A Better Question than Love

Reflections For Those In Abusive Relationships

Image Courtesy The News Chronicle

Quite recently I watched what may well be deemed a controversial video within the Awakening and New Age communities. My beautiful soul sister Hope Jemimah shared it on her Facebook page and it caused some great controversy. The video of contention was Matt Kahn's Soul Contracts, Twin Flames and Soul Mates Redifined. Allow me to preface this blog post by saying up front that I have no desire to attempt to define or redefine these terms - this is not what this blog is about.

Now, I truly did not watch the entire video - I find myself doing that a lot of late: buying a book and not finishing it, starting an interesting article and then just skimming it...it's almost as though I go in - take just what I need and then leave. It's just the way Spirit is working with me these days. 

Anyway back to the Matt Kahn video - the one thing that he said that jumped out and grabbed my attention and had it fully for the last few days since watching his video is (and I'm paraphrasing a bit):

"If you stay with someone long enough you will fall in love with them even if you hate them - because your core nature is love."

Now don't we see evidence of this all the time - whether it be the Stockholm syndrome that kidnap victims face or the woman who cries mournfully at the graveside of her abusive husband? Surely the psychologists and psycho-analysts would probably offer a more technical and logical explanation, but I personally believe that our true nature is love and that the Divine is choosing to have a multitude of physical experiences through and in us. 

However the moment that you resonate with this truth that we are all love at our core, the reality of life challenges you to see people - not based on this absolute truth but on their relative truth. 

So the absolute truth is that co-worker who gives you a hard time is an expression of God and that you should love her....but the relative truth- the truth you experience -  is that she is a backstabbing fiend who attempts to undermine you at every opportunity she gets. 

Imagine this scenario now: You are working on an ultra-important project but your co-worker envies the fact that you were chosen for this project. She has even presented herself as a better candidate for the project to your boss! 

You just sent your final report to the printer but when you go to collect it - it's not there. When you look down the corridor you see your good 'friend' or rather fiend walking away with a stack of papers in her hand. You approach her but she denies having your report but your 'spidey' sense aka intuition is shouting to you that your report is in her hands. 

You can't just say "Peace my sister" and walk away. Consider this - God is using this opportunity to challenge you to honour your intuition and speak up for yourself. You have been a doormat for far too long and have stamped down your intuition for far much longer. Yes you can re-print your report but do you really want it in her hands when you know she wants your project?

Image courtesy:
http://kamisulat.blogspot.com
Title: Workplace Backstabbing

Now I'm not advocating that you accuse her forthwith but maybe you can say 

"Oh really, can we just go through the papers you have in your hand because I know that I just sent my report to print and I believe it got mixed up with your print job." 

As your report miraculously jumps out of the stack in her hands, she apologizes and calls it a genuine mistake...let's not judge - maybe the mistake was indeed sincere....in any case, this is the place where you can show love! 
What is vitally important to the universe though, is that you stood up and honoured your intuition!

Now what does this have to do with the Matt Kahn video or abusive relationships. Well believe it or not - you playing the doormat to your co-worker's overt and covert tactics is an abusive relationship and according to Matt, that co-worker is a twin flame sent to meet you on your path and help you to accelerate your soul's evolution!

Now you see why the video is so contentious - because so many of us are just so attached to the idea of a 'one and only love for me'  twin flame romance song! I'm deliberately not getting into that conversation.

However, Matt did make me think about a relationship I walked away from and one of the hardest things for me has been trying to resolve whether I loved enough...or whether there was enough love and then all of a sudden I realised that the question of love is totally irrelevant. 

When at the core of our beings, we are all love for we all possess the Divine spark buried deep within us, we realise that we are all capable of loving. The problem is that we are inconsistent or incomplete in the loving as we suffer from unconsciousness - lacking the full awareness of who we really are!

The grieving wife at the husband's graveside telling everybody how she much she loved the dearly departed is not crying - in that moment - for all the times he hit and abused her but rather for all the good that she beheld in him. She is also grieving for what could have been and all the 'if only's' her marriage faced. If only he did not drink so much...If only they had more money.....

