Welcome back to the Remodel Your Reality Challenge! The experiences you had as a child formed your love beliefs. If you grew up in an affectionate family, or if your family was very expressive and communicated feelings of love through words, you may feel most loved when you’re being treated affectionately or when someone tells you they love you. Conversely, if you received no such messages as a child, you may doubt your own lovability. If you grew up with a parental model of a healthy marriage, you probably developed empowering beliefs about relationships, whereas if you grew up with an unhealthy or dysfunctional marriage model, it’s likely you’ll question the value of marriage or the possibility of happy-couple-dom.
One Thing To Think About
If you believe you are good and worthy of love, you will be much more likely to attract healthy people into your life and expect a high standard of treatment from them. Your faith in people will cause you to look for the genuine goodness in each person in your life, and this will allow you to have high-quality connections.
Conversely, if you have doubts about your own deservingness of love or you mistrust people, you probably have some unhealthy beliefs about love and relationships. These beliefs could cause you to live in fear of abandonment or prompt you to be suspicious of your partner. Not only is this environment detrimental to building a quality union, it can wreak havoc on your emotional stability.
One Question To Answer
Do you believe you’re lovable? In your mind, is there such a thing as soul mates? What has your experience with commitment taught you about marriage and relationships?
One Challenge To Take
- Identify one empowering belief you have about love.
- How has that belief served you in your life and work?
- Now, identify one disempowering belief you have about love.
- For each belief, ask yourself the following:
- Identify it – Write the belief down.
- Define it – What is supporting this belief? What experiences are you using to prove the belief?
- Disprove it – Are your proof points really valid? What else could they mean?
- Shift it – How could you improve upon this need, so that it serves you? What proof points could you use to support it?
Until next time, take care!
Kim
