THE EVER-Ending love story

But what’s really happening when we think that we “love” someone who is hurting us?  We are amplifying the good memories of our partner and minimizing the very worst.  In the context of a toxic relationship, this is not a “Neverending Love Story”, but an “Ever-Ending Love Story”; always on the brink of another crisis, but never really being over and out. 

Did you know that you can fall OUT of love in a matter of minutes?  Understanding how you code, store, and retrieve those memories is key to taking control of them.  Falling out of love is not about falling into hate.  It’s about learning how to code your memories in a way that is realistic and no longer idealized.  Falling IN love is all about having an idealized vision of your partner; seeing them with “soft eyes”.  Falling out of love means holding a much more realistic vision that enables you to accurately recall the past consequences (and predict the future consequences) of maintaining the relationship.   

It’s a wonderful skill to be able to “put the past behind you.”  In most situations, it’s useful and healthy to be able to put past grievances, conflicts, and painful memories in the past, where they rightly belong.  But there are circumstances where that skill works AGAINST us.  Drug and alcohol abusers are typically very good at putting the consequences “behind them” and literally forgetting how bad it really was.  That leaves the chronic behavior pattern available and the consequences inaccessible.  Because behaviors never occur in the PAST.  They only occur in the present.  So if the consequences are in the past – behind you, where you can’t see them – the odds of repeating the patterned behavior rise exponentially. 

For the victims of domestic abuse, falling out of love can seem impossible.  Typically, they’ve had YEARS of deploying a survival strategy that relied on putting the pain and fear behind them.  Otherwise, they’d be paralyzed and overwhelmed, unable to function at work or at home.  Since abusers follow a standard pattern of escalation, this strategy ultimately fails.  But the victim has not developed a strategy that allows her (or him) to fall out of love.  Her love for the abuser is the only thing that has kept her functional through crisis after crisis.  So the pattern continues until she either reaches the tipping point where the pain is so severe that she cannot set it aside for even a moment, or she dies at the hands of her partner.