Love is life giving. We don't fully know that because many of us didn't receive love growing up. We learned that love was being understanding. 

As a child you had to be understanding of the ways your parents treated you. You learned love was disappointing. You learned that because you are family and love one another you need to accept bad behavior. You were conditioned to believe that no one outside the family would ever care more about you. 

So they mistreat you. They speak poorly about you and to you. You think it's all normal family stuff especially because usually people living in similar frequencies live around one another and come across one another. 

I had a lot of friends and every single one of them had issues with their parents. They were different from the issues that I faced, but they still had them. They knew secrets like their mother cheated on their father. 

Their parents were very strict and wouldn't let them hang out with friends outside of school. Their parents were negligent and didn't care if they didn't go to school. Their father was very strict and cruel. 

I saw all sorts of issues so it was all normal. And they tell the story that this is all mainly normal in lower socioeconomic classes, but the truth is I had a lot of friends that lived in really good areas. 

As an adult, I had a bestie whose father was a surgeon. She told me it was a surprise for her to find out that poor men cheated on their wives because in her world it was believed you had to have money to provide for a second woman. 

These issues are everywhere and they are normalized. You hear about them in the streets, at work, and they are completely normalized through television and music. 

So is it no wonder that people question what love is? Is it no wonder that they are in a confused state while dating and don't have a clue as to what they really need from someone?

I have childhood friends that married younger than I did. One of them early on in their relationship called the police because he had hit her in self-defense. She was honest to the police that she was the one that attacked him so the police said, "Okay. You can't do that and then call the police. Figure this out."  

She was 19 at the time and I remember everyone around, even adults, talking about how crazy she was. Those stories are told as, "That's so and so. They're like that." It's all so normalized. No one looked at that and said, "It makes sense she needs to do a lot of healing work because her mother married an abusive man twice. She never had a real father figure. Her father didn't speak to her in love and there was always tension in the home. Why wouldn't those patterns live in her? Why wouldn't she repeat them?"

You can see these energies working within individuals, within couples, and within a home. You can see disharmonious energy in a home. That does not feel like a safe environment. 

Her mother conceptualized what happened throughout her childhood. Her mother was open and frank about having married an abusive man. Her mother could talk circles cognitively about all of it, but there was no inner change which allowed this to stay in the family. 

I don't believe her husband was abusive. I didn't see that in his energy, but the turbulent energies living within her allowed something like that to unfold. We all become actors in other people's stories. Energy can be very manipulative. If you've ever spent time alone you can feel how you feel when you're alone and when you're under the influence of other people's energies. And unfortunately, the way it works is that it is easier for people to be brought down into a lower vibration than it is to be brought up to a higher state of vibration. 

So people stay together because they've been taught that's what love is. You've said your vows right, "Stay together through the good times and the BAD times." They think, these are the bad times. But bad times are things outside of your control like becoming unemployed and having to figure out finances together or receiving a really bad health diagnosis and working through that together.

As an adult, I met a couple that had been together for over twenty years. They had three beautiful teenagers together. The husband was in a constant state of depression and abused alcohol. I saw her say to him, "You really need to figure this out. I want you to be healthy." She said it in the most loving way, but the truth is he had been an alcoholic for a long time. It was clear they were experiencing chaos due to his state of being, but she was the faithful wife that stayed by her husband. It is common programming that a faithful wife has to stay by her husband despite these very unhealthy behaviors. 

These "bad times" are normalized in relationships even though they're not "bad times" they are an every day occurrence that continuously cut your energy and keep creating new wounds. Nothing good comes from this. You only become more and more destabilized and more and more confused. 

Real love is safety, nurture, security, and trust. The energy is harmonious. There is no need to yell at one another or call each other names. It's this stable, constant, harmonious energy. 

Most of us haven't been taught that or how to work within that space. No one taught me either, I am just intuitive so I felt it. I had an inner voice constantly guiding me. One of the things that I constantly heard in the back of my head was, "Don't take away love." And I learned when I heard that to check my heart and to work through the energy of love. 

And it really works. When I was a new mom, I had those challenging overstimulating moments where the baby is crying and life feels chaotic. Instead of forcing myself to keep at it in that state of being, I would recognize the tension within my body and I would choose to work from the space of love. I would instantly feel a heart shift and all that stress would melt away. That is the power of love. 

And when you have that connection with other human beings, their love has the power to decrease your tension and stress levels. It has the power to calm down your nervous system. 

