4 Tiny Things Pushing Him Away (That You Don't Even Realize You're Doing)
Don't let fear run your life.
mimagephotography, South_agency | Canva When you lead with love, you shine in relationships and thrive in them. However, when you lead with fear, you feel unworthy and fight to keep your partner close. Even the best of relationships can rarely survive the fangs of the fearful Lover.
Here are 4 tiny things pushing him away (that you don't even realize you're doing):
1. You drain their energy when they need space.
As the Lover, your passion is connection, the intimacy of giving and receiving. Whether you're sharing your gifts and talents with the world or having a one-on-one relationship with a lover, a friend, a family member, or a co-worker, you enjoy fusing your essential being with everything in life.
That’s what gives your life meaning. Connecting with people makes you feel grounded, secure, needed, valued, supported, happy, good about yourself, comforted, and loved. However, at your worst, you are an energy vampire, an over-connecter who fuses with a grip that can be intensely smothering. As the Vamp, you can be desperately needy, self-centered, and depleting. In anger, you can whip up a storm and strike out with lethal words, wanting to hurt those who have hurt you. You can burn out the people in your life with an endless cycle of drama.
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2. You sabotage whatever is going right.
Throughout their lives, Vamps seek fusion in their relationships — much like a baby fuses with the energy of its mother — to compensate for an early lack of nurturing, and to protect them from similar pain. The ironic twist is that the addiction is to yearning after — not actually to have what they say they want. Confronted, they initially deny this. However, once Vamps is old enough to have lived through several patterns, they begin to see that it is the truth.
Underneath, the baby got stuck somewhere a long time ago and imprinted the feeling, "I'm not good enough to receive the love I crave. I yearn for it. But if it shows up, I must push it away and go after the person, job, or situation that remains elusive." That’s the Vamp’s love map.
3. You treat your partner like your mom.
The Lover’s passion for connection develops from emotional wounds incurred during infancy. At this age, the mother is the source of everything to the child. Babies feed off the energy of their mothers in this stage of development. Research has shown that underprivileged infants who are raised in orphanages without the constant touch and love that a mother would give them fail to thrive.
Children need a mother’s attention to develop a sense of self and self-worth, just like they need a mother’s milk. She is life, safety, and love. If the mother can meet her baby’s needs, the baby moves on to the next stage of development. But if the baby’s needs for nurturing are not met easily and lovingly — perhaps because the mother is nervous, ambivalent, scared to breastfeed, or working too much to breastfeed — the baby gets "frozen" between the ages of 0 to 18 months.
Emotionally, Vamps in adulthood are much like babies, waiting to receive energy love, and permission to live, love, and contribute to the world. They don’t believe they matter or have worth (else, wouldn’t we shower them with love?) They fear abandonment and the loss of a caretaker. To persuade others to meet their needs and end the sense of yearning, they learn to be sneaky and seductive.
4. You don't know how to be alone.
If you are the Lover, the part of you is frozen in babyhood and doesn’t realize that YOU are the source. This tiny fragment of your whole being is eternally searching for external sources from which to draw love.
When the Vamp part of you is activated and running your life, you will use your energy to attach to others and pull on their energy. You feel endlessly needy. Nothing is ever enough. Your sense of self comes from your object of affection. Your singular fixation on this person feels engulfing because it is like the obsession of a small child for its mother. Think about how small infants behave when separated from their mothers for any time.
Even if they love you, they probably won’t stick around for this forever because it’s unpleasant. As adults, nobody can provide energy endlessly to another or give them a sense of self for very long. Therefore, it is up to you, the Lover, to help the frozen baby fragment to grow up.
People use five signature styles to express passion and seek fulfillment: The Lover, The Creator, The Warrior, The Visionary, and The Prophet. Each has specific evolutionary gifts used to open and reveal love while each has survival strategies used to protect us. At any given time, we tend to flip back and forth between our more evolved, life-loving selves and our emotionally irresponsible, knee-jerk reaction self-provoked by fear.
On a good day, we’re resilient, open-minded, and can cope emotionally with the challenges life hands us. But on bad days, watch out! Since our fearful self seems to sabotage every aspect of our daily lives, romances, and career objectives — always in the same ways — we begin to cycle and recycle through similar events. Despite having incredible dreams, aspirations, and potential, we keep messing things up.
Do you experience any of these unfulfilling patterns in your life?
- You want a new job but end up staying in the old one because it’s safe.
- You want love but shrink from it when it stares you in the face.
- You are a gym rat who runs for the hills at the first sign of intimate connection.
- You are a spiritual seeker who can’t pay your rent.
- You are a therapy junky who stumbles endlessly over the same mental garbage.
- You have potential and dreams that never seem to come true.
Oppositional patterns such as these are signs that, on some level, fear is running your life. You are locked in place. If this sounds like you, you may be a Lover/ Vamp.
As an integrated person who has done the necessary work, you can fulfill your needs and have tremendous gifts for a relationship. You know instinctively how to be intimate and fuse appropriately with another in love. As a part of standing on your own and supporting yourself, you must also develop your talents, gifts, and abilities and begin to share those with the world.
Photo: GAGO-Images via Shutterstock
You are in the greatest harmony in any relationship that involves a genuine exchange of energy, emotion, ideas, time, and attention. However, relationships do not always involve physical intimacy. By the way, we all have aspects of the Lover in us, though some more than others. There’s no shame in it. Infancy is a vulnerable stage of life when we are still so wide open to the world that we are extremely sensitive to wounding.
If you are a Lover, as soon as you become aware of your less-than-desirable Vamp tendencies, they become the easiest patterns to resolve. Connection lights your fire and inspires you, whereas Vamp energy seeks a host to feed off of and hinders true connection. So embrace the passion! Your gifts as the Lover will enable you to have exactly what you desire most — romance, friendship, community —as soon as you integrate them with the wholeness at your core.
Donna LeBlanc is an innovative licensed psychotherapist, career coach, and life coach. She has won awards: 2016 Best Life Coaches for New York City Expertise.com and 2016 People Love Us On Yelp.