliefs and emotional reactions.
How does your Love Imprint affect your choices and behavior?
Let’s say you believe all men are cheaters. Your subconscious mind will highlight any information that means the man you're with is untrustworthy. You’ll likely be triggered into feeling jealous or insecure whenever he speaks with another woman.
You might put too much emphasis on dating a "trustworthy" man, even when there is no spark of attraction.
Maybe you feel like you have to prove you're loveable. This strategy leads women to doing "the pursuit" in the dating process, only to find that the men they want never step up to claim them.
If this is one of your strategies for love, you might choose men who reject you. If you have to prove you're loveable in order to feel loved, then you'll always need that challenge to exist so you can overcome it. It feels familiar to what you experienced in your family regarding love.
Knowing how your subconscious system is wired for love and transforming it is the shortcut to having the long-lasting love you desire.
Change what you think of as "familiar."
The main job of the subconscious mind is to keep you alive. It does this by highlighting the familiar.
As a human being, you have physical needs required for you to exist. If your body’s temperature, heart rate, or blood pressure fall outside of a very narrow range, you'll die.
There are also behavioral needs. Your subconscious mind strives to keep your behavior consistent within a narrow range. Because you’re wired for survival, your subconscious mind directs you toward similar circumstances.
The subconscious mind cannot judge. Think of the subconscious as having two buckets: Known and unknown. What is known is considered "safe," and everything else is considered "unsafe." This is because whatever you've done in life has worked.
Your subconscious wants to bring you more of the same experiences because it assumes you will continue to survive through whatever you’ve already experienced.
The subconscious has no clue if you're happy or miserable; it only knows that you’ve lived through all of your experiences.
Your Love Imprint is the program for intimate relationships.
It tells you what love feels like and how it functions. So if you’ve never experienced the kind of love you desire, there's a disconnect between what is highlighted out in the world, and what you truly want in a soulmate.
The underlying limiting belief system comes from the circumstances within your family, then gets played out via intimate relationships.
You meet someone and have all the good feelings, You’re certain this time it will be different, only to discover it’s the same. There is nothing wrong with you — as a matter of fact, your survival mechanism is 100 percent intact.
You’ve probably had the experience of walking into a room of people, most of whom you’ve never met. Your eyes connect with someone's, you smile, and you begin to have a conversation.
Have you then discovered you have all these things in common that you couldn’t have known ahead of time?
It seems like kismet.
You don’t decide in your conscious mind who you find attractive. It just happens. You simply speak to the people who stand out — who are highlighted for you by your subconscious, drawing you toward the familiar.
When it comes to love, you're always in reaction to the past.
If the last guy cheated, you want to make sure the new one is faithful. If the ex is an alcoholic, then all your focus goes toward finding someone sober, etc.
Truthfully, what you really want is not the opposite of what you don't want. Yet this is how you stumble into love simply by accident.
Accidental love leads to a similar dysfunction like the one you grew up with. If you desire something you’ve never experienced before, then you will never find it looking outside of you. The solution you seek is inside.
As a child, you assigned meaning to the events that occurred. The plot points of your past are not changeable, but that doesn't mean you can't change. Having a new experience of love changes the identification of what love is to your subconscious mind.
Just like riding a bike, once you learn how to love, you cannot unlearn it.
You can change your dating strategies all you like, but Your Love Imprint will still keep you stuck in the same patterns blocking you from your soulmate. So, look to your limiting beliefs and find where you're self-sabotaging when it comes to dating so you can reprogram yourself to find true love!
Orna and Matthew Walters are soulmate coaches who help people release bad habits to create long-lasting love from the inside out. You can download a complimentary copy of their e-book, Recognizing Mr. Right, along with a guided hypnosis program on self-acceptance on their website.