But this isn't the way love is spoken about. It's spoken about as self sacrifice. Women in particular are made to feel that if they love someone they have to give up parts of themselves. They don't consciously do that. It's small things like their partner wants to do a very specific job in a very specific area so she makes the decision to let go of her job to make his dreams happen. It's small things like that that eventually leave behind a woman that doesn't recognize herself and has lost parts of herself to "love." And you can continue to delude yourself and believe, "that's just what love is" but the reality is if someone loves you they could never watch you give up parts of yourself. 

When we are connected to our hearts, we can feel how others around us are feeling. We can feel when we are both connected and feeling good and we can feel when something has brought them down. If you register that you did something that's brought them down, you immediately want to correct that. That's love. 

But it only happens through being connected with our hearts. It's through being connected with our heart that we can form life giving relationships. 

I am intuitive and I help people solve their spiritual problems by assessing their energy and correcting it. If you would like to receive my help, then please contact me by clicking the button below.
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​Disclaimer: I am not a doctor or a therapist. My work with you should not be considered a replacement for appropriate professional care.   Any materials  (blog posts, newsletters, and other communications)  created by A Joyful Life Lived, LLC are for educational purposes only. If you are struggling with any mental, emotional, or physical illness it is your responsibility to seek the counsel of your primary care provider. Nothing created out of A Joyful Life Lived, LLC should be misconstrued as personal or medical advice.

Lately, God has been asking me to talk about love from my perspective given everything I have learned about it in the past several years.

There is a lot of confusion around what love is and it isn't an accident. Remember negative forces are always working toward distraction, destruction, and keeping you afraid. 

Love is life giving. Love overcomes fear so of course they will keep you in a confused state so that you never experience it. 

All of this can be seen spiritually and felt and experienced in the body. 

When you're in a loving relationship it gives you strength. You can do anything. It fortifies you. So when you both equally love each other, you do that for each other. 

But that's not what we see in this world. We see a lot of imbalance. We see women self sacrificing for their men and becoming a shell of what they once were. 

There is a lot of vampirism in a lot of marriages. It's done in the open and women are mocked for it. 

For example, women have a purpose in life just like men. They want to do fulfilling work. How often do you see a woman working on a career or business and she can't find traction? She becomes the joke. She's had a business for over ten years and it's rarely ever made a profit. 

She can be doing anything. She can be a real estate agent and she never sells a house. She works and she works, but she makes no money. 

Meanwhile, the entire time that she is working as a realtor her energy is constantly pulled away from her work to help her husband. His business is excelling and guess who is managing it? The wife. She is doing all of the administrative work and making sure all the paperwork is squared away for legal and accounting. 

She even does some customer service work, but does she see a dime from this labor? Not once. Her work isn't valued and she is seen as a joke because she isn't excelling in her own business. 

What is going on here spiritually? That will tell us the entire story. In the spiritual, I can see the man is abusive. I can also see that he is stealing her energy. Because her energy is continuously stolen she has gotten to a place of extreme weakness. She no longer trusts herself. She no longer feels capable. She no longer feels strong and on top of it she is older and is aware that society is not kind to the older woman. She is trapped. And she will be labeled as stupid for allowing this to happen, but it all happened without her awareness. 

As soon as a vampire gets their fangs on you, if you are not aware and you don't do any protection work, it's a slow demise to everything that you are. They will take absolutely everything that you are and you will wonder, where did I go?

The cure for this is to take back your energy, but that doesn't automatically happen by leaving someone. You can leave and never see someone again and they can still have access to your energy especially in situations where you have given yourself to them or they are family members. 

This is what I help people with. I do spiritual and protection work to help people get back to a state of harmony again. With that comes clarity of mind instead of living in a state of confusion. You also feel fortified from within and able to take action that actually gets you somewhere because your energy isn't helping others instead. It's being used the way it was supposed to be used, to help you navigate your way through this life. If you would like help with this work please contact me by clicking the button below. 

 I had been to therapy for years and had been told I was an empath, but I didn't realize what that really meant. 

It means more than you are absorbing other people's emotions, illnesses, and energy. 

It's not just an inconvenience. 

It completely destroys your life. Having this energetic exchange happen regularly in your relationships distorts your relationships. 

There is no other way around it. 

Here is how it played out in my marriage and began to make my marriage suffer. 

I remember this day vividly still. My husband and I have amazing conversations together and enjoy spending time together so we had this beautiful habit of going on trails together. 

One Saturday, we were walking a trail and I was filled with so many positive emotions.

I had been working on my trauma and was beginning to feel safe and happy when all of a sudden he reached for my hand. The second he touched my hand, a dark cloud loomed over me and I felt depressed. 

Grief and extreme pain overwhelmed me. 

The reality is that this had been happening for a long time in my life, but the stark contrast of that day is what made me realize this was occurring. Prior to that it would have been hard for me to notice because I was already depressed so if I were to feel even more depressed it just meant I was having a bad day. 

