Ever heard of a relationship pattern?  A relationship pattern is a set of negative events that repeats in your relationship(s) on a regular basis.

For example, if you are single woman, you may have a pattern of attracting unavailable men. These men may not seem unavailable when you meet them, may in fact seem to be people who are very much interested in a relationship, but yet within a short time turn out to be unavailable. You don’t go into a new dating situation intending to attract an unavailable man; in fact, you intend to attract only available once. Yet that is what happens repeatedly and you are seemingly helpless to stop it.

If you are coupled, perhaps you have a pattern of interacting in a certain way with your partner that creates distance or withdrawal either on your or his part. You most certainly don’t go into the interaction intending to create this pattern, and yet that is what happens and you are seemingly helpless to stop it.

Everyone has a relationship patterns, but did you know how these patterns are developed? They are developed in childhood and are based on your parents’ interaction with you. This is how your past still runs your love life.

The pattern of whom you attract or partner with is influenced by how you perceived the parent of the opposite sex parented you. The worst the parenting felt to you, the worst your partner choices as an adult.

The pattern of how you interact in a relationship is influenced and modeled on your observations of your parents interaction with each other. Specifically, you will tend to model your relationship behavior on your same sex parent’s behavior. The more stress you observed or sensed in your parents relationship, the worst your own relationships will be.

Alternatively, if your parents relationship with each other had no stress, you will tend to have a Pollyanna type view of relationships, expecting the relationship to flow smoothly and ignoring relationship stress until it’s too late.

So what are your relationship patterns and what can you do to change them?

To help you discover your relationship patterns I created a PatternTracker e-class that will take you through the process of ferreting them out. Working through the PatternTracker e-class will help you uncover the patterns behind your seemingly random partner choices and relationship behavior.

To learn what you can do about your relationship patterns,  listen to a radio show below. I was a guest on the Relationship RX show. The host of the show, Coach Lisa Hayes and I talked about all aspects of relationship patterns.

Single and having trouble meeting right partner? Check your beliefs. Do you believe all the good once are taken? Do you believe there aren’t any good available singles to date in you area? Do you believe people you want aren’t going to want you?

If you believe all good once are taken, none are in your area, or people you want are not going to want you, change these beliefs to start attracting partners who match what you want.

But how do you change these things that seem true to you? Ahhh, that’s what a Love Coach is for.

Attention singles: would you like to find out if you are a true love magnet, and if not, what you can do to enhance your ability to attract true love? Take the quiz below and find out.

Recently I have been working with a couple of clients who are stuck in wanting their no longer interested ex partners back. The ex partners are done with the relationship in both cases, but my clients do not want to let go.

To make it worst, they have much pain about not wanting to let go and take many actions to stop the letting go process. One of the clients who’s doing this contacts the man she used to be in a relationship with constantly, wanting to connect with him. His responses range from anger at her reaching out to compassion while asking her to be strong and move on with her life.

Another client does not contact her ex, but responds when the ex reaches out to her. Unfortunately, he never reaches out to reconnect, just to touch base on the phone, by text and email. They have no seen each other in many months.

These clients are stuck in that they do not want to let the relationship go. They would rather hold on to the fantasy that it can still be revived somehow, even thought their ex-partners are giving them no indication at all that revival of the relationship is possible.

What do I mean? If a person is considering getting back together with you, or trying again, they will let you know. They will call and say “I have been thinking about you” or “I miss you.” They will schedule a time to see you and talk to you. They will try to sort through issues that lead to the breakup. There will be clear indications that they want to reconcile or at least try to reconcile.

This is not the case in the situations my clients are in. There are no indications at all that their partners want reconciliation. Yet, there’s still the “I don’t want to let go” on the part of my clients.

I have been thinking about how to help both of them and other people in the same “I don’t want to let go” situation and here are my thoughts. Sometimes people hold on to a relationship because if they let go, they are letting go of any chance for their partner to heal for them the wrongs and wounds of the relationship. In other words, if I let go of a partner who hurt me, he will never have the chance to make the pain he caused me right by me.