Did he abuse her and make her life miserable? Yes
Did she love him? - Most certainly - she stayed and hoped and prayed for the best.
Did he love her? I would like to suggest that yes he did! In his sober moments when he held her and sobbed and promised to never abuse her again - his agony was birthed from a place of momentary remorse and dare I even say - love as well!

Now we can argue that this is not a good representation of love and that abusive love is not true love and I would agree with you! 

However I will add that the higher perspective, that you are in position to have, is because you know better! The woman who stays - does not know better. This love - that buys her flowers one week and bandages the next - is the only love she knows, which is why you cannot use love to get her to leave!

Should she have stayed with him to live a life of pain and misery? You may say that we cannot go back in the past especially as our imaginary guy is already dead! 
However allow me to superimpose another image into our story - that of their daughter - a child who grew up watching this abuse and has now hand picked a guy who is 'just like daddy'. 
This daughter, based on her home environment, associates love with abuse and has consequently chosen a lover who abuses her.

Let's say you are a friend of this daughter and you try to explain to her that she is repeating a cycle of abuse and that she should walk away from her guy. She looks at you and says "But I love him....and he loves me."

Can you truly deny their love? Can you call her stupid and thereby subject her to verbal and emotional abuse? Especially when you know how her father treated her mother and that she loved both her father and mother?

Do you now see why Matt Kahn's statement was such an epiphany?

If we could all understand that we love - whether in part or in full - because that is what we truly are, then a better question to ask  is not - Is there love? But

Can there be growth?

Real Questions on Growth:

• Can you truly grow into the full capacity of your God given potential with someone who disrespects you and does not value you? 
• Do you even have any idea of how much potential you have? 
• Can your abusive partner grow into all that God has designed for him or her if you stay and facilitate their need to hurt other people by presenting yourself as a willing and submissive target? 
• Can you truthfully grow together and have a loving and healthy relationship where boundaries are set and respected? 
• Based on your real experience (as opposed to your fantasized desires) - are you being honest with yourself?
• Can your partner support and encourage you to pursue your passions - even if those passions are less about making money and more about fulfilling your soul's purpose?
• Does your partner nurture and support your vision for yourself or your business?
• Is your partner comfortable with you flourishing even as they don't?

Special Note for Victims of Physical Abuse:
If you experience physical abuse, you cannot effect change and help your partner grow if you stay! Your life is in danger and your life is precious. Please contact the relevant authorities.
It is okay to love your abusive spouse or partner - it is not okay to live with them. 
You guys need separation and external help via counselling etc. if you have to make it work.


To the victims of verbal and emotional abuse - your situation is actually pretty dire because of how sinister and undercover emotional abuse can be. If you truly believe that the two of you can grow together and you are both willing to conscientiously seek therapy and get the help needed...then you guys have a chance of making it.

Image courtesy Examiner

You cannot make it if:

• Only one of you sees a problem
• Only one of you is committed to seeking help
• Only one of you is committed to changing
• Your partner is treating your therapy as a charade
• Your partner is narcissistic and does not see his/her narcissism

Let's face it - the only way you could be content in an abusive relationship is if you lower your expectations and kill all the dreams you had for yourself - especially the dream of how you wanted to be loved and treated.

And everyone has dreams on love. You just may have forgotten yours if you think you don't have them. Revisit your inner child...

You may think that you are simply not growing and that you are comfortable with being stagnated and you may even tell yourself that it's a sacrifice you are making...maybe for your children perhaps. 

Here's the problem with that:

Nothing remains the same - not even stagnation.  Eventually, slowly but surely and possibly imperceptibly at first, stagnation gives way to death.

First you kill your long-term dreams, then you kill your day to day expectations, eventually you kill your opinions and by the time you have killed your hope, you have long lost the battle for you. 

If you have to take away only two things from this blog post, take this:

A constantly diminished you cannot truly serve another person - not even your abuser.

The more you grow, the more your understanding of love grows and this places you in a position to love better and be a better YOU!

