Popular culture, media, and folklore hold up this grand idea of finding one’s “soulmate”. This person is the one who completes us, the one who makes us feel whole, the person who is our other half, our soul mate.
Throughout my life, I have written songs and poems about being completed, finding my other half, and feeling whole. I have searched high and low. It has been a constant in my life and, unfortunately, it is the root of three failed marriages and enough relationship anxiety on which to float a cruise ship.
In my last blog, I talked about having an anxious attachment style and continually dealing with the need to have affirmations to fill the hole and to relieve a horribly uncomfortable feeling. I shared this mental trick whereby you can recognize that feeling and use it to feel brave rather than feeling weak. That was huge progress, but it does fall short of really understanding what is going on.
If you need someone or something outside of yourself to help you feel complete, chances are you are experiencing dependency on someone or something. Psychologists might call this co- dependency. I am not sure what the right word is for it, but I can tell you the feeling sucks. It is uncomfortable at best and frightening at worst.
If we need someone to complete us, we are going to be in for a really hard time, just like my friend Carence in The ANTICS book. Feeling incomplete to yourself and being dependent upon others—yes, your soulmate—to complete you can put you into crazy-making situations. The feelings of emptiness, aloneness, and incompleteness can be so powerful that we may set aside our values, our friends and family, as well as our own identity just to keep those horrible feelings in check.
We may buy into false narratives about ourselves. We embrace these narratives out of fear of feeling less than whole and our fear of feeling incomplete. As we lose pieces of ourselves, bit by bit, we feel even more incomplete. The cycle goes on. Rinse and repeat.
It takes work, real work, to rediscover yourself. You don’t have to find the missing pieces because the incompleteness you are feeling is just that, a feeling. Feelings come and feelings go. You are, and always have been, complete. Somewhere along the line, you just forgot. Perhaps you set it aside or maybe someone fooled you into thinking it was gone.
You can do your work, or your work will do you.
Doing your work means reconnecting with yourself. You can start by developing a practice of just moving. Perhaps it’s walking, hiking, or exercising. If you move your body regularly, you will
begin to reconnect with yourself. Sometimes our past trauma has been so powerful that we may need a counselor or therapist to help us fully reconnect with who and what we are, and that is okay. Every journey starts with one step. Even the smallest step matters.
This is scary stuff and it can be really hard, but you are not alone. Carence can tell you his story and show one way to do the work before it does you. You can also download a free companion journal to complement The ANTICS book. This journal can be the starting point in rediscovering those pieces of you that you thought were missing.
No, you don’t need a soulmate to complete you.
You are already complete. You are already enough. You might, however, need a guide or someone to show you a way.
The ANTICS book and companion journal might be a good first step. Why wait?
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