I think that is what’s going on here. These women (and I have coached men in the same situation) are holding on to their ex hoping that the ex will make up somehow for the hurt caused in the relationship, will somehow make it right. And some exes do reach back and make things right and some exes reconcile and go on to live together happily ever after.

But in this situation, the exes are showing no inclination to either reconcile or make things right, at all, and it has been like this for a long time. So how do I get my clients unstuck and be willing to let go of their ex? And if you are in the same situation, how can you get unstuck, stop trying to revive a dead relationship and move on with your life?

Forgiveness.

If you are able to forgive the person who hurt you, you no longer need to wait for the person to rite their wrongs. If they make amends and make things better, great. But your life is no longer on hold, no longer waiting for your ex to make things better for you. If you forgive, you are free.

Forgiveness is for you, not for them. It is a way of releasing yourself from the need for your ex to do anything to make you feel better. And there’s no requirement that you forget, but simply forgive, as in let go of the holding on of the pain, and the holding the other person responsible for your happiness. See them as having done the best they could, even if it was very worst for you. It was still the best they could do. And let go.

That is what I told my clients. Forgive your ex and in forgiving, let go of the relationship and be free to go on with your life. Say “I forgive you and let you go.” And keep saying it until you mean it. It seems to be working for them and perhaps it will work for you.

If you are dealing with a breakup, you may also want to read the following articles:

• Dealing with Heartache – Here’s Relief
• How To Let Your Ex Go

If you are single, by now you have ventured out into the online dating world. There’s not that much of a stigma anymore about using online dating to meet potential partners. The dilemma now is more of which dating site is more effective and where should you spend your time and money.

My single readers and clients tell me that it’s hard to  get noticed on Match because of the sheer volume of people. eHarmony tends to be ok for some, but for others the matches can be wildly mismatched. Free dating sites such as Plenty of Fish and Craig’s list are sometimes creepy. Smaller dating sites have a smaller pool of potential partners. The jury is still out on the dating applications on facebook.

So where’s a single person to hang their dating hat?

I like this site. They are affiliated with Match, and will pull in your profile from Match for you to edit. But, you will not be deluged with hundreds of faces to wade through. Instead you get served 5 matches at a time, and some of the matches are at least on paper quite well matched. It’s like eHarmony, but with better thought out criteria. This dating site feels less superficial and more likely to yield a good match. It’s where I often send my single clients.

If you are single and trying to find a mate, you may want to give it a try.

Think some people have all the luck in love and you’re not one of them? Head on over to my personal blog – RinattaParies.com- to read an article about a study and a book published by a leading PhD. in Phsychology about how to become lucky in love and life.

We experience emotional pain as physical pain, as has been discovered by recent research. This means that when you are experiencing heartache, your heart actually does hurt – well, perhaps not your heart, but something in your body does hurt and badly. You knew this already, because when you feel heartache or anxiety or frustration, it hurts.

In my practice I have noticed people often have a very low tolerance for this pain of heartache – they want to make it go away as fast as possible. And I can understand this. When you have a headache, you want to take an aspirin and if you body hurts, you want to rest, sleep or go to the doctor to find out what’s wrong.

It’s true – physical pain often does indicate something is wrong with out bodies. Emotional pain is different however, even if we experience it physically. The best way to deal with emotional pain is to feel it, without making it better, because on the other side of feeling that pain are great gifts.

In order to understand exactly what I mean, let’s first look at how we behave when we are in pain.

Since physical pain is indication of something gone wrong in the body, you might feel some anxiety or worry about having the pain. You may wonder if you are ok. You want the pain to stop and wonder if and when it will stop, and try to make a plan for how to end it.

Same thing happens with emotional pain. You may feel heartbreak or loneliness or even frustration and wonder if you are going to be ok. You feel anxiety about the pain and wonder if the pain will ever stop and if you are going to survive it.

The interesting thing is that you do survive it, every time.