So you may love and you are free to love, but can you grow? - that is the better question!


In love, light and blessings

EE

Leaving you with this heart stirring song from Chrisette Michele which may help some of you...:)

"Yes I love you but I really got to lose you

Freedom is where I want to be

Yes I'll probably always love you

But I'm moving

I got to do this for me!" 

 ~ Blame It On Me by Chrisette Michele

The Art of Graciously Walking Away

You have made up your mind. You are walking away from this relationship. It’s either abusive or oppressive – it is not allowing you to grow. In one way or the other, it is toxic to you and your soul. You know you deserve better and you want better but you are also on a true spiritual path and so the ‘how you walk away’ is important to you. 

As much as you want to ascertain yourself and your independence, you want the way you walk away to be reflective of your highest ideals and beliefs in yourself. You want to walk away graciously. Here is how you do it.

Acknowledge The Love – The fact that you are reading this article means that love existed at one time or the other and that's why you care about how you walk away. A lot of people believe hate and hostility are the necessary vehicles one must use when walking away from a bad relationship. While it is necessary to feel angry and hurt, you don't have to feel hate to walk away. In fact, it is a whole lot more empowering to acknowledge your love for this person for it means that your decision is actually rooted in a more objective place.

When you spend a lot of energy bitterly hating someone who has hurt you, only to realise that you still love this person, the effect can actually be quite damning for you. You see all those negative energies that you created can actually turn around and manifest as feelings of guilt and shame when you are forced to confront the truth that you still do love this person. This is the boomerang effect.

You need to understand something – You don’t need to stop loving someone to walk away from them. Walking away does not mean the love has ended, it just means that you have chosen to love yourself better.

Be Angry, Hurt & Disappointed – When you accept that you do or did love and care for this person, it opens the way for you to truly feel your pain. This is necessary. Feel the anger and the hurt. Acknowledge the fact that this person has disappointed you. If you want to journal your feelings, go ahead. If you want to vent to a friend – go ahead. 

Some words of caution for the friend you chose to vent to though – make sure this person is trustworthy and won’t betray your confidence. It is also really advisable to select someone who is a good listener. As you vent, you don’t need this person constantly interrupting to put in her ‘two cents’, as we say here in the Caribbean, which means that their own failed relationships and even their thoughts about your ex are not welcome at this time. You are venting. You are feeling your pain.

Stay Away from Public Broadcasts – Put another way – leave your business off social media! Or as we say in the gorgeous Caribbean – don’t air your dirty laundry in public! That pic of the girl flipping off the camera carrying the caption “I’m So Glad I left your Sorry A$$” does not need to become your new profile picture nor do those words need to become your new status update! 

You also don’t need to be telling everyone you meet why your relationship failed and all the wrong things your ex did. If asked, you can politely admit that yes you guys are over but you really don’t want to get caught up in mudslinging or discussing it. If you are direct, people will respect your boundaries. In fact, they may even feel embarrassed for asking, so if it is someone whose friendship you do value, you can further tell them that your feelings are just too raw at the moment and that’s why you don’t wish to discuss.

Even if your ex is maligning your name; you still owe it to yourself to be more mature and gracious. Such immaturity is expected of little teenagers or persons who are still emotionally undeveloped. This reflects more on your ex than it does on you. Your friends and peers, who are right now giving him an ear, will see through this eventually and if they are that gullible to believe every word he says, then trust me, you should not care about their opinion!

Forgive Them For They Know Not What They Do – the idea of forgiveness often times rubs people the wrong way. Forgiving someone does not mean excusing their hurtful words or actions. The mere fact that you have chosen to walk away, already signals to the Universe and to yourself that you will no longer tolerate their behaviour and that you have already embraced the fact that you deserve better. 

You need to realize that this person was operating from their own limited knowledge of highest truth. People who hurt you actually do this because they think it is beneficial to them. They say hurtful things or betray you because that is how they steal energy when they are running low on energy. I discuss this at length here The Energy Exchange In Emotional Abuse and it is applicable to other abusive relationships as well.

