“…Still, people make extraordinary efforts to modify the behavior of others in an effort to make relationships work. But ultimately this is as futile as cleaning the mirror in an attempt to clean your face. The mirror will just keep reflecting back the same image.”

I have come to learn that life and people truly reflect back to us precisely who and where we are. We can be in denial about this, but people and circumstances (our teachers) will keep showing up until we get the lesson.

To keep this discussion short, I will just talk about two areas here:

(1) really finding clarity within our self, and (2) really tuning in to the other person for information about who they really are. Here’s what I mean:

CLARITY WITHIN. It has taken me years to discover that so much of my relationship chaos comes because I am not truly clear within myself about what I want. Oh, sure I will say that I am, but my actions will show differently. Therefore, I get involved with a lot of people that I never should have gotten involved with in the first place because they really don’t make sense for me – in a healthy way.

TUNING IN TO THE OTHER PERSON. Someone once said, “When someone tells you who they really are, LISTEN!” Again it’s taken me a lot of years to learn that people will give me very accurate clues about who they really are pretty early on when I meet them. What generally happens though, (remember: love is blind?) I block out this information so I can hold on to my fantasy about this person. I so dearly want this person to be right for me, that I don’t hear the real truth about this person. Even when some of that truth seeps through, I foolishly tell myself that I’ll be able to change them.

So I just keep cleaning the mirror…and believing that the rest of it will take care of itself.

One of the overarching themes that I see people talking about is all the “drama”  in their love lives. They talk about how people have shown up in their lives, only to be dishonest and disappoint them — as so many have done before. When one person wrote about that recently, he asked for input on how he could learn to trust again – after having been disappointed so many times. It reminded me of a phrase that a friend of mine used several years ago.

He said, “We Create Our Own Chaos.”

Now while it doesn’t sound like it, that is a very empowering statement. What we tend to do is to blame other people for all the pain we suffer in relationships. However, if we begin to realize that “We Create Our Own Chaos” then we have the opportunity to exam our attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors so as to bring about more desirable results. When we really get good at this, we will see that we get exactly what we ask for.

Stated another way: the people that come to us are a direct reflection of the  energy that we are sending out. They don’t just sort of represent – they precisely reflect – the energy that we are sending out. They are answering our call.