Think about the last time you felt emotional pain. Perhaps the last time was about a second ago, or perhaps a fairly long time, regardless, put yourself back there for a moment. Now let me ask you a question. Was your body ok while you were feeling that pain? Were any parts of you bleeding or falling off? Were you able to feel emotional pain, but still go to the bathroom, walk and talk?

Emotional pain is not like physical pain. It can be debilitating in that it can take away your desire to do things such as eat, walk, talk, function, but it does not prevent you from actually doing those things. While physical pain is sometimes a signal that something is very wrong, this is not exactly the case with emotional pain. That is why you do not need to be afraid of emotional pain. It is not going to kill you. It is not going to cripple you. It is not going to blind you. It does hurt, but with no real harm to your body.

Emotional pain is different from physical pain in another way. Physical pain often needs outside intervention to make it go away. You may need to take pain reliever, change your diet, go see a doctor, have an operation, bandage the hurt part, etc. Emotional pin will go away if you feel it. Often you have to do nothing else. But if you do not feel, it can linger for a lifetime while you take many actions to avoid feeling it.

This means that when you feel anxiety about feeling heartache and worry about how you are going to make it go away and try to make plans about how you are going to alter circumstance and situations and people so that you stop feeling pain, stop. Remind yourself that nothing bad will happen if you feel pain and it will subside after you allow yourself to feel it. You don’t need to do anything to deal with emotional pain. Instead, you need to be with it.

Deal with emotional pain by delving into it, making friends with it, feeling it until it stops and you are on the other end of it. If you able to do this, there will be gold on the other end.

Here is the gold at the end of emotional pain. Imagine the freedom you would have if you were no longer afraid of feeling emotional pain. If you are single you might be willing to get out there and date more, because you would know you can tolerate the pain of rejection and the pain of not meeting the right person. Or perhaps you would get single and happy, knowing that you could tolerate the pain of loneliness.

If you were in a relationship that wasn’t going fast enough you would either be more patient because you know you could tolerate the pain of waiting, or you would get out because you know that you could tolerate the pain of letting go and being alone.

If you are married or in a long term relationship, you would perhaps speak up for yourself more because you knew that you could tolerate the pain of your partner’s rejection or his or her displeasure with you. Or perhaps you would get closer to your partner because you knew that you can tolerate the anxiety you feel at allowing someone close to you.

If you were going through a breakup or a divorce you could allow the relationship to end because you would know you can tolerate the grief and sorrow of letting go and the temporary loneliness.

Do you see the power you could have over your emotional life if you were able to tolerate emotional pain rather than being afraid of it? It can be truly astounding how much easier and more peaceful life becomes when you are no longer afraid of feeling pain.

It’s true that no one wants to feel emotional pain, but as it is a part of life and unavoidable, better to know that you can tolerate it and get through it then to be afraid of it.

Now for the specifics of how to tolerate emotional pain. Try the mediation below the next time you are suffering from heartache. You can use the meditation once a day, many times a day, or pick a favorite line and use it as constant mantra to help you cope with pain. Or perhaps use this mediation as a template and create a few lines that fit your circumstances best. Feel free to leave your version below in comments.

(I have loosely based this mediation on meditations from the Blooming of a Lotus by Thich Nhat Hanh)

Instructions: simply read this to yourself slowly and breathe.

Feeling pain in my heart, I breath in.
Suffering from the pain in my heart, I breath out.

Feeling my heart breaking, I breathe in.
Feeling as if my heart will break in two, I breathe out.

Feeling the pain is too great to live with, I breathe in.
Feeling as if the pain is going to swallow me up, I breathe out.

Feeling hurt, I breathe in.
Finding hurt where I want love, I breathe out.

Feeling frustration and anger, I breathe in.
Feeling frustration and anger boiling inside, I breathe out.

Wanting things to be different, I breathe in.
Wanting to change him/her, I breathe out.

Wanting attention, I breathe in.
Craving attention, I breathe out.

