Sweet Toxic Love

Rhea: I love the story. I love the romance story.

Liz: You do. You love it.

Rhea: I love it. But actually, what I've started to realize is it's the story that hurts me the most because the love story always has the same progression. They meet. Something happens that they're attracted to each other. Some kind of obstacle comes in the way. Someone changes, something changes and they live happily ever after. That story, that timeline, that kind of growth span as it were of a relationship is not realistic.

Liz: It never was.

Rhea: No, it never was but because I believed it that it was, all I was doing was when a relationship, a partnership, anything started to stagnate, I'd think, Oh, well this is the tense bit and when it's done, we're just going to be closer, and we're all going to be living happily ever after

Liz: This is the obstacle that's going to bring us together.

Rhea: Exactly, so it just kind of left me in this place where I was constantly sublimating myself and my needs and my wants so that we could get to that. I'd stay in this holding pattern of like, things are pretty shitty here waiting for things to get good again. And I didn't realize that that's not how it works.

Liz: How do you think it really works then?

Rhea: Well, now having done all the work that we've been doing over the past three seasons . . .

Liz: Your spiritual boot camp.

Rhea: My spiritual boot camp, I would say that in a relationship when things start to stagnate, when things start going wrong, as it were or feels like they're not quite as they were.

Liz: What would be an example of things going wrong?

Rhea: So that yumminess, that mutual admiration, that almost infatuation with one another, it shifts. And you know we hear a lot about the 'honeymoon phase' and the reality, and how the first year of marriage is really hard and relationships are work and all that kind of stuff, and they are work when it comes to working on yourself and looking at what the other person is mirroring to you, staying in the relationship itself shouldn't necessarily be the work.

Liz: I think that's really key, because I think that's what a lot of people get stuck in.

Rhea: In the crash course, in my spiritual love crash course that I ended up doing, I would go into each relationship thinking this is just going to solve my problems. This somehow is going to show me that I am lovable. So I'd be on the hunt for evidence the other person liked me, that I like them, that this was going to work, that this was the one that was going to fix my wounds and be my happy ending as it were, or my happy ending for now, whatever kind of notion I'd gone into the relationship with.

Liz: In romance book speak, it's the HFN, the happy for now.

Rhea: Exactly. Yeah. Whether it was I just want a physical connection. I want an emotional connection. I just want any connection, I went into . . . 

Liz: Give me something, please.

Rhea: Give me something please, to make me feel like I feel good. What I learned fairly quickly with the help of the people around me was that each one of my 'partners', if we want to call it that, in this game and this dance . . .

Liz: This person.

Rhea: Each one of my dance partners were mirroring something back to me about myself that needed healing, and using that experience in that way, allowed me to become more whole and allowed me to connect to myself further. But even now that I'm in this place where I know what I want and things seem to be working out a lot better, I still feel that, where still whenever I get triggered, I don't look at the other person and what they're doing. I try to see what it is about that relationship that's mirroring something back to me. Whether it is someone has weaker boundaries and what that feels like to be on the other side of that, because also I've struggled with that in the past. Whether it is, someone's not sure about how they feel and what it's like to be on the other side of that, because I've struggled with that in the past. You know, I was always torn between this. I need to walk away because this is going to end and I can see the ending so I'm just going to walk away now, and there's other side of, I need to stay in it because I found someone who I kind of like, and they kind of like me and the infatuation, the yummy stage kept me staying in stuff for much longer cause I kept waiting for it to come back. So I had all these coping mechanisms for doing so whether it was living in my head, living in fantasy, convincing myself that it's work and I just had to keep working at it, making excuses for the other person constantly when they didn't even make excuses for themselves. I would make them for them. No probs. I'll write the story for you as to why you couldn't treat me better.

Liz: You're like, I'm a pro.

Rhea: I'm a pro. You don't even need to do anything. I'll do it.

Liz: You're busting out your laptop, ready to write this story.

Rhea: I'm ready to do this. I'm ready to explain why you not treating me good enough is fine. You know, I was ready for all of that because I was going from ‘it's either the end or it's fine’. I wasn't living in any gray within a relationship at all. So, I was either rewriting it all or I was walking away. And actually, once you start understanding that everything in this life is gray, every moment is another moment, it does really shift that for you because it starts being like, okay, I can enjoy this for what it is. It doesn't have to mean that it's the end or that it's a learning or whatever else. It's just being really conscious of what the story my mind was telling me, and what I was actually feeling and what my instinct was telling me, and following the one that wasn't the story, even though for so long, stories where all I had.

