A Pound of Red Apples (A story about relationships)
Imagine that you have a friend named Mary. Mary has 3 green apples, but you need a pound of red apples. Logically it would have made sense to go to the market and buy a pound of red apples from someone who is ready to sell you a pound of red apples, but the market is too far and who knows if there are apples there at all? What if it is closed down for inventory or maintenance? Meanwhile your friend Mary is here, right in front of you and she is cool. So you make a brave assumption that somewhere Mary should have a pound of red apples. Deep in her heart. You also believe that if you apply necessary efforts, she will give them to you, which is what you really want.
“Hey Mary, do you want to go to the movies?” you say with a nice smile on your face. Mary is surprised, but most likely she wants to go, especially because you pretend you really want to take her out. So you take Mary to the movies, but interestingly enough a pound of red apples doesn’t appear after this. “What the heck?” you think and then take her out for coffee. You take her dog for a walk, paint her walls, fix her car, but nothing happens. “What a witch!” you think indignantly, however offer for her to move in with you. The price of red apples is now sky high. Forget about the market, now you need to get your apples specifically from Mary. You tell yourself that she is your fate and now it is pretty clear how the story will end: the day will come when someone will be screaming “I have given you my life, and you can’t find the bloody apples for me?!” And someone else will be sobbing and saying: “I don’t have any apples, why in the world have you decided I do?”
And, honestly, why did you decide that? I purposefully don’t consider the situation when deceitful Mary laboriously misleads you because she simply likes to go to the movies (although often this is exactly what happens). However in many cases we, ourselves, are not quite honest in our intentions and other people eventually don’t have what we are looking for: a pound of red apples, a wish to have five kids with us, an intention to spend vacations together, an ability to have honest conversations, and trivially – loving us. Consequently they don’t have a capability to demonstrate this love. And this is normal, just like it is normal to want all these wonderful things.
What is not normal is to racketeer trying to shake out from the first nice person who come our way something that they don’t have, just because somewhere deep in their heart they may still have it.
They don’t. If someone has something for you, they will gladly give it to you by themselves. Not from the depth of their heart, but from all of it.
Selfishness is a very common thing in relationships. We often want to be happy the way we think we need to be happy coming to the relationship with the specific agenda. Or we simply hope that the other person will make us happy, take away the loneliness and bring stability and comfort. This reliance on the external source of love and comfort makes us blind to the needs of our partner and go after securing relationship benefits for ourselves. In the end it creates a lot of dissatisfaction, misunderstanding and disappointment.
The reason for selfishness is our inability to be good with ourselves, to love ourselves and not to be emotionally dependent on our partner. This happens because we may still be in the emotional position of a child who is expecting to receive love, attention and guidance from the parents. This condition is called overextended childhood codependency, or Bosurgi Syndrome.
The way to get out of this dependency is to establish our own leadership over our life, find the meaningful purpose and get comfortable with our true identity. One of the ways to do it is CognitiveOS Hypnosis therapy which helps clients to terminate childhood codependency, revise their goals, enable themselves to be emotionally independent, start living in the moment and feel comfortable with themselves no matter what.