How To Take Control of Your Love Life
You are unhappy and can’t seem to find, create, or keep a healthy, harmonious, and sustainable relationship. You are tired of repeating relationship patterns that make you feel unfulfilled and alone, and perhaps even that there’s something wrong with you.
But you have decided to no longer be the victim of circumstance.
Dyan Ferguson, our top Relationship Coach at the MAP Coaching Institute, decided she wanted to fully understand what was happening in her relationships and change her trajectory, after a devastating breakup in 2011. Having struggled with relationships for decades, it was time for her to finally figure out why love seemed so difficult and elusive.
She even decided to become a Relationship Coach and studied with Katherine Woodward Thomas, a famous licensed marriage and family therapist who wrote the New York Times Bestselling books — Conscious Uncoupling: 5 Steps to Living Happily Even After and Calling in “The One:” 7 Weeks to Attract the Love of Your Life.
In 2020, after practicing as a Conscious Uncoupling coach for several years, she discovered the MAP Method™ and knew immediately this was the missing ingredient for her and her clients!
Here are the top three epiphanies she wants to share with you through her 13-year journey in helping others and herself to feel happy, healthy, and whole again. Not to ruin the punch line, but she has found an exponentially better, faster and easier way to transform our relationships and that’s through rewiring the brain with MAP.
Your early biology affects your adult relationships.
Attachment Theory was first coined and developed by psychiatrist and psychoanalyst John Bowlby (1907–90). “The theory posits that infants need to form a close relationship with at least one primary caregiver to ensure their survival, and to develop healthy social and emotional functioning.” ~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attachment_theory
Later in 1987, Cindy Hazan and Philip Shaver published a research paper exploring romantic love in adult relationships as an attachment process. Romantic partners desire to be close to each other, similar to how young children feel a need to be close to their primary caregivers to fulfill their primary needs, such as love and security. They have found four possible attachment styles for adults: secure, anxious/preoccupied, dismissive/avoidant, and fearful/avoidant.
In a longitudinal study published in 2012 by the University of Minnesota’s Institute of Child Development, 73 participants were observed from birth into early adulthood, along with their romantic partners. The objective of the study was to form a developmental perspective on how these participants with secure and insecure attachment styles in childhood recover from conflicts as young adults in romantic relationships.
The study reveals that:
- The children who did not feel securely attached to their parents struggled more in managing their negative reactions and recovering from conflicts with their romantic partners as adults.
- The children who had secure and loving attachments with their parents grew up to be far better at managing conflicts as adults. They could manage their fear and anger instead of being consumed by these intense emotions and were able to move on.
When we build loving and secure attachments with our primary caregivers, we are being nurtured to be more resilient in managing conflicts, ups and downs, and intense emotions later in life.
Dr Louis Cozolino, a psychotherapist and attachment researcher, connects the vital importance of our caregiver attachments to Charles Darwin’s Survival of the Fittest theory. Fitness in Darwin’s terms is the ability to adapt to the environment. In our modern society, our ability to face conflicts, manage our emotions and move on indicates a healthy level of fitness. Dr Conzolino elaborates on this further:
“When a parent abuses, neglects, or abandons a child, the parent is communicating to the child that he is less fit. Consequently, the child’s brain may become shaped in ways that do not support his long-term survival… When children are traumatized, abused, or neglected, they are being given the message that they are not among the chosen. They grow to have thoughts, states of mind, emotions, and immunological functioning that are inconsistent with health and long term survival…
Maternal and paternal instincts, in fact all caretaking behaviors, are acts of nurturance that trump one’s personal survival.”
~ Dr. Cozolino— The Neuroscience of Human Relationships.
The takeaway from this is that understanding Attachment Theory and our attachment styles can be really valuable in our adult relationships. It can often point us to patterns that create conflict and distance, and ways to overcome those patterns. There’s a lot of information online as well as quizzes to help you assess your attachment style. Don’t take it all too literally, as our attachment styles change from relationship to relationship, but look for any resonance and wisdom that could help you to understand yourself or your partner better and to create more closeness in your relationships.
Your most painful relationships will give you essential clues to your unresolved childhood wounds
After a series of disappointing relationships, Dyan was determined to finally uncover the root of all her painful relationships. She dove deep into training as a relationship coach and was finally able to identify and overcome her deepest blocks to create healthy, sustainable love.
This self-exploration journey undoubtedly requires you to have enough courage, light curiosity, and plenty of self-compassion to find the common thread underlying your relationship patterns. Dyan encourages you to give this a go by starting with these three crucial questions.