These people have not yet discovered a way to tap into the Source of life to refuel. They feel bad about themselves and so they make you feel bad about yourself. You however, have an opportunity to work from the highest knowledge you have of yourself. Once you have acknowledged your pain – and only you will know how long you need to do this – it is to your highest good to then release this individual. That is what forgiveness is all about – releasing them so that they do not continue to be toxic to your aura even after you left them.

Reflect & Be Grateful – You should be able to reflect on the good qualities of this relationship and this individual and be thankful for them. Don't go around saying everything about this person was bad and evil only to then have a quiet moment where you recall something wonderful they did for you. Again the boomerang effect comes into play and all the negative energies you were pushing towards them will turn around and act upon you as guilt and shame. 

Even if you truly believe there was nothing positive about your experience with this individual, you can at least be grateful for the important lessons learnt. You see you are leaving because you have come to better appreciate what you want and what you don’t want in a relationship. You should also spend some time reflecting on what attracted you to this person and how this experience is going to shape what you look for in another relationship. 

Don’t spend too much time beating up yourself for your past decisions, instead acknowledge that you have grown and are hopefully in a better place to make better decisions. You are a lot stronger than you think – and this is something that you could always be grateful for.

Practice Kindness – Now I stand to lose a lot of people here, but if you reached this far in the article, please stay with me till the end. I am not asking you to become a ‘bobolee’ – that’s a Caribbean term for someone who allows people to take advantage of them. I am certainly not condoning that you continue to help your ex with his loans and bill payments long after you have gone. When we understand soul contracts which is quite sufficiently explored by Danielle Mackinnon in her book, we realize that there are some people you need to walk away from so that their soul can learn a valuable lesson. If you walk away from them but are still a crutch to them, then not only are you allowing yourself to be used but you are also not serving the highest good of this person’s soul. 

The kindness I speak of in this point rather refers to your ability to be gracious while respecting your boundaries. For example, if your ex is an excellent and professional artist and you know someone looking for the kind of art work that he can deliver, by all means refer him!

Don’t refer him because you feel guilty about leaving him and are now worrying about how he is paying his bills! Refer him because you truly believe he can provide what this potential client is looking for. Remember, you are not obligated to worry about this person you have walked away from. Worry and guilt are low vibrating frequencies. However in a scenario such as this, it would actually be dishonest to say you don’t know a suitable artist and again you don’t want to energetically be aligned to such negative frequencies.

If you can leave someone and still be kind towards them, then it means that you have truly grown and are in a much better place to move onto a next relationship if you so choose.

Choosing to graciously walk away from a toxic relationship, as it is explained here, will not only give you peace of mind but it also sends a powerful signal to the Universe that you have grown and that you don’t need a repeat lesson! Ever wondered why some people keep attracting the same kind of abusive relationships despite setting intentions for good partners? Well what we signal to the Universe attracts more of those experiences and people that will reinforce the signal we are transmitting. So victims, with victim mindsets are transmitting “I am a victim, I always get a raw deal no matter how hard I try!” Guess what? They will always attract oppressors and abusers to reinforce those signals. It sounds harsh, but it is true. That's your power as a god or goddess - you create your life and you can choose to either do so consciously or unconsciously.

So, make a conscious decision to walk away graciously and tell the Universe "I have had some bad experiences but I have learnt from them and I am now a better person and I am now more connected to my true nature of love and light." If you continue to live in these higher vibrations, sure enough more of the really good stuff –in every area of your life -  will come your way!

Love, Light and Blessings

Elizabeth Energy

The Energy Exchange Which Occurs in Emotional Abuse

Emotional abuse is typically invisible to most people including the abuse victims themselves. In fact while victims of emotional abuse may be aware of feeling sad, upset or lack lustre, they may not truly know why they feel this way. Adding onto this the fact that emotional abusers are often times quite charming and endearing personalities, and you begin to understand how emotional abuse is often quite hard to detect.