This isn't where it stopped though. I began to notice that I was waking up fatigued in the mornings. I had no energy within me. That was because I was giving my life force energy to my husband while we slept at night in bed together. 

I didn't know what to do anymore. I literally couldn't be around my husband without feeling discomfort in my own body and of course that spilled out into how we interacted with each other.

I had absorbed so much of other people's anger and other emotions that I began to genuinely feel hatred inside. I hated people and I hated my husband. 

All of this anger welled up inside of me and I would vomit verbal diarrhea on my husband daily. 

Our joyous walks turned into fighting matches. 

And he just wanted his wife back. He had no idea what was going on with me. 

Once I realized what was going on, I began to do the work that needed to be done to undo all of this and it isn't easy. 

There are no tricks to stopping this cycle. The only way to get out of it was to go through the subconscious beliefs I had that were causing me to absorb other people's energy. 

There are a few core beliefs that allow this to happen. Here they are:

1) I don't deserve love. 

2) I am not worthy of goodness. 

These beliefs energetically send out the message to the world that everyone else is more important than you are so they are able to steal your energy and due to your beliefs you also willingly subconsciously self sacrifice all the time absorbing other people's ailments, maladies, and negative emotions in exchange for your healthy energy. 

The underlying reason for this is the belief that if you do this you will finally be able to receive love. You will finally be loved. 

But unfortunately that never happens. 

So instead what happened is that I became increasingly emotionally unstable and easily triggered and as time progressed incredibly ill. 

And I felt like a complete failure at life because my relationships were a disaster, but I also couldn't function very well in life anymore due to this lack of energy. 

I was a mess and it hurt to be stuck in this mess. 

I felt that God was very unfair. I felt that God wasn't supporting me or helping me. 

It was an incredibly dark time in my life that I wouldn't wish upon anyone and I was helpless to change it only because I didn't realize how my energy was contributing to my problems. 

This post is part of a series on Getting Out Of the Fight Make Up Fight Cycle in your marriage. There were many components that were creating this issue. It is a very complex issue. Please click on the links below, if you would like to read the rest of the series. 

If these posts sound like the problem you are currently experiencing in your marriage, I can help. I have helped myself and dozens of women get out of this cycle and I can help you too.  If you're ready to receive help please click the button below to schedule a FREE consultation. In this consultation, I will assess whether I am the right person to help you with your current problem. 

It isn't obvious, but shame is the number one killer of marriages. 

This is because shame keeps you stuck.

When you feel ashamed you don't feel like you're able to ask for help. 

You're too ashamed to tell anyone about what's going wrong in your marriage.

You can't bear the thought of anyone knowing the real you.

You might even be too ashamed to examine the role you're playing in your marriage. 

That is a sure fire way to kill a marriage. 

So you have to start to dismantle the shame by realizing that the issues you're facing are quite normal. 

You're not alone. 

All couples go through hardships in their marriage. 

The difference isn't whether a couple is perfect or not, but how they work toward resolving their issues. 

But shame is a little more covert in how it kills a marriage than just the above. 

Shame also kills a marriage because while you feel ashamed you cannot perceive things clearly. 

So when your husband tells you that "it isn't what you say, but how you say it." 

If you have a good sense of self worth you can hear that and be okay and work with your husband to make changes. 

If your sense of self worth is low and it's making you feel ashamed you will instantly get defensive because if what he is saying is true then that means you are a terrible person.

It isn't your fault that you feel ashamed and it isn't his fault either. 

This shame is coming from a different source usually your childhood. 

And shame is a tricky thing to deal with because it isn't an emotion. Anger, joy, sadness, and despair are all examples of emotions, but shame isn't an emotion. 

It isn't giving you any valuable information. All of the other emotions let you know something you need to know. 

Shame is just a lie that doesn't belong in your life and as such it cannot be processed like emotions can. It needs to be energetically released. That's the only way to get rid of it once and for all. 

So how do you start seeing a change now? Notice that shame is working in your marriage. Bring awareness to how it's making you feel and how it's making you respond to your partner. 

Once you have this awareness you can choose to respond differently. 

Recollect your last fight that was centered around something you were doing. Recall the tension and stress that came up into your body. 

Notice how you responded. How can you respond differently now that you know that you responded the way you did due to shame?

We had been stuck in the same arguments for a long time. Every time I would try to bring it up in a different way and to be careful with the words I used, but we would still end up in a fight. 

Until one day as we were stuck in the same pattern something changed within me. This time I said what I said, but as he responded the way that he did my inner voice said, "He is hearing he isn't enough." 

