why relationships suckthe only guide to

being happy with other peoplethat you will ever need

bartolomeu orsahttp://www.bartolomeuorsa.com

Copyright ©2014 Bartolomeu Orsa

All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or

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cover illustration Holly Ollivander

mehiel is our friend

KinshipA Guided Journal for the Trip of a Lifetime

Much like guided meditation, Kinship is a guided jour-nal. Within the pages of this book you will arrive at your own inner sanctuary where you may ponder and respond to insightful questions designed to bring you to full and joyous self-understanding.

Also by Bartolomeu Orsa

This is a book about how relationships work — ac-tually, it’s a book about how everything works since every thing exists in relationship to ev-ery other thing, to varying degrees of proximity. Ask any physicist or philosopher and they’ll tell you the same: there is nothing in the universe that is not in some relationship with everything else.

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It may surprise you that a book explaining how everything works could take up so few pages but, there you go, the print version doesn’t even have a proper spine to write the title on. Lucky for all of us that explaining how everything works is simpler than anyone ever suspected, though just because a thing is simple doesn’t necessarily mean it will be easy to accomplish. Change can be like that.

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At some time in your childhood you may have decided that any sort of conflict was complete-ly physically uncomfortable and through trial and error you learned that when you bent over backwards to please someone the tension eased up enough to make it bearable for you to remain in the same room.

To accomplish an operable comfort level you most likely became the peacemaker in your family, or the good child, or the helper, the fix-er, the over-achiever, and it’s probably worked pretty well up to now — now being the point at which you find yourself here, reading this book and wishing things were different.

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Over the years, you refined this method of en-suring harmony in your life by never allowing yourself to relax until you were assured every-one around you was happy and comfortable first. If you are bitter, if you are tired or ill or over-medicated nowadays it’s no wonder — all this work to make sure things run smoothly is rarely, if ever, rewarded in kind.

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Over the years, you have trained the people around you to expect nothing less from you than total service and complete cooperation with whatever they desire in the moment. The instant you are tired or you are sick or you are weary or you need support, do you get it? Doubtful. Instead, you have others asking what is wrong with you, or remarking that you don’t seem like your usual self today. Sometimes, the reaction isn’t so nice — sometimes people become seri-ously resentful that their usual cheerful servant is apparently out of the office or away on holi-day.

If this is the case with you, you may have be-come a pathological pleaser.

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It’s not particle physics or defining pi, hence the brevity of this book. Being a pathological pleaser is merely a survival habit developed over years and sustained because you are afraid people won’t love you when they find out who you really are. You have fine-tuned your entire sense of self-worth to whatever response you are receiving from everyone else in any given moment.

You worry about how you appear to others, or what they think of you, or what they say about you when you are not around. You worry about whether anyone is telling lies about you, and most of all, what you can do about it without appearing to be the bad guy — heaven forbid you should ever appear to be a bad guy!

You must be worn out by all this. All these years you have been investing the gold of your soul in the wrong bank. You have been scurry-ing around pleasing others in order to get their approval, approval having come to mean love in your mind.

The problem with being a pathological pleaser is that the main people who will be drawn to you are pathological users. But there is hope: the user you attract will be in direct oppo-sition to the degree that you are a pleaser, no exception. What this means is that you don’t have to spend a single moment trying to change anyone else.* You are the only person you can ever change and — unlike attempting to change the world — changing yourself is simpler than you may have ever imagined.

* you can’t change anyone — you can try, but they will just sneak around behind your back and do whatever they wanted to do in the first place, every time, guaranteed.

That’s a lot to throw at you in a small number of pages but, never fear, there’s diagrams on the way. First, let’s revisit this statement:

The user you attract will be in direct opposition to the degree that you are a pleaser

What does this mean? Glad you asked …

So, you’ve heard of spectrum behavior? This is what a spectrum can look like:

There are a million different landing places on the spectrum, but for simplicity’s sake here’s two more just to get some variety going. As you can see, the two new places are closer to the center:

… works for guys, too:

Now note the length of the line between pathological user and pathological pleaser.

