How not to feel in love any more...

Karuna, I have thought of an even better example which I am sure you won't take offence to. Imagine some lady is on a diet, she struggles with her weight. She walks past a beautiful patisserie and in the window is the most beautiful looking chocolate cake, full of gooey chocolate, pieces of fudge, chocolate sauce, chocolate moose, etc. How do you tell that lady to stop having thoughts about loving that cake and wanting the cake? Would you say "Ohh but I bet it isn't that tasty, it won't be as tasty as it looks, try ignore it?" You see I would say that the way to make the woman turn off her feelings for that cake is to say "it is just wrong, there are probably 10,000 calories in that cake, you will put on weight, you'll feel bloated after eating that, you need willpower, there will be temptations but if you give in to them the only outcome will be negative ones".
Do you see what I mean? To stop feeling a certain way about something is to focus on the negatives of the results.
I bet I have offended you again though.

Hello Everyone,

We all respect the right to offer ideas, suggestions, advice and opinions. These are the principles for which these forums exist. But we must always strive to do this with respect, hopefully compassion and trying to understand the OP intent.

Now, we do not always meet those requirements. I certainly fail more often then not. But I think we need to respect the fact that posters arrive here with their own particular perceptions and feelings and yes, their own issues. These things create our own version of reality. And we react and respond from those very real perceptions.

We must also strive to be aware of when a particular thread may trigger something in us and then we wind up projecting some of our own deeper hurts and experiences onto others. Again, I have been guilty of this myself. And what is good for me, is not necessarily good for others. How I see things, may not be how they see things.

In the end, we are all striving, to feel better, to fix problems, to explore ourselves, and for some to heal from very painful experiences.

Now, sometimes things are not as simple as black/white and right/wrong. Placing value judgments or coming to moral conclusions about what people experience or say or their behavior. This happens in these forums. And must strive to be careful in this arena.

I myself became involved with someone which turned out to be very painful for me. And I arrived here saying all kinds of things and experiencing toxic feelings, emotions, anger and pain. I was not thinking or feeling clearly about it all. If someone simply said to me how wrong, foolish, stupid or blind I was to fall in love with her, well, that would have been useless information. Instead I received understanding, kindness and support.

In my opinion, Karuna is exploring WHY she feels this way about this man. She is not saying she intends to act on this or create harm, and even if she did, it is not my place to judge or make her feel any more pain for it. We have a forum here called, remorse. Take a look at it. People are in sheer anguish over things that they did. Should we forever hold those things above them?

It is ok to be honest here. And sometimes we need to tell people difficult things. Just be sensitive to a person's own wounding. And understand their perspective may be different then your own. We are all unique, we all arrive here because of our deeply personal hurts and anguish. Let us all remember that.

Thanks

Mark,

Thank you very much for you previous post. i'm not as kind and wise as you are and so : I will just stick to what i said about the coffe-machine...

I really appreciate you sharing your experience. I don't know how, but i feel it helps.

I'm trying to meet people. I met 3 interesting guys and the last one... made strange and very accurate remarks, i still feel uneay. he said i was always like "i'm guilty, i should do that and that, i regret that" i was in shock he was right. i'd like to untangle those thoughts but there's like a fog around them. as i said i really worked on my childhood. but i think i still have some weakness sometimes. mmm i guess there's another field i could explore, but as you did not comment my question about energy i think that past life topics are not your favorite, are they?
.... he was perceiving something holding me back :/
as i could not see any red flag (but ... question flags ^^) for him, i stopped chatting with others, waiting to see what's coming out of the meetings. I'm seeing him soon, but i "fear" he did not behave the same as me... is it correct/logical for me to have this expectation? i'm not even flirting with him, just talking but for me, as i want to be sure that state does not happen with 2 people at the same time, i think it's safer to put early boundaries.
I realized i put a lot of pressure on seeing this guy again, yet i just find him nice for now. i think it's because i 'm desperate and want to escape the dead end situation i'm in :/

mark1958 wrote:And in the end, this may simply be a case where you found someone who really attracts and interests you.

good to read from you

mark1958 wrote: Sometimes we can be hoping our partners "fix" us in some way.

