Love is what we all seek and one of the most complicated aspects of our lives.  We all wish for, live for, and talk about it daily.  Life is  relationships and interaction.

We are born needing love, care and touch.  We long for that right person, for someone to love us without judgment, for attention, that loving  feeling.

But after the infatuation always comes the storming stage or power struggle.  We then are hurt and frustrated.  Like the small child, when we did not get our needs met with our parents.

"All of life is a stage" - Shakespeare

The universe plays a cruel trick on us to help heal the wounds of old.  We need awareness, skills, and tools that most of us are never given or  shown.  We choose a relationship with a person like one of our parents.  Then we take the role of the other parent and we have created  our theater.  The only way to heal is to be aware of this, and then to have the courage to start to parent one's self.  Asking for the needs of our feelings to be heard and honored by our partner, the partner who is the stand-in actor for your parent of long ago.  As we see our play, our assigned role, we can also start to hear and nurture ourselves and our partner's  needs. 

"GETTING THE LOVE YOU WANT" is a book by Harville Hendrix Ph.D.  He is the founder of the Institute for Relationship Therapy.  I highly recommend  this book as a must own and read.

Below is a link to an exercise from Harville's book, Getting the Love you Want.  This exercise is on page 250 from this book.  When you click the link below, a window will pop up asking you what you want to do with the file.  Click Save and save it in the directory where you want it.  After it has been downloaded, go to the directory where you saved it, double click the file and you can work on the exercise.