I said this out loud.  I said, "Are you feeling like you're not enough right now?"

He said, "Yes. I am a man. We are always feeling like we're not enough and when you keep bringing these things up it keeps reminding me that I will never be enough. No matter what I do. I am not enough."

That stung. I wasn't trying to hurt him. I wasn't trying to add to his pain. 

We cannot tip toe around people or know what will rub them the wrong way, but understanding their internal battle helps in bringing in more empathy into the dynamic. 

It brought more awareness around how I could connect more with him prior to having these conversations so I wouldn't poke that wound so hard. 

It had nothing to do with tools or phrases I learned to say so I won't share that here. 

Something inside of me changed when I understood how deeply he felt that he wasn't enough. 

That brought in the empathy for me. In this exercise you will experience the same. 

Take a moment when you're alone and close your eyes. Replay some of the last arguments you've had with your husband. Really feel the argument. Was it led with empathy? Don't judge yourself too harshly. It's hard to lead with empathy when we are frustrated, but bring that awareness. 

As you see the argument unfold notice your body language, notice how you feel inside. Notice the energy you're projecting forward. It isn't about what you're saying. It's about the energy you're bringing in to the conversation. 

Allow what ever insight comes to come forward and jot them down in a journal. 

Please take the time to do the exercise. Don't just read it. 

This is the first step to beginning to see where your blind spots were and how you can change the energy in the relationship. 

Within the energy there are energetic factors causing you to poke at his "I am not enough"  wound and there are energetic factors that are maintaining this wound in your husband.  Both are at play and locking in this cycle in your relationship. 

Both need to be addressed to have this issue resolved for good.  I help my clients with the energetics around their relationships. If you would like to understand how I can help you with this, click on the button below to book a FREE consultation. There is no pressure during the call.  You tell me what your problem is and I will assess if I am able to help you. 

​Before I got married I thought I was set. I had a psychology degree under my belt, had read lots of books on relationships, and my partner and I had gone to counseling together to make sure we had discussed important topics and learned how to communicate more effectively together.  Does this sound familiar?

That was 14 years ago. I wasn't prepared at all for the reality of what was about to happen. 

Despite all of our efforts, after seven years together, we were having the worse fights we have ever had. I began to question whether it was time to divorce. 

And yet something within me new this was fixable and that there was something more to it than us, an unknown X factor. Something was playing games with us. 

If I was honest with myself, I was angry and resentful about things that didn't truly matter and that were completely fixable. 

Once I began to really reflect on it, it didn't make sense. I loved my partner and it shouldn't be this hard. 

I would use the psychology tools I had learned, but we would still argue daily. 

Eventually, it had been going on so long that I felt completely disconnected from my partner. I didn't feel inclined to hug him or show much affection anymore. 

It was nothing big that happened. It reminds me of all of the celebrities. They are always divorcing for irreconcilable differences.  

Because that's what it is. It's the small things that eat away in a marriage. 

One day, I had had enough and I was able to perceive that it wasn't me causing the inner drama, but quite a few ancestors. 

The drama would unfold, but they were not being driven by my own thoughts. My perception of everything my husband said was being altered by the ancestral energy that had been passed down to me. That energy was what was creating the constant friction. 

Everything is energy. Nothing ceases to exist. It is only transformed. Due to this, when ancestors have unprocessed trauma and emotions it stays in their body and it is passed down to their descendants until someone does something about it. 

When I began to do the ancestral healing work, everything began to change. All of a sudden, I was beginning to see my husband as my teammate again rather than my enemy. 

My husband still loved me and wanted to support me, but I hadn't given him the opportunity to. 

All of the fighting had created a huge wedge within us that drove us farther apart.

How do you connect with someone that continues to argue with you?

But when I released those energies that were stirring up the frustration and anger within me, I began to soften. 

I began to be approachable again. 

Of course, it isn't only me who had these issues. After I had begun my work, I helped my husband release some of this clutter too. 

That magnified the work. As we both released these energies from our systems, we began to feel more connected to each other. It brought a profound sense of peace and harmony to our relationship. 

This is one of the energetic components in a relationship that is often overlooked by many methodologies and it is the one that has created the biggest impact in my marriage and in the marriages of my clients. 

I know of no other work that is as vital and that makes as big an impact because we all have energies that have been passed down to us that are not helping us. 

If you honestly look at your own parents and grandparents and how they handled their relationships, it becomes very clear that you are recreating their patterns. It may be showing up slightly differently due to having more resources available to you, but underneath it all, it is those patterns creating the disharmony.

If this has peaked your interest and you would like to learn more you can book a FREE consultation call with me where we can discuss your specific problems further and assess how I can help you.