Photo courtesy http://www.playbuzz.com/johnmr10/is-your-current-relationship-emotionally-abusive

Understanding the Energy Exchange of Emotional Abuse

You are energy. Beyond your organs, blood and water which makes up 70% of your body, are the chemicals and molecules and atoms. The core components of atoms are very minute particles which when keenly observed are nothing more than highly vibrating pockets of energy. Some people intuitively understand that we are energy but may refer to this as spirit. While it can be argued that energy and spirit are one and the same, in this blog series we will view spirit as an attribute of energy which may be positive or negative but energy itself is neutral.

Understanding that you are energy and that energy is the essence of who you are will help you to understand the interactions that occur between abusers and victims. All abusers are thieves. Have you ever understood the term ‘steal my joy’? Well abusers are out to do just that! However they don’t want to just steal your joy, although that may be a consequence of what they do. No, they want to steal your energy. Abusers are people who typically always feel low in energy (and I don’t mean physical energy) and they don’t know how to top up on this energy from Source and refuel themselves through positive and healthy practices. So they do the next best thing – they steal it from you.

Imagine this very subtle but real example of emotional abuse. You and your husband have to go out to a special function in a few days. You know that he sometimes questions your choice of clothing and so you are quite preoccupied with trying to find the perfect dress – the one that will make him look at you approvingly. You believe you found such a dress in your wardrobe, a pretty little number that you have not worn in years but which is practically still brand new as you only wore it once before. You are particularly drawn to it because you remember how much he raved about it, the one time you wore it years ago, and you really hope to get the same response from him. You put it on and you look at yourself appreciatively. You look fantastic despite having a kid or two. In fact the few additional pounds have all settled into the right places and it looks like you are now properly filling out the dress as it snugly holds your shapely body in a tasteful manner.

Finally on the night of the event, you put on the dress and wait for your husband’s verdict. He is upset with his boss and since the event is work related, he is in an especially grumpy mood. He looks at you and for a moment there is a very pregnant pause. In that moment, you start doubting yourself - you’re not as thin as when you first bought the dress and maybe you look silly instead of sexy!

So there you are biting your bottom lip and awaiting the end of his inspection and of course he senses your self-doubt. Finally he says –

‘So you know that I have this really important company dinner and you could not even make the time to buy a new dress? Is that old dress the best thing you could have chosen to wear? Don’t you know how important it is for me to make a good impression to my co-workers or is it your plan to embarrass me? Besides that dress is for a thinner person! It’s fitting you too snug! Have you forgotten that you are a mother?’

You go and change your clothes, and even though you take only a few minutes to get into another dress, you have to hear him fuss some more because now you are making him late! By the time, you reach to the dinner, you would notice though that his mood has brightened up considerably and as you walk through the entry doors of the event your husband is in full show mode and is every bit the charming and pleasant conversationalist that you first met and fell in love with. He may even whisper an apology into your ears and tell you that he did not mean to hurt your feelings; he just needed to tell you the truth. He may even go so far as to promise to take you shopping to get you a whole new wardrobe. This no doubt, will perk you up as you thank your lucky stars that you have such an amazing husband. You start looking forward to your shopping expedition with the manner he recently demeaned you all forgotten.

Reviewing the Exchange of Energy in the Example Above

1.       Your husband\abuser does not feel good about their self. Maybe they feel wronged by someone or maybe they are dealing with long repressed emotions or trauma from their childhood but consequently their energy is low.

2.       They need to feel good about their self and they need energy. In the scenario above, the husband may have even tried to pick a fight at work (emotional abusers are often very charming in the interview phase and upon first meeting them. After a while, their colleagues tend to drift away from them as their true negative behaviours begin to surface with time.) The people who work with this guy however don’t feel a need to feed him the energy he so desperately needs and so he comes home in a bad mood.

3.       You are there waiting for his approval on the dress you have carefully selected. As a victim, you are very codependent and your need to have his approval only serves to advertise to him that your energy is available for stealing. It’s like leaving your car unlocked and unattended in a rough neighbourhood – you are basically begging someone to steal it from you!

