So you’ve been in a relationship for a couple of years or more and it was so easy to fall in love with your partner. It was as if your brain exploded and you were bathed in the most wonderful love serum, which is actually called Oxytocin, or the Love Drug.
Everything was going so well until about 18 months or 2 years later you woke up one morning and asked yourself “Who is this person?” The falling in love part was fairly easy because of your childhood conditioning. The way a person looks feels, sounds and smells can be very familiar to us because of what we experienced in childhood. Smell is particularly potent because of tiny little particles called pheromones, which can be filled with all kinds of information that inform us about the person, in particular sex, fear, aggression, love, and safety. When the pheromones positively lock into the receptors of our brain they release Oxytocin and Dopamine and reinforce the bond and reward us for finding a suitable mate.
As I said earlier, this is the easy part, the harder part is maintaining those feelings because, in the beginning, we keep reminding ourselves of all the good qualities of our partner, which keeps us fully associated with. But as time goes on, you start to notice the things that you didn’t notice at the beginning like how messy they are, how they eat and talk at the same time, their annoying voice, and how they complain about everything. You are now associating with the negative aspects of the person and dissociating from the positive qualities that attracted you to them in the first place.
As some of you know, I am a Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) Master Practitioner and Trainer and was trained by and assisted the man who co-created NLP, Dr. Richard Bandler. The following is one of his quick and very successful techniques to change your mindset in your relationship to go back to the beginning of your loving relationship and focus on why and how you fell in love with that person. Where focus goes, energy flows!
Here are 6 easy steps to achieve that. Have fun!
- Imagine a large TV screen in front of you. Now sit comfortably and close your eyes and see your current relationship very clearly in technicolor, with sound and beautiful lighting. See it, feel it, hear it.
- Now choose 3 negative memories or behaviors that have happened in your relationship that threatens its success. Now begin to run each one in your mind like a film and make sure you’re in the film with your partner and relive it as if it is happening now. I’m sure it will be very vivid as you have been focusing on the negatives for a long time.
- Now choose 3 positive qualities or behaviors that you had in the beginning of your relationship but haven’t focused on for a while because you were too busy focusing on the negative ones. These memories will be smaller and less distinct because you dissociated from them, pushed them to the background, and allowed the negative ones to take your focus.
- Now close your eyes again and picture each negative experience. Take your time and focus on each experience individually giving it time and make sure that you reduce the size of the image and push it away into the background. Drain the color out of it and watch it reduce to a very small black dot and evaporate. Repeat this 5 times for each experience and, each time, do it faster and faster.
- Now think about the three positive memories that you would like to see and feel more clearly again. The qualities that enabled you to fall in love in the first place. Close your eyes and bring the image of each one into focus making it vivid, large, and with sound. Now do this 5 times with each memory and might it bigger, brighter, and bolder each time as you do it faster and faster.
- Finally, sit back with closed eyes and imagine a beautiful golden road in front of you (your future) and see yourself on that road with your partner. Run the film and be fully associated and involved with the experiences like having a meal together, making love, or any other pleasant experience you have had before and want to have again. See 5 situations with your partner and make them big and bright and bold and make them bigger and more exciting every time you think of one. Run each one as a film, take your time, create as much detail as possible, and make sure you are fully in the film.
I promise you that next time you see your partner, you will have a much more pleasurable time with them as you focus on the positives and how you fell in love with them in the first place. You have now fallen in love with your partner again. Repeat this exercise whenever you feel that you are going into a negative space with them. It will quickly pull you back into love.
