Maneuvering an Emotional Chokehold

As a Love and Relationship Psychic and Coach, I have the pleasure of connecting with people about their love lives and relationships.  Recently, I felt inspired by a client’s session and received Divine Guidance (and her permission) to share this with you. 

She is a beautiful, vibrant woman. Highly intelligent, successful, and quite kind.  She is the type of person many of us would see and think, “Her life is perfect. She has it all figured out.”

The reality is that she has been in an emotionally abusive romantic relationship for three years too long. 

She has told herself that she can fix it—that if she could just “be better” and “work harder,” then her partner would be happy—and that maybe the relationship would one day be what she has always wanted it to be.

In this relationship, she often experiences feeling devalued, dismissed, wrong, and anxious. She is not treated with love and respect. Many times, she has wanted to leave but has chosen to stay. She is losing confidence.

Does anything about her story feel familiar to you?   As someone who loves to identify and dismantle illusions that separate us from Love, which I call the Illusions of Relationship™—I am excited to shed light on this common situation with a Love Renegade’s perspective, starting with mistaken thinking.

My client’s mistaken thinking was such that she believed that “being better” was going to going to lead to new enjoyable experiences in her relationship. Her motivation for “being better” was with the expectation that her [former] partner would like her more or treat her better. Although completely understandable, this approach is not only manipulative but also a form of self-deception.

The mistaken thinking at play here aligns fully with the Illusions of Relationship™, but not with Love. If continued, actions made from such thinking would result in more opportunities to deceive and be deceived, more reasons to stay stuck, and more dissatisfaction in relationships—causing a lot of pain and frustration!

Now back to my client—-in addition to being gorgeous and successful—she is a martial artist. In her coaching session, her Guides and I directed her to apply martial arts to this common relationship dynamic.  From this exercise, she uncovered that her [former] partner’s “signature move” against her was a chokehold-—which made perfect sense for her!

See, the throat is the energy center of communication, authenticity, and self-expression.  When we have blocks on our throat chakra, we are experiencing difficulty in speaking or living our truth.  Nothing about this relationship really supported her in shining as her authentic self!

As we continued the session, I watched her throat chakra heal as she connected with her inner Love Renegade. As she saw the enlightened truth before her, she embraced a new perspective that will support her in breaking free of an emotional chokehold and the Illusions of Relationship™.   

Of course, without being consciously aware of it, many of us unknowingly allow ourselves to be put into emotional chokeholds. For your own healing and illumination, I encourage you to spend some time with the following questions: 
 

  • What would I do or say if I felt more trusting and confident? 
  • Is there anywhere in my relationship or life where I am deceiving myself?
  • What part of me wants to shine? 

It’s ok to be unpopular

I want to speak about popularity and how it impacts our relationships.  As a love and relationship psychic and coach, I get to connect with a wide variety of people about heartbreak, healing, and frustrating experiences they’ve had in their relationships.

From my experience, I notice that there are some of us who would rather be popular and liked, rather than be in an authentic, happy relationship. As someone who takes pleasure in identifying and spotting illusions that separate us from love and cause disruption in our relationships, our dating experience, with our significant others, etc—which I have come to name the Illusions of Relationship™— I got curious about this.

I have seen that for some of us, the thought of fully claiming what we want and daring to be our authentic selves, is an absolutely terrifying endeavor. Bringing this to a person’s attention has, more often than not, led me to be highly unpopular, which I take responsibility for.

I see that many of us are [unconsciously] fond of our Illusions and when questioned, cling on more and more tightly. Even though it is empowering and deeply healing to know when we are in Illusion, it can lead to a lot of fear for someone who is not ready to see themselves and others with eyes of love and truth.

What I feel guided to share with you is that I am willing to be unpopular. Yes, if I am fortunate enough to have you on my mailing list and if I am blessed for you to be a client, then no matter what I will identify misalignments to Truth and I will support you (as best as I can) in having a life and relationships without sacrificing, “selling out,” or settling.

If you have been following me for a while, you will see that I talk about the sacrifice aspect frequently. More recently in my last email about the Illusion of Satisfaction, I touched upon the settling aspect.  Now, it’s time to discuss “selling out.”

Whenever we try to be who someone wants us to be, we are selling out.  It puts us out of alignment with our personal truth and with universal truth.  When we pretend that we are ok for settling for less than what we actually want, when we fail to communicate our needs, we are acting out of fear.  We are, in a way, telling the Universe, “no. no thanks. I may say I want a great relationship, but my actions show you that I am fine with getting crumbs.”  This leads to resentment and it keeps you further from what you actually want.

What I have come to see is that shedding light on Illusion can frustrate and upset people, and you know what? I understand.

It can be very scary to step up and ask for what you want. It can be really intimidating to live life as your true self. For most of us, it is unknown. It is uncertain. We are taught to believe that the unknown is scary and should be avoided at all costs.