- What are the similarities between the people you’ve dated?
- What are the pain points, recurring arguments, problems and painful dynamics in your past romantic relationships and friendships? What keeps happening over and over in ALL of your relationships?
- How did each of these relationships end?
- What was your part in ending each relationship?
- Were you more active or passive?
As you reflect on these relationships, you will start to see patterns emerging where these relationships were reenacting similar experiences in your childhood of NOT meeting your needs. These needs could be:
- A need to feel loved
- A need to be seen/heard
- A need to be appreciated for who you are, not what you do/didn’t do
- A need to feel safe and secure
These answers you’ve discovered for yourself reveal the areas where you seek to feel nurtured the most, so you can restore your ideal level of fitness in adapting to this modern society again, just like what Dr. Cozolina highlighted. In essence, as you consciously and compassionately seek to understand your deepest wounds and corresponding needs, you are seeking to reparent yourself in a nurturing and enduring way.
You are paving your way back to being “fit” or simply resilient enough to thrive in your relationships as an adult!
You can rewire your brain to feel happy, healthy & whole
Now that you know your deepest unmet needs to fulfill, it might seem straightforward that you just have to ask for what you need and want from your partner, right? However, with more awareness of your underlying wounds and needs, you might start to realize that the way you have been reacting to your partner and using unhealthy coping behaviors, such as people-pleasing, passive/aggressive actions, victimizing yourself, or silencing yourself when you get gaslighted, are indirect ways your unconscious mind is already using to try to get what you want and need.
These may be behaviors we learned from our caregivers, passed down from the past few generations before us, or the way society deems as ‘normal ways’ to get what we want. They are deeply embedded in our neurobiology. And, they typically result in the opposite of what we want.
It is not enough to simply be conscious of your deepest wounds and unmet needs. After all, this is only one aspect of your brain. Like an iceberg in the ocean, our conscious mind is only the tip of the iceberg above the waterline. The remaining 90% of the iceberg underwater represents our unconscious mind. We need to address the trauma that’s hidden in our unconscious minds as well. If we don’t, our unconscious mind will continue to recreate familiar circumstances to resolve past traumas and unmet needs.
For example, studies have shown that adults with insecure attachment styles frequently bond. To make matters worse, it’s very common for one person with an anxious attachment style to want to bond with someone with an avoidant attachment style. This is the unconscious mind recreating a past familiar, unresolved dynamic. This particular pairing has a very low chance of succeeding since their coping styles are opposite — when under stress, the anxious partner wants more closeness, whereas the avoidant partner wants more space.
This creates conflict and apparent incompatibility. The only way to repair and succeed in this type of pairing is with a high level of understanding of the dynamic and deep emotional resilience.Unless of course, both partners are willing to heal those childhood wounds and unmet needs with MAP. This can truly resolve those early unmet needs, enabling the anxious partner to feel safer with space and the avoidant partner to feel safer with closeness.
Dyan strongly recommends that you continue to be gentle with yourself when you finally see the underlying motivations for your unhelpful coping behaviors. These are the ways your traumatized brain has been conditioned to try to survive. Even with your increased awareness of your relationship patterns, it can be very challenging to shift to more positive and empowering behaviors.
Here’s the good news
The good news for all of us is that our brains are found to be neuroplastic. We can use the process of memory reconsolidation to neutralize the feelings behind our painful long-term memories, even those that date back to our early childhood experiences, and rewire our brains for us to behave in a much more positive and empowering way.
The MAP Method™ has been intentionally designed to leverage the process of memory reconsolidation in a gentle respectful, fast, and effective way. We are befriending our conscious, subconscious, and Superconscious minds to make positive and lasting changes to the way we perceive and behave in our relationships.
In practical terms, MAP enables a client to neutralize those childhood experiences creating the self-sabotaging behaviors by participating consciously but passively in a session, without ever having to relive or even verbalize past trauma. Consequently, anxiety, fear, unsafety, and feelings of inadequacy or low self-esteem can dissipate quite quickly, creating immediate changes to one’s capacity and resilience, behaviors, and sense of self.
This was the missing ingredient in Dyan’s relationship coaching programs! When Dyan discovered MAP in 2020 and started to apply it in her coaching, she was thrilled to witness miraculous transformations in her clients and herself. With MAP, there is no need to work hard at being resilient and being consciously aware of all the painful details in your relationship struggles. The process is gentle and safe.
You can experience a free preview of Dyan’s 12-week Journey — “Returning to Love: MAP Your Way To Happy, Healthy, and Whole in Love" HERE.