Liz: Yeah, and stories fed us. In third dimensional consciousness, we all lived through stories, didn't we? And everything was an example and everything was a story in order to model for us how we needed to live our lives. So, we always depended on them to define how we would relate to one another. And so, it was like, they got to 50 years of marriage. Look at that. Isn't that what we want? Nobody ever asked, why should I want to be married to somebody for 50-some odd years? Nobody really questioned the idea that maybe . . .

Rhea: It was celebrated. It was like, Oh, well done. You've achieved something.

Liz: It's was always celebrated. The longer you were together, the more amazing a person you were. Staying together long enough for you to be able to look back and say, well, I did that as a test of endurance. I've tolerated the same person for 50-some odd years. Isn’t quite a love story?

Rhea: No.

Liz: That's a test of wills. And it's not to say people can't be together 25, 50 years and for it to mean something. It's not to say that in fifth dimensional oneness consciousness, that partnership and long-term partnership isn't possible, because it certainly is, but making this kind of outside goal of we have to be together for this number of years for this to be worth my while, or if I'd meet you, I have to know that I can be with you for 50 years, then we've already started to stunt our growth, haven't we?

Rhea: Because the thing is, as I look back at all my relationships that I've had where I was so focused on getting to an end goal, rather than enjoying it, that I look back and I think, God, they were going to end anyway. Why didn't I just enjoy it while I was there? Why was I so focused on the end before the end happened? Because all I did was, I lived the end throughout the whole relationship instead, and I don't know how to change that.

Liz: So when you are present in a relationship and you're living for the present, and you're sort of in that now moment, and you get to enjoy that, what also happens is that you get to be free in it.

Rhea: Yes. Oh my God. That makes so much sense.

Liz: So when you have the freedom to enjoy a relationship where the future means nothing, then you really get to see what it's all about. You get to be so present in it and you'll get to play out that relationship in no time. Does that make sense?

Rhea: What I understood from it was if you're in the relationship in the now, and you're not putting any expectations or hopes onto the future of it, then you're able to see it for what it is.

Liz: Yes.

Rhea: And you're not waiting for someone to change or waiting for something to change because you are living for the future of the relationship rather than the present of it.

Liz: Yeah. If you're going to hope or wait for somebody to change, you're going to be waiting for a long time. And if you expect them to change for you in order to accommodate a particular need so that you can be together . . .

Rhea: Or to show you that you love them

Liz: First of all, that just shows how insecure they are, that they'd be willing to change themselves for someone else, and that's not really a recipe for a healthy long-term relationship, but the willingness to change or expecting someone else to change is just a recipe for misery.

Rhea: When I was staring every fear in the eyes and walking through them and becoming more and more healed and giving myself more and more permission to be me, on the surface, I've changed. I didn't drink and now I do. I mean, a reasonable amount. I was scared of human touch, and now that's no longer an issue. When I was in relationships when I hadn't done any work, they were all very me-centric and how they were feeding my fears and feeding my ego and retelling the story of me that I told myself. The more and more I managed to get out of that, the more I could be a more present partner, the more I could be free, fun and joyful, all the rest. So I know it's possible to change, but the difference is that I became more of myself. I became truer to me. I didn't change to become more like someone else. I didn't change for someone else. I became more me. 

And yes, that meant that all these positive side effects happened for my relationships and my interactions and all the rest, and not just romantic, but it wasn't me changing for someone else. The closer you are to yourself, the more you work through your fears, the more you work through your karma, the more you do the work, the more you know who you are. Therefore, as we say pretty much in every episode, the less everyone else is going to fit you. Only certain people are going to fit you as a result. And then at that point, it's going to last longer because you both fit each other better. Whether it will last forever, we don't know but it will last longer.

Liz: And that's not the point. The point was never forever. It was in 3D again and we've acknowledged that. It has served its purpose, the idea that two people can be together for a long time. It was . . .

Rhea: And suffer and endure each other.

Liz: And suffer and endure each other. But they had kids and their kids had kids, and that was all part of a really lovely story. But in 5D, which is something that people haven't really been experiencing so of course there's just all of that uncertainty, people will grow together, but not because they have to, but because they want to, because they're partnering for their personal growth, and that personal growth will enhance their growth in their partnership. And one inspires the other and one can hold space for the other.