my boss is sometimes impatient, stubborn, a little nasty, not coherent ...not even sure that a relationship would work with him! yet what i feel is very strong. I know i don't know him very much. i just feel attracted from any level i can be :/
it's something i don't like in how i am with the other guys. basically i'm trying to get more interested into someone else than i am in my boss. it's not fair.
but i agree with what you say, in general... lots of relationships are actual therapy attempts ^^
but here for the feelings about my boss... i still have no clue.

mark1958 wrote:Now, it is true, we need others to meet some of our needs. But, we need to come at them open, vulnerable and emotionally honest. We need to ask them, rather than expect them, to meet our needs. See, many of us do not do this. Not really. We assume our partners know what we need.

i'm usually the one people think should know about them! i know how tireing it is, & how hard it is to open your heart: you can not be sure the person will answer with the same honesty level. their ego can get in the way and leave you as (or more?) sad as before, with no hope.... BUT then it helps readjusting and look for understanding somewhere else, or with another way... right? i'm used to making this- risky - effort. I've seen a little more than half of my emotional questions discarded

the more i think of it, the more i regret i can't talk with my boss. hearing him saying i invented it all would help me get rid of his image in my heart. or if he'd say he feels something but wants to stay in his marriage, that's it. i would not try to make him change his mind.
It would be very different than thinking it's the case... he really made many strange "moves" on me, like the beginning of something (each time i was quite in shock and my mind was blocked) but then he backs off. i need to remind me of that because sometimes i wonder if i just imagined it.

mark1958 wrote: I pushed for emotional closeness (my hunger) and she pushed it away (her intimacy fears). But because I was in a fantasy bond, I stayed.

i'm not even in, i'm looking for the way out ^^

mark1958 wrote:In the end, I needed to assess why I was so filled with emotional hunger and what I needed to fix to be in a loving relationship rather than a fantasy bond.

May i ask you what you did to fix it?

Hi Karuna,

The term "emotional hunger" sounds more dramatic then it really is. It is very subtle and often it does not exist in our conscious awareness, but lies very much in our sub-conscious. And many people go through their lives and seek out relationships from an emotionally hungry place. I will do my best to explain.

When we have unmet emotional needs, and we spend our time ignoring those needs, we can find ourselves in a state of emotional hunger. Now, we may not even be aware of those needs. We can think all is good. That we are fine. That there are no problems. But there is always the persistent, nagging, inner voice that tells us something is missing. Something is not quite right. On the surface our lives may look very good. We can have friends and loved ones around us, we can be successful in our careers. BUT, we still find ourselves not feeling content or even very joyful or happy. And we are confused as to why.

What I came to discover, at least about myself, is there were unmet needs that I needed to tend to. Many times we feel that we must be in a significant relationship to feel good about ourselves. And so, when we find ourselves in one, it becomes a very significant attachment for us. A very important piece of our self-worth or self-love. In others words, if someone is not loving us, then we may feel something is wrong with us. So we cling hard to the attachment. I see this a lot in relationship stories.

Now these things do not lie in present awareness. But they are there. We do not walk around with a sign that says this , but it exists. And the longer our hunger remains un-satiated, the more problems we can have. Poor choices, bad relationships.

What we have to do is to go very deep inside of us and explore our emotional world. This goes back to the concept of emotional intelligence. We need to see what lies in there. What emotional pain we may be holding onto. We need to call up bad feelings and put them into conscious awareness. Because the hunger is that unresolved feeling/meaning/ belief we formed because of it.

If we do not feel good about ourselves, no one else will be able to make us feel that way. No idealized love or relationship or finding the one (I do not believe in the one), or being in love or whatever will resolve it. And if we have this hunger, we are prone to place that in the lap of our partners or potential partners. And we come at them from need.

I see this all of the time here as well. A lot of ego wounds and demands (hunger). You see it in the phrase she did this, and this, and he did x,y,z. Now while those may be true, they do not have to impact you and you can walk away. Unless you have unmet emotional needs that you are silently demanding your partner fill. So your ego remains wounded.

