Page 359 - The Truth Landscape Format 2020 with next section introductions-compressed

Self Love – Where it all starts

Self-esteem and self-respect are the foundation qualities of the truly healthy personality.

The more you like or love yourself, the more you will like and love other people. The amount of love and respect you have for others, and they for you,
is in direct proportion to how much love you have for yourself.

If you do and say the things that are consistent with loving yourself, it won't be long before you actually feel positive and loving toward yourself. Love is the
mechanism that activates the very best that is in you, and in the people and situations around you.

Stages of love

Love grows and changes. The emotional stuff that brings couples together in the first place is different from the love that emerges five or fifteen
years down the road. Loving relationships go through many stages. All are important and none can be by-passed if love is to flourish.

Mature love doesn't come into existence unless the relationship has evolved through earlier stages of attraction, romance, power struggle, acceptance and
attachment.

Stage 1: Attraction

Our choice of mates is guided by unconscious factors that are the same for us all. Our unconscious leads us to a person who offers us the greatest opportunity
to heal our childhood wounds. As the old Chinese saying goes:

“The greatest opportunity brings with it the biggest danger and challenge”.

The person we are most attracted to will very likely share some significant traits or characteristics with the parent who gave us the most trouble in childhood.
If we follow the attraction through to a committed relationship, we will have the same conflict with our mate that we had with our parent. Obviously, we
don't intentionally set ourselves up to have a repeat performance of our childhood unhappiness.

Unconsciously, though, we do choose the patterns that are most familiar to us from our youth. We are now adults and have greater personal strength and a
better chance of standing up for our-selves than we had before. The learning and growing we must do to live in harmony with our partner is exactly the
learning and growing that's required for repairing the damage of the past. That's what we mean when we say that the purpose of loving relationships is to
heal childhood wounds. Page359