4.       When he delivers his hurtful words to you, the desired effect is obtained. The moment you feel as though the wind has been knocked out of you is the moment the energy leaves your body. Some of us are sensitive enough to feel a pit or drop in our stomach. The solar plexus chakra is located there and that is the seat of your confidence and that’s why we actually feel a drop in energy there. Your face appears to fall and you look downcast because our energy level is easily reflected on our faces.

5.       With the desired effect obtain, your abuser actually feels a boost in his moral. He may continue to chide and deride you, feeding on your energy until he feels sufficiently topped up.

6.       In public settings it is important to him that you look and reflect how he feels because he sees you as an extension of him. (Note: We are truly all ONE but in LOVE. We are all extensions of God the Father – the God of LOVE. Codependents don’t see you as an extension of their Higher, True Self but of their lower energetic self which is not healthy!) So once you are in public, he wants you to brighten up. If you look all sad and sour that may reflect negatively on him and so he says something nice to you and may even apologize. Truthfully abusers don’t really need a public setting to turn around and play Mr. Nice Guy. Once their energy feels high, they don’t like it if you are feeling low around them and so they will try to perk you up so that you now match the high they are on. This is particularly true of narcissistic abusers and this very quality makes them highly unsympathetic and unable to relate to you when you are having a genuine low spell or are dealing with some grief. This up and down nature of relationships with emotional abuse however, is also what makes the abuse quite insidious and particularly toxic.

7.       You feel happy but for all the wrong reasons. The apology offered was not really an apology. When he told you sorry for hurting your feelings but he just had to tell the truth what he really said is “It’s too bad your feelings got hurt because I’m such an honest guy!” In this ‘apology’ he never acknowledges that he should not have said what he said. In fact he vindicates himself!

8.       You are looking forward to a shopping excursion with your darling controlling hubby and reaffirming to him and yourself what he has already stated – that you don’t know how to dress yourself and that he needs to be there to help you choose your own clothes. In giving in to his subtle control, you are further guaranteeing to him the continuous supply of your glorious divine energies. You are not holding any to yourself. You are willingly giving them over to him on a platter.


You my wonderful, divine sister are not operating in the fullness of your God given goddess nature. Spending time watching your thoughts, being mindful, meditating, praying, singing, dancing and any activity that makes you reconnect to your soul allows the goddess within you to awaken.  Communing with the Eternal Mother-Father-Creator-GOD helps you to remember who you really are. Your energy is sacred to you. Don’t give it up so easily. The next time your abusive partner says something hurtful to you, take a deep breath and ask yourself three questions in this order:

Is this statement of me true?

Was it necessary for him to say this to me?

Could he have expressed the same thing to me in a nicer way?

These three questions are three gates and only those words which were first filtered through love can pass through all three gates. From the moment one of these gates refuses to open, dismiss the statement and simply tell your partner “I hear you but I don’t wish to receive what you are saying into my spirit.” You then walk away with your energy, leaving his energy tank on empty.

Do not engage in lengthy conversation or arguing for getting you worked up and angry is another way your energy gets stolen.

You are waking up and that is why you are here. You may falter and succumb to your abuser’s tactics despite reading this but don’t beat yourself up. It takes time to un-learn unhealthy practices. The simple act of becoming more aware of how energy works in abusive relationships is the first step to better managing and protecting your energies. Actually awareness is the key to awakening.

You would notice the first time you effectively hold onto your energy instead of giving it away, your abuser may be confused. They may even try harder to steal your energy by saying something even more hurtful. Do not rejoice outwardly (as this may aggravate the situation) but rejoice in your heart, knowing that you have successfully deflected their plans to ‘steal your joy’.

Like Esperanza you need to sing "I'm not gonna waste my precious divine energy, trying to explain and feeling ashamed of things you think are wrong with me." Enjoy the music of this beautiful, divine sister in her performance below.

Love, light and blessings

Elizabeth Energy       

 “I’m not gonna waste my precious, divine energy, trying to explain and feeling ashamed of things you think are wrong with me.” - Precious by Esperanza Spalding