This is the journey of a Love Renegade. As courage is the vehicle of love, the Love Renegade chooses to see, heal, and work through Illusions. Love Renegades choose to create their own future based on love and truth, instead of selling out and being who everyone wants them to be.

So today, I send you blessings of courage as you embrace your unique path and dare to create relationships that reflect and support YOU. 

We are Complete

We are Complete

Do you judge others for not giving you the support (ahem, validation) that you would like?  Does a part of you feel that you *need* support from others to be the person you desire to be?

I ask these questions to shed light on Mistaken Thinking where love and support are confused with entitlement and validation.  See, it is normal to seek safety and comfort when you are making changes and making new choices.

What we forget in this process is the Illusion of Drama, the Illusion of Relationship™ that separates us from Love by insisting that drama come with the natural chaos of change.   

When we make changes our environment will react.  By environment I am largely referring to our relationships.  The other person (let’s say your partner, your husband, your adult child, your best friend, etc)  may not be in “like vibration” to the changes you are making and may react as such.  In this instance, it is important that you acknowledge that like you, this person has free will.

Just as you are free to make changes, others are free to react to those changes.  If any part of you is seeking validation and approval and even feels entitled to receiving this so-called unconditional support, all you are really doing is activating the Illusion of Drama by causing yourself unnecessary drama, pain, and agony. 

I bring this up to invite you to acknowledge your own actions, your own intentions, and your own process of initiating change. For example, have you entered into change with a variation of either of the following?  (I have done both!) 

Example A–  You bulldoze forward with an attitude of, “I don’t care what others think! They will have to deal with it!”
Example B– You take action, but you do it in a covert way. It’s like you are living a double life.

Each of the aforementioned situations will inevitably lead to fear because they were initiated with fear.  Not only do both of these actions invite drama, as they amplify the Illusion of Drama, but they also make assumptions, which is a hallmark of the Illusion of Absorption. 

As you grow, it is wise to accept that much like your inner world and our beautiful oceans, your relationships will ebb and flow.  You may find that some of these relationships fall away.  This can be both a time of grief and a time of celebration.

Whether your heart is hurting from a breakup or a series of misunderstandings, choose to know that healing and peace are on the way.  What would happen if you stepped out of a victim mentality and into your own authority?  What would you do differently with all that you learned?  What has the other person taught you about yourself? 

Bless the gifts of these experiences and move on.

We are complete. We are whole. All is well.

Exposing False Love + Mistaken Thinking

Many people I connect with express to me that they want to have fulfilling relationships where they feel loved, seen, and supported by others. What I have found is that while this is a beautiful ideal, it is an ideal that can unknowingly push love away.

With the desire to be loved, seen, and supported by others, you might have created standards that came about from past negative situations where you experienced the opposite of being loved, seen, and supported.

As these events were unpleasant—and understandably very hard for you—they caused you to put walls up to protect yourself from being hurt.  Then, as you began to process and heal from those experiences you developed healthy boundaries for how you wanted to be treated.

This was great then, but now you are likely stuck and not feeling fully loved, seen, and supported by others. This is because the healthy boundaries you once created have now become conditions, and conditions inevitably lead to being stuck.

Let’s explore this in a practical way…

Many of us mistake approval for unconditional love and acceptance. To see how true this is for you, look at how you handle rejection—in all areas of your life—not only your relationships!

  • Do you avoid rejection by staying quiet and tolerating what no longer supports you? 
  • Do you avoid rejection by being so forceful and frequent about expressing your opinions that it pushes others away? 
  • Do you choose to dislike others because you perceive that they do not approve of you?

This mistaken thinking [of believing that unconditional love and acceptance are the same as approval and validation] keeps you stuck. Instead of going deep within yourself, authentically connecting with yourself, and making choices that go beyond your conditions by connecting authentically with others, your energy gets fixated on protecting your self-image and micro-managing other people.

What would change if you handled rejection in a new way?  What would it feel like to create new boundaries instead of upholding outdated conditions?

Thank you for reading and for spending some time on your relationship with you today.

To Your Inner Wisdom,

Lauren

Exploring the Need to Suffer with Coaching Questions

One form of mistaken thinking is believing that life has to be hard and that relationships take a lot of work.  Many people believe that we have to suffer in order to grow and that anything worth having requires a lot of work. While there is a little bit of truth to this, this is another form of mistaken thinking.  Suffering and growth do not have to co-exist.  -Lauren Kay Wyatt, CEO of Love Renegades

To go deeper with this, I have some questions for you!

Do you believe that life has to be hard and that relationships take a lot of hard work?  On a scale of 1-10, how energizing are your life and relationships? Do you feel more enlivened or more tied down by your relationships and circumstances?

If you are not energized by your life and relationships, you most likely—at least on some level—believe that life has to be hard and that you have to suffer to receive “anything good.”

What would change in your life and relationships if you did not have to suffer? How would you be different from who you are now?