This is the part two of The Four Ways We Block Ourselves From Love (And What It Costs Us)

Here is the thing nobody told me when I was standing in that bar after the CIA conversation, or sitting across from the man who had opinions about my outfit before he had learned anything about me, or lying awake trying to understand how I had ended up in the same painful story twice with the same person across ten years. Nobody told me that every single one of them was supposed to be there.

Not as punishment. Not as evidence that I was broken or that love was not available to me. They were there as teachers. Each one arrived at exactly the right time to show me something I was not yet willing to look at inside myself.

This is what I mean when I talk about your partner being your mirror. And I do not just mean your current partner or your most recent one. I mean all of them. Every confusing situationship, every heartbreak, every person who showed up and behaved in a way that made you think what is wrong with people. They were all reflecting something back to you. The question was never what is wrong with them. The question was always what is this showing me about what I am carrying.

I know that can be a confronting idea. So let me show you exactly what I mean by walking you back through my own stories with that lens on.

The man with the outfit requirement, the one who became visibly angry when I arrived as myself rather than as his preferred version of me, was teaching me about control. Not his control over me, although that was certainly on display. He was showing me my own. How uncomfortable it feels to be managed and monitored and shaped into something more convenient for someone else. I had been doing a version of that to myself for years, deciding which parts of me were acceptable to show and which needed to stay hidden. He showed up and made that feeling so visceral and so external that I could not ignore it anymore. I had to feel it to finally see it.

The CIA man, the one who pulled love away without explanation and then returned and then disappeared again with a letter and a key, leaving me the apartment but taking everything else including any real explanation, was teaching me something different. He was teaching me how to survive abandonment, and to still be ok with being alone with myself and seeing myself as a lovable person. His dishonesty was also a mirror. The places where he could not be straight with me were the exact places where I was not being fully straight with myself. I was not ready to look at certain things yet and he showed up as a living, breathing reflection of that avoidance.

The father of my child, the most painful chapter by a significant distance, brought me face to face with the most unloving version of myself I had ever encountered. We activated the worst in each other. We battled. We were unkind. And as excruciating as that was, it drove me to a depth of self-love I genuinely do not think I could have reached any other way. You do not go looking for that depth voluntarily. Sometimes you have to be brought there by something that breaks you open enough that the only way through is to finally, completely choose yourself.

And the man I was not kind to, the one who was devoted to me while I was checked out, he showed me where I was abusive and dismissive toward myself. How I was treating him was a map of my own inner dialogue. The impatience, the distance, the withholding. All of it was mine first.

None of this is about blame. Not of them, not of yourself. This is about what becomes available to you when you stop seeing your relationship history as a record of failures, or as proof that you are a victim being victimized and punished and that the universe somehow has it out for you, and start seeing it as a curriculum that was designed specifically for you.

Here is the metaphor I keep coming back to. Mickey’s Terror Wheel at California Adventure looks completely harmless from the ground. You think you know what you are getting into and see it as just a ferris wheel. But once you are inside your cart and the ride begins, the carts roll almost completely upside down while you are high in the sky, and what looked gentle and manageable from below is suddenly nothing of the sort. It is deceptive and it is terrifying and it is also, if you let it be, an absolute thrill. THAT IS shadow work inside a relationship. That is what it feels like when one of these mirrors actually shows you something real. It looked like just another person, just another date, just another relationship.. And then suddenly you are upside down at the top of the sky wondering how you got there.

The people who showed up in your story were not mistakes. They were on the ride with you and the ride was always taking you somewhere.

The question is whether you are willing to stop gripping the sides of your cart, relax into the lens that this is actually fun, and trust that what it is teaching you will be so worth the wait.

Once you understand the lessons your relationships were trying to teach you, a new question emerges:

If love is available to you, what’s actually stopping you from receiving it?

In Part Three, I’m sharing the four ways we unknowingly block ourselves from the very thing we say we want most.