Wanting gentle touch, I breathe in.
Wanting loving touch, I breathe out.

Feeling I am not good enough, I breathe in.
Seeing nothing good about me, I breath out.

Feeling shame about my body, I breathe in.
Feeling that I am unlovable, I breathe out.

Feeling that no one loves me, I breathe in.
Suffering from not feeling loved, I breathe out.

Feeling frustration, I breathe in.
Feeling fear, I breathe out.

Being afraid that nothing will ever change, I breather in.
Wanting love in my life, I breathe out.

Feeling fear that I will not have what I want, I breathe in.
Feeling fear and anxiety, I breathe out.

Noticing that I am ok, I breathe in.
Noticing that I am ok, I breathe out.

Do you want help dealing with your heartache? I am here to support, comfort and guide you in both learning how to master and tolerate your pain and in actively re-arranging your love life so that it has as little pain as possible and is mostly full of happiness and love. Contact me for a coaching session now.

CNN published a great article yesterday in their living section. The article pretty much summarizes everything I tell my clients about why they end up in bad relationships and what to do about it.

In essence, people tend to attract partners who are very much like their parents, specifically the opposite sex parent. If your opposite sex parent was loving and supportive, if the relationship with that parent was wonderful, then you are very likely to attract wonderful relationship partner(s).

On the other hand, if your opposite gender parent was emotionally unavailable, or critical, controlling, etc, you are very likely to have a negative relationship pattern and attract partners who cause you grief and pain.

Here are the reasons the CNN article lists for why people tend to attract partners who are like their opposite gender parent and my explanation:

•    “Comfort in familiarity – that feeling of knowing someone your whole life”

People with traits similar to your opposite gender parent may feel familiar to you. You may not realize that this feeling of familiarity is not a good thing. It may feel comfortable, but it’s not a good kind of comfort in the end. It’s comfort in knowing that you will experience a very familiar kind of pain.

•    “Wanting to resolve the parental relationship in relationship/marriage”

Parents who are less then loving leave behind life-long wounds in their children. These wounds may be well hidden in all areas but love relationships. That childhood pain wants to be resolved, which is why people often choose for partners people who will reject them or hurt them the same way their parent did. The unconscious hope is to overcome the rejection and to MAKE this person love you, so that the childhood pain can be finally healed.

•    Working through family history in relationship/marriage

Similar to above, people will often attract partner who are like their parents in order to come to terms and learn to survive that kind of pain. It’s as if they are reliving their childhood, but this time they think they will overcome, heal and that will somehow set them free from the early-in-life pain.

Keep in mind that these three reasons are often subconscious. No one who has had less then stellar relationship with his or her opposite gender parent goes out and finds a partner like him or her on purpose.

Never the less, it would be safe to say that if your relationship with your opposite sex parent was less then great, you are nearly doomed to attract less than great relationship partners. At least that’s where the CNN article leaves it’s readers. The solutions for how to deal with this very real dilemma of attracting the wrong type of partner are, well, weak. They are: Don’t jump in, Don’t be afraid to disagree, Talk about life issues.

Let me tell you, you don’t need to know what to do when you once again attract the wrong partner. If you attract partners who cause you pain, what you need to do is learn to recognize your relationship pattern, learn to recognize potential partners who fall into that pattern, before you get into a relationship with them, and say no. And then you need to break your pattern, learn to attract a completely different partner and live happily ever after.

Let’s start here. I have created an ebook called PatternTracker to help you discover your relationship pattern. You can purchase the PatternTracker by clicking here. It’s only $15 and truly is an investment in you. If you diligently answer all the questions in the eBook, your relationship pattern will become obvious. Knowing what you keep repeating is the very first step to freedom from it.

Next, you need to know that even thought relationship patterns are natural and built in, breaking them, attracting partners who are not like your opposite gender parent is possible. How? It requires coaching, and the right kind of coaching.

