The Conscious Person’s Guide to Love Everlasting

By Jed Diamond, PhD, LCSW

We long for a relationship that lasts through the ages, but are often disappointed. We fall in love, things go well for a while, then we hit the difficult times. Some of us work through these changes and come out stronger on the other end. Others separate and divorce. Most of us don’t give up and marry again, but often we find the same problems we had in our first marriage. Many have become fearful of “marriage” and look for a healthy long-term “relationship” without “typing the knot.”

But here too, many are disappointed. I recently read a blog post, “Why I Left,” written by Joelle Pittman. Like many of us, Ms. Pittman was looking for love, but found abuse and heartache instead. Like most us who have been through a rough relationship, she wondered what had happened. “l have a great job, I have my Master’s degree, I live alone in my own home, I travel all over the world, I have wonderful friends and a loving family, I compete in horse shows, and I volunteer for the Humane Society. Looking at these factors, I never expected to be ‘that girl.’ But I am ‘that girl.’ I fell in love with someone who treated me like a punching bag for his problems.”

This isn’t just a problem for women. I know many men who feel the same way. For more than 40 years I’ve been helping women and men find the love of their lives and teaching them how to keep their relationship alive and well through time. But to be honest at the outset, you should know that I’ve been married three times. My present wife, Carlin, and I have been married 35 years and we have every reason to believe we will defy the odds of third marriages and make it to the end totally in love and successfully married. Here’s what we’ve learned thus far.

1. We all want love and respect, but more often find heartache and pain.

No one goes into a relationship expecting that we will be hurt. If we’re older than fourteen, we’ve all experienced the heartache and pain of a relationship that ended. But love is such a strong need that we try and try again. But when we look around us, we see more relationships that start out good, but turn bad. We rarely look deeply at why that may be so. That’s a big mistake.

1. Our desires for love come from our conscious minds, but relation realities are driven by the subconscious.

Most of us have a pretty good idea of the qualities we look for in a mate. I’ve looked for someone who is loving, nurturing, attractive, kind, intelligent, caring, and self-aware (I call it the “A” team). But when I look back on the qualities in the relationships I’ve actually been in I find they are often fiery, frightened, angry, attractive, uncompromising, wounded, and worried (I call it the “Z” team).

After two failed marriages and numerous dysfunctional relationships, I took some time to delve deeply into the question, “If I want someone from the A team, why do I keep choosing women from the Z team?” I also had to ask, “If I want to express qualities of the A team, why do I slip into expressing the qualities of the Z team?” What I came to understand was that my A team desires were coming from my conscious mind, but my Z team choices were driven by my subconscious mind.

1. Be it ever so shitty, there’s no place like home.

Our conscious mind is like a homing pigeon that searches for home in the arms of love (the A team). However most of us come from dysfunctional families where we suffered some degree of abuse, neglect, or abandonment (the Z team). When I looked back at the family I grew up in, I realized that my mother was frightened and worried. My father was fiery, angry, and uncompromising. Both were deeply wounded from their own past. Although my conscious mind sought the A team, my subconscious sought what was familiar, the Z team.

1. Conscious Mind–Score 1. Subconscious Mind–Score, 1,000,000. Guess Who Wins?

George Miller, Ph.D., is one of the founding fathers of modern cognitive psychology. According to Dr. Miller, the conscious mind puts out on average between 20 and 40 neuron firings per second, while the subconscious puts out between 20 and 40 million firings per second. In other words, in measuring the activity of the subconscious mind as compared to the conscious mind, we’re looking at a factor of about a million to one. No wonder we find ourselves looking for love in all the wrong places.

1. Our subconscious mind wants to heal old wounds.

The subconscious mind works largely by association. It connects things to other things. In other words, it pays attention to resonances and it is always working in the background.  It’s why we’re drawn to people who reverberate with feelings from the past. We long to heal the father wound and find the love and support we often didn’t get from our Dad. We hunger for the nurturing and unconditional love we didn’t get from our Mom.

Our subconscious mind seeks the same dysfunctional emotional conditions in which we grew up. Without our conscious awareness it’s saying, “I’ll find someone who is like the father who ignored me or the mother who smothered me (or whatever pain patterns we experienced growing up), but this time I’m going to make them love me.” However, the subconscious mind doesn’t have the skill to heal us. It knows about fear, but is clueless about love. So we repeat the process of seeking and creating hurtful relationships over and over again.

1. Most marriage counseling addresses the conscious mind, but neglects the subconscious.

The father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, helped us understand the power of the subconscious. But analysis was a poor tool for healing and was too time-consuming and expensive for most people, and has fallen out of favor. Modern marriage counseling focuses on things like communication, problems solving, and cognitive changes in what we think and believe. However, the high divorce rate continues and many people feel disappointed.

Our conscious mind learns all the rules for a successful marriage, but we never seem to be able to put the rules into practice. Joelle Pittman found that out when she sought out a counselor. She writes eloquently and openly about her experiences in her blog, I Spent 15% of My Salary on a Relationship “Coach” & All I Got Was a Lousy List.

1. We need a new form of marriage counseling that unites the conscious and subconscious minds.

In their wonderful book Code to Joy:  The Four-Step Solution to Unlocking Your Natural State of Happiness Clinical psychologists George Pratt and Peter Lambrou, offer this insightful story about the relationship of the conscious and subconscious mind.

Once upon a time there was a flea who believed that he was king of the world.

One day he decided he wanted to go to the beach for a swim. But the western shore was many miles away, and on this own, the flea could travel only inches at a time. If he was going to reach the shore during his lifetime, he would need transportation.

So he called out to his elephant. “Ho, there Elephant, let’s go out!”

The flea’s elephant came to his side and kneeled down. The flea hopped up and, pointing to the west, saying, “That way—to the beach!”

But the elephant did not go west. He rather felt like taking a stroll in the forest to the east, and that is what he did. The flea, much to his dismay, could do nothing but go along for the ride, and spent the day being smacked in the face by leaves and branches.

The next day, the flea tried to get the elephant to take him to the store to buy salve for his face. Instead, the elephant took a long romp in the northern mountains, terrifying the poor flea so badly that he could not sleep that night. The flea stayed in his bed for days, beset by nightmares of thundering along mountain roads, certain he would fall to his death, and awoke each morning in a cold sweat.

After a week, finally feeling well enough to rise from his bed, the flea beckoned the elephant to his side, clambered up, and said, “I’m not well. Please, take me to the doctor.”

But the elephant merrily trundled off to the western shore, where he spent the day swimming. The flea nearly drowned.

That night, sitting by the fireplace and trying to warm himself, the flea had a thought. He turned to the elephant and said, “About tomorrow…um, what are your plans?”

What’s the moral of the story? If you are a flea riding an elephant, before you make any plans, you might want to check out what your elephant has in mind.

“This point is more important to your life than it might seem,” say Pratt and Lambrou. “The flea of the story represents your conscious mind which includes your intellect and power of reason, your ambitions and aspirations, your ideas, thoughts, hopes, and plans. In short, everything you think of as you. And the elephant? That’s your subconscious mind.”

If we really want to have a relationship that lasts through time, we have to bring together the conscious and subconscious mind. That’s what my wife, Carlin, and I have learned and what we practice in our counseling with men and women.

Jed Diamond, PhD, LCSW, is the Founder and Director of the MenAlive, a health program that helps men live well throughout their lives. Though focused on men’s health, MenAlive is also for women who care about the health of the men in their lives. Diamond’s new book, Stress Relief for Men: How to Use the Revolutionary Tools of Energy Healing to Live Well, brings together the wisdom accumulated in 40 years helping more than 20,000 men, women, and children.