Picture that line as a string and think of that string as vibrational, like a harp …

When you play a harp you rest the soundboard against your chest. One of the first things you experience when you pluck it is that the longest string has the most powerful resonance and sustain. You can feel this vibration thrumming internally for a very long time.

This is one of the main reasons why a relation-ship of extreme opposite personalities takes so long to get over, the vibration lasts and lasts — it sustains — long after the string has been plucked.

Many people become addicted to this type of relationship, convinced that what they are feel-ing is passion when what they are actually ex-periencing is the intensity of conflict.

Many country and western songs agree.

People say opposites attract, but here’s the thing, they don’t have to be extreme opposites. You can have all the intensity you could ever desire without once indulging in conflict or the tension of a long spectrum string pulled taut between you.

All you have to do is move yourself — only your-self — towards the center of the spectrum. As you do this, a wonderful alchemy takes place: you begin to attract others on the opposite side of the center position, and you will find they are equally opposite to the place you occupy on the spectrum line. In other words, the more you close the gap between you and the center of the spectrum, the more new people you will encoun-ter doing the same.

You never have to worry about where anyone else is on the spectrum, ever. Nor do you ever have to fret about trust issues or whether or not someone is lying to you or if you are going to be hurt by someone else — you will sniff out trouble in an in-stant the more time you spend occupying a space near the center of the spectrum.

This cannot be stressed enough:

You will never have to worry about trusting anyone else again because you trust yourself via

your own excellent instincts.

You will begin to increasingly heed the inner alarm that goes off when you spend time around people too far from their own center position.

And now, a warning …

Once again: your only concern is where you spend time on the spectrum. The more you fo-cus your energy and will towards maintaining a place near the center, the more people you will attract with the exact opposite proximity to the center of the spectrum.

Attempting to drag anyone else closer to the center is worse than futile; they will always pull in the opposite direction and in the attempt, you will move further away from where you ought to be. It is only ever your job to look after your own balance and allow the rest of the world to look after itself.

Never worry that by living a balanced life you will exchange intensity for blandness, it doesn’t work out that way at all. Instead, something marvel-ous will begin between you and the new people coming into your life, a tight circle of operation, a closeness, flexibility and shared intimate lan-guage where you can effortlessly exchange places as either the strong one or the one requiring sup-port quickly and efficiently and with an emotional shorthand unique to both of you.

This new circular motion echoes all the healthy movement in the cosmos: the waltz of galaxies, the rotation of planets, the swirl of water, the incan-descent buzz of electrons around a nucleus, the spiral dance of Sufi in prayer — all creative motion in the universe is rotational rather than a tension between extremes.

So give yourself a break. Stop exchanging back-breaking work for approval, calling it ‘love’ and always feeling short-changed. Concentrate on your joy and nearness to the center, be the per-son you want to be with and they will appear.

The best way to keep yourself in the center position is to meditate. Entire tomes have been written addressing the subject, but every one of them boils down to this: you want to achieve the same level of relaxation that you do natu-rally every time you go to sleep, yet maintain consciousness throughout. That’s it. Just find somewhere comfortable, lie down, breathe reg-ularly, relax completely and stay awake. That is meditation.

Giving yourself the deliberate, conscious relaxation time called meditation every day for half an hour grants you all the centering benefits of sleep, yet allows you to identify and fine-tune your place-ment on the spectrum at will, anytime.

And lastly, a heads-up …

There will come a point when the old crowd be-gins to drift away and your new friends have not shown up yet. This is where many people run back to the old crowd, and for a variety of reasons: to avoid being alone, or because change is scary or because they crave the familiar. There is always a tipping point, a lull between one state of being and another, but by becoming aware of what you have learned in the previous pages, you will find the old crowd is no longer the comfortable fit for you it once was. And it’s not only that — they are no longer comfortable with you. They may try to browbeat you into being ‘yourself’ again, but do not be afraid. You have changed at a molecular level and there is no ‘going back,’ only the pros-pect of continuing to act out some part others require you to play if you attempt to cling to the past. Carry on, maintain your position near the center of the spectrum, make that your priority and let the old crowd drift away.

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New love is coming to you now.And now. And now.

Let it in.

forjaymah k

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