I can’t exactly spell it out for you, because the process is somewhat different for each person. I am not trying to hide it, I wish I could lay it out to help you do it yourself. Breaking your relationship pattern is such deep and profound work, there’s pretty much no way to do it yourself effectively. But I can say that this is exactly the kind of work I do with clients in coaching – I fix their broken partner picker.

The process takes about six months of weekly coaching sessions and work between sessions on the client’s part. It’s definitely a time and financial investment. But in the process the clients gains the freedom from automatically attracting unhealthy partners and having bad relationships and starts to automatically attract loving, nurturing partnered. And that is priceless!

Please know that you very likely do have a relationship pattern, that it very likely has something to do with your childhood and parents and that you can figure out what it is, with help. And that you can change it and have the love you want, if you are willing to work on it.

Do you use a dating site? If so, do you pay for the site membership? A recent article on cnn about online dating suggests that most members on dating sites have free profiles, but do not pay for memberships, which means they have no way of knowing that they are being contacted by paid members.

I am curious how many of you use dating sites to browse profiles but do not pay for membership yourself. Let’s see if this is a major trend. Take the survey below to let me know what you do.

If you would like, provide more info in comments below.

Who knew that an important key to attracting a good mate or knowing what to do in early dating is staying calm? Well, maybe some people did, but it sure is not widely known.

Let me tell you what I mean, so that you can go make your dating situation better right now.

Do you tend to react to dating events in your life with a large upswing of emotions? Do you tend to get visibly upset, maybe even raise your voice, create fights, or have a hard time concentrating? Or do you get paralyzed into inaction and start to feel dull and shut down?

In other words, if you go out on a date, and the guy/gal does not turn out to be the one, do you experience a strong wave of frustration, anger, sadness – or numbness? Do you start to wonder if you are ever going to meet the one, or perhaps you are meant to be alone? Do you feel despondent?

If so, calm down already! What does that upswing of negative emotion get you, except upset and unhappy and afraid? It sure does not prepare you to get back out there, date more, and improve yourself, your profile, maybe even your looks. It sure does not get you more involved in the world. Strong wave of negative emotions makes you feel bad. And feeling bad makes it hard to take action.

So calm down. Sooth yourself. Talk yourself down. Have a cup of tea, maybe some chocolate – both have chemicals to help you get calm. Remind yourself it’s just one experience in a series of many. Your right partner is out there and there are many, many things you can do to improve your chance of meeting him or her faster.

Or let’s say you are in early stages of dating someone and something goes wrong. Perhaps you allowed the relationship to go too far too fast, or you have found out things about the other person you just can’t live with. You are upset. You don’t know what to do. And this may feel like your last chance at love.

Calm down already! You can’t think or problem solve when you are upset. No clear solution will occur to you and no clear path will be visible, until you are calm. And if you take action without being calm, the choices you make will probably backfire later. Perhaps in a small way, but maybe in big way.

So calm down. Sooth yourself. Talk yourself down. And take the time to think about what’s happening in your dating relationship. Was it indeed irrevocably damaged by too much too soon? Sometimes that’s true and if so, you will do best to pick yourself up and go back to dating other people. Or is there something you can do to pull back and restore balance? Often just spending a bit of time apart, giving each other space to breathe can restore the normal flow of an early relationship.

And what about that trait you see in your new partner that is a red flag for you? You are very likely right about it, but then again, maybe your judgment is being clouded by past relationships. Watch that trait, calmly, not taking what ever your new partner does or does not do, personally. Give it a little time, without trying to change him or her. If you stay calm, you will know what to do.

The key is to stay calm in order to allow yourself to think clearly and make good choices.

Upset-based choices are almost always designed to try to sooth you or make you feel better in the moment, rather than leading to your long term goals. But you don’t need to do anything with the upsetting situation to sooth yourself and calm down. Instead, just calm down already! Sooth yourself no matter what’s going on, then deal with the situation, using a clear head.

You can do it! And if you need help, come work with me as your relationship coach and I will teach you how to stay calm no matter what’s going on. You will be amazed at how good it feels and how effective it is to be able to stay calm and think clearly.