Rhea: When you're in this place where you're fearless or less fearful, and you're just enjoying the other person, you kind of take them for what they are. You take yourself for what you are and you take advantage of the triggers in the relationship in order to grow. But to get here, I had to really experience the opposite and really see the difference. I was clinging on to what I decided years before was the potential of our relationship, and waiting for that to come into fruition and where the relationship itself wasn't a relationship at all, but one person waiting for the other one. And the problem was the more I stayed, the more I sublimated myself, the more I think he resented me and respected me less for doing so, to the point where my feelings, my wants my needs became side notes to his moods, his desires and it hurts so much, but I stayed because I thought that's what you do when you love someone. 

Seven years on, eight years on, I still see echoes in my reactions. I still think, Oh God, is this like that? When the intentions of the other person are totally different, the story I tell myself is still that relationship sometimes, because the longer I stayed, the longer I allowed him to be in my life in the way in which I had allowed him to be in my life, not only the worst it would get. Obviously, there were periods of ups and downs. It wasn't all terrible. There were periods of ups and downs, which kept me going, but consistently on a curve, it was a downward one. The longer I stayed in the situation, the more I felt it had to work because I had to make it worth my time. I needed the 'happily ever after' to explain how I had stuck around before, because if it wasn't for the ending, oh my God, the ending would have written the rest of the story for me, if that makes sense.

Liz: It justified it all, being able to tie it up with a pretty bow.

Rhea: Oh, if we ended up together, then all this stuff made sense. Or if we didn't end up together, then I should have left a long time earlier. It ruled my life in a way, because I need it so badly for things to work out so that it could have all been worth it, and that I was good enough to have gotten him. And he stopped being a human and he started being the personification of my worth, which is so ironic because it was outside of me. I had made someone else and how they felt about me the measure of who I was.

Liz: And that's really going to be the thing that we're going to be having to unravel over the next few years as we come into this real consciousness, because we're going to have to face our own worth in all the ways in which we have measured it. And we're going to have to face all those toxic relationships of past, present and what would become our future if we stay in them.

Rhea: Relationships aren't meant to be a measure of anything. Most relationships out there to some degree or another suck.

Liz: Well, yes.

Rhea: They are hard. They are painful.

Liz: They are.

Rhea: People are not just compromising. They are sacrificing. They consider walking away and then they come back and they hate themselves for coming back, but they stay.

Liz: Yes.

Rhea: Because we have been taught as a society, that being in relationship, that having a partner means that you are worth something.

Liz: Yes.

Rhea: We have been taught as a society that if you are single, it means you are unwanted, which actually it's just not true because at the end of the day, if you are strong enough to walk away from a relationship that doesn't serve you with the hope of finding one that does, then you are more in your worth than you've ever been before. At the end of the day, it has to come from inside first. I think about so many of my relationships since, and I think about how I acted and reacted because it was all coming from this defensive space of, I won't let that happen again, that I didn't see the love in so many situations. I was waiting for the other shoe to drop because it dropped once. I was always looking for the faults. I never gave anyone the benefit of the doubt because I didn't trust anything, because I didn't trust myself. I had to rebuild. In order to trust other people, I had to rebuild the trust in myself.

Liz: Yes.

Rhea: In order to love other people, I had to love myself. In order to listen to other people, I had to listen to myself. In order to help someone else or give someone else the space to heal, I had to give it to myself first. In order to partner up with someone else, whether it be for a weekend, a night, a month, six months or a year or forever, I had to partner with myself first.

Liz: And that's the thing about toxic relationships and why they are so hard to leave sometimes. And that's why we call it, giving the worst we've got, because it is really difficult to face all those parts of ourselves that we judge, that we don't like. And we think, well, if somebody can at least like or love me enough, then I'm better off.

Rhea: I think when you're living within your karmic story, when you're living within the shit, when you're feeling that you are unlovable, not worthy, undeserving, broken, nothing, imperfect, evil, you don't think you're good enough, so you are desperately looking for someone else to tell you that you are good enough. And as a society, we have been conditioned that being in partnership, being in relationship means we are good enough so you will end up giving everything you have for that relationship to work or at least to look like it's working, so that other people think that you're good enough so you don't have to.

Liz: Right.