And the ego is the worst thing to listen to. Because it lies. If you have unmet emotional needs, the ego will mask that and create scenarios where you are not authentic. Where you get into trouble. You develop masks and false selves (we all do) to cover up these needs and show the world a false persona rather then a genuine one.

Also understand the difference between need and preference. We may tell ourselves that we need someone in our life. But we really do not. We may prefer having someone to love us, but we really do not need it. We can feel good about who we are even if we are alone or have to exit a bad relationship. (people stay because they think they need it rather then prefer it).

So, in the end it is about self discovery. Now some people can do this on their own and some need help in sorting it out. If you find out what it is you need emotionally to feel good, and then go about accepting the responsibility for making those happen, you more then likely will find that good things are attracted to you, rather then you trying to force them into reality.

I hope this helps.

I still thank you for your answers.
yet i still can't understand what this emotional hunger would be for me ....
the situation is the same: i feel very attracted to him and try not to let anything show, even to him. when on motorbike, sometimes he touches me a little more than other people on motorbikes do. last time we were in a meeting he touched my breasts (i think not on purpose) to grab something else , apologized and then, his knee touched mine several times, staying in contact several minutes; it was not by accident this time, he did as if nothing was happening... no reaction again from my side. my primary reaction is that it's normal that he touches me (my head knows it's not) and then i don't know what to do with it. i don't want to misbehave but i can't reject him either.
with other colleagues i have no problem setting boundaries - and it's quite automatic!
I NEVER was in this situation before. if i had any pattern left with father figure, authority , it would not wait until i'm more than 40 to show, would it?
if i were thinking i need to be with someone: 2 people regularly tell me they feel in love with me :/ i'm sad for them. I told them i don't feel the same but like them as friends. When i read you, i think if i needed a relationship to fill in anything, i'd be going with one of them...

now i think the guy who made comments about me having too many doubts in general, probably just did not have the same expectancy about honesty as i do. hence his comment.

so i really can't figure out what would be the emotional problem leading me to this situation : I have friends and problems in my family as i told you but i had some therapy about it - i really do MANY things i love in my life (music, arts, my 3 jobs, many sports...) so it's definitely not about me being annoyed i've had roommates, i know i can like the advantages of both of the situations and i feel quite lucky for the place i live in.
i really spent time thinking of what you say and still got no idea what it would be for me. that's why i was asking you what you did for your own emotional hunger. but perhaps it's too intimate, if it is, i respect that.

Hi Karuna,

What I decided to do to deal with my own emotional hunger was/is a personal journey. It would not be valuable to you because it is what I need, and what you need is or probably will be very different. This is about you, discovering you. No two people will be the same as we are all shaped by our childhood and life experiences.

In life we only have control over ourselves and nothing else really. We can not control others and how they feel or react to us, we can not control our life circumstances or adversities. We can not control our experiences. Things are going to happen to us, both good and bad. But if we understand ourselves as well as we can, these things will not deter us from living as fully as possible.

Your original thread question is: why do I feel love for an unavailable, married man? Well, I do not know the answer to that, only you can deduce what it is that is pushing you in that direction. However, you know this man is unavailable and is committed to someone else. So why would you allow yourself to become emotionally attached? If we truly love ourselves properly and have self respect, we would never allow ourselves to feel this way. Because we will probably lose in the end.

I have chased unavailable people in my life before. It never leads to happy outcomes, because, well, they are unavailable. For me, there was something going on inside of me that caused me to feel attraction for someone who was not going to be there for me. It was self defeating behavior.

Sometimes, when we become attached to someone who is unavailable, it is an emotionally safe thing to do. If we stop and think about it, we will never really have an actual relationship with this person. Instead we can engage in an imaginary one. Ruminating what it would be like. For some people, this distraction or diversion keeps you from looking at other things.

Is it fear of intimacy holding someone in this state? Never having to choose someone else who may actually want to be with us. Because that may not be safe emotionally. Even if you have had other relationships before, this could be a pattern for some.

These are just thoughts and ideas for you. None of this may have an impact for you. But you need to know that the secret for you, lies inside of you. Not me or anyone else. In the end only you can unlock it.