Tuesday, April 07, 2009

Why Can I Not Get My Ex-Lover Out of My Head?

When a woman falls in love with a man (and a man with a woman), her brain creates an incredibly powerful chemical called oxytocin. It acts just like a narcotic in that you literally become addicted to that person. Because this person acts as a catalyst for your brain to create this chemical, every time you see, hear, touch, kiss, hug, or are with person, your body literally goes into a euphoric state without your control. Pulling away from this person can create pain similar to drug withdrawals. You literally "crave" this person. He fills your thoughts, feelings, and living. That is why it hurts to be away from them. The bad part is that it takes anywhere from three months to two years to recover from this addiction to another person. The good news, is that there are ways to "shorten" this withdrawal period substantially by focusing on "other" oxytocin producing activities.

The first step is that you now understand "why" your are literally "addicted to love."

Do I Have a Soul Mate?

The legend of a "soul mate" came from the drunken story telling sessions way back in the days of the early Greeks. As the legend goes, the gods once made mankind perfect with two heads, four arms and four legs and two different sets of genitals. In this state, mankind was extremely happy. For some unknown reason, the gods became angry with mankind and separated them. With this, mankind was doomed to wander the earth looking for its other perfect half.

Of course this was just a story made up by drunken Greeks to amuse other drunken Greeks, but the concept took on.

The important point here is that there is no such thing as a soul mate. You may find someone you get along with well, but there always be compromise. The perfect person for you (or I, or anyone) does not exist in a natural state. There are forces that naturally bring certain people together, and in some instances we are predisposed based on our temperament and intelligence to be highly attracted to another individual.

We are all individuals and should be looking for an individual who we can love for their faults as well as their good points. Men do not think like women (and visa versa) and hence do not understand us (or we them). We have to carefully train them as to what does and does not work in a relationship with us. Patience is a must and expecting a potential mate to be perfect right off the bat is a misguided idea. Love takes a lot of work, and over the period of the next couple of months, I will go into more detail as to how best achieve mastery of Love.

I do feel that if you are realistic, you will meet someone you are quite happy with, but you must be willing to make allowances for some of the differences in you, and most importantly both of you must be willing to work toward building a loving, long term relationship. There are a lot of things that make a relationship sour (and I will talk about that too in my future post). That is NOT to say that over time and with a great deal of practice and effort and knowledge two people cannot end up being like "two hearts beating as one," or in other parlance, "soul mates."

As much as people want to, you cannot Force this condition to exist. Many people want to connect with their partner and no matter how much effort they expend, it just will not happen. Building a committed bond takes a lot of time, love, and work. Yes work! Believe it or not the initial commitment to love does involve a chemical "dependency" that I will go into in some of my future posts, but that is only the start. In essence, initially you really do become "addicted" to your partner, and that addiction can result in some of the best, and worst, feelings imaginable. Addiction is NOT Love. But no fear, in the end it is ALL good. I will help guide you (if you want) to become a Master of Love instead of a Slave to it.

Bottom line: Soul Mates are not found, but created.