“Failed” Relationships

As an Emuna Therapist, I get asked by people all the time: “How do you listen to people’s problems all day long?” They tell me that they’re really sorry to “lay all this stuff on you”, or “to dump all this stuff on you” – and truthfully, in the past there were times when I felt overwhelmed by all the negativity. But not anymore, because when people are telling me how bad their lives are, I’m sitting there thinking it’s not bad at all!

Recently, I had one client who thinks that he’s a real loser and that he’s never going to get married, The man, let’s call him Benny, is not a young guy, and he recently came out of a five year relationship that he thought was going the whole way. He was so in love with this woman, and he felt it was the first time that anyone had ever showed him true love, and then – she abandoned him. Not only that, when Benny tried to reignite the relationship, the woman got extremely upset and complained he was harassing her.

Benny went into a deep depression, and before long, he ended up on all sorts of anti-depressants. There he is, in his lonely life, working in a menial job well below his intelligence level, and he’s stuck on this failed relationship and still thinking about this girl and how good she was for him. He doesn’t have G-d in his life yet, so he’s feeling boxed-in and miserable, but I don’t see things the same way, because it’s clear to me that G-d didn’t want this relationship to work. I tell Benny that he’s so blessed that he didn’t stay with that girl, because G-d forbid that they would have started a family together, and then she would have run off!  We all know that it causes almost irreparable damage to a child, when a parent runs off. They feel so broken and unloved, and G-d has spared Benny all that heartache.

I told him that I’m 100% sure that G-d already has someone better suited for him lined up, but before He can show Benny who that is, He’s waiting for him to let go of this failed relationship. “Let go! You’re trying to be G-d, and you’re trying to dictate the terms of your life, but that’s not accepting reality, to say it has to be her and no-one else. G-d has sent you a clear sign that this woman wasn’t for you. It was a learning experience that He sent to you to prove that it is possible for you to have a marital relationship, and to love and be loved. It wasn’t a waste, it wasn’t for nothing at all, but you have to take away those points of goodness, and then jettison the rest!”

G-d was showing Benny, via our conversation, that all the good things and feelings that he’d enjoyed throughout his “failed” relationship were a gift from G-d. G-d wants Benny to continue to enjoy those wonderful feelings, and to hold on to them when he moves on to his next relationship. I tell this to people all the time: if you had a relationship, and it didn’t work out for whatever reason, you should know that G-d sent that relationship to you for a reason. Hold onto the good memories from that relationship, they didn’t happen to just be forgotten about. And the same holds true for any business you ran with a partner, that didn’t work out. You can still end on a good note, even if you fought. This is a lesson for all of us. We all need to remember the good, because it was a present from G-d. We can’t throw that present back in His face because other factors didn’t work out to our liking; and we shouldn’t put that present away and not look at it again.

We need to hold onto our good feelings and experiences, even if they weren’t perfect, and write them down to review them and make them part of ourselves. The more we make an effort to review all the good in our lives, the more effort we make to look for it, the more we’ll know it and feel it. That in turn will help us to have the clarity to know that G-d is with us, and that G-d loves us, and that G-d wants to give to us. Clarity is power.

Each of us has to learn about ourselves; we have to become experts in our own lives and our own personal histories, but exclude the bad, and keep the good.  Knowing what’s good about ourselves is the most important learning there is.