Honestly, I feel so blessed to be speaking to you every week and I am just honored that you open my emails and learn something.
I just got back from a vacation in Florida with my mom. It was so much fun. We laughed, ate a lot, got on each others nerves, talked a ton, and took long walks on the beach. Something I learned is that my mom is hilarious.
Sometimes when we are home and she is feeling pressures of daily life, she doesn’t allow herself to be funny and light. It just shows me that often we look at our parents and it is so easy to say ‘I love this about you’ and ‘I totally dislike this about you’. We don’t have the full picture, but without even knowing it we begin to make choices that are the same as what we liked about them or different than what we disliked.
Most of our life decisions are based on what we observed our parents doing “right” and “wrong” in our mind. In our translation.
Where is what WE really desire in this equation?
For example, I felt that my Mom was an amazing mother and so the idea of having children feels like a LOT of pressure. I feel like I have to be the way she was. She was a pharmacist who left her career to stay at home with my brother and I.
I LOVE what I do, I don’t want to have to leave that to have kids. Although I know logically I don’t have to do anything I don’t want to do, something emotionally pulls at me. I have now worked most of this out through several conversations with my mom, but many of us never take the time to find our pressure points. Discover why we believe what we believe.
Discovering your pressure points.
You might feel pressured to meet a man who is funny, smart, and handsome like your Dad. You admire who your Dad is and unknowingly are trying to find a man just like him. Meanwhile you might be passing by the right kinds of men for you.
You might feel pressured to not seem too naggy like your mom was with your dad. So, you don’t always express yourself with men. You hold back.
You might feel pressure to get married and have children soon because you feel like your family was so close and you want to recreate that. This is having you put out the energy of I want children ASAP and keeping you from really connecting with a man to see if he is the right match for you.
You might feel pressure to “have it all together” because your mom was able to raise kids, work, and still pull off looking beautiful and stylish every day. This is stopping you from fully connecting with men, because they want a woman that doesn’t necessarily have it all together.
I am just giving you examples. Start to think about your specific Pressure Points.
Most of these pressure points are either because you want to have what you experienced in your family or you want nothing to do with it, so you are striving to be the opposite or just like them. Either way this doesn’t give you the freedom to really know what YOU want in love or from a man.
This is often why we make wrong choices when it comes to men. Because we are either avoiding what we grew up with and putting pressure on ourselves to not be like that or putting pressure on ourselves to be like that because we admired it.
Okay, so how do we identify and release these pressure points?
Your Lovework this week is to:
- Locate your pressure points. Ask yourself “How am I putting pressure on myself in my love life?”
- Then ask yourself, “How is this impacting me while dating and meeting men?”
- Where did this pressure come from? Dig deep around this one. Did it come from Mom or Dad?
Tell me in the comments below so I can support you and you can see that you’re not alone in these pressures.
Awareness is really powerful. You can begin to release these pressures by answering these questions.
In Love,
