Butterscotch Ponies and The Stories We Tell...

Do you know that it’s easier to get someone to change their church or even religion, than it is to get them to leave relationship that causes them pain or unhappiness…Even if they are not married, and have no children together..

This is astounding don’t you think?

At first, when I began to see the pattern in this, I thought it was just about not wanting to be wrong. I don’t love being wrong… especially when I thought I was SO right about a guy…

I don’t think I’m alone in this. I seldom hear anyone else saying “Wheeeee! I was WRONG! Yee Haw!”…. But still, do we really stay in a miserable marriage, pine over someone who didn’t treat us well, then left us.. or try and revive a relationship that is for all intents and purposes, dead….just to avoid being wrong about them?

One school of thought, Abraham-Hicks, and the law of attraction says that when this happens it means that that person is just no longer a match for who we are, and what we NOW want… That we’ve grown and changed from the person we were when we started the relationship…and the other person didn’t make the jump to the follow-up class with us…

Okay, I like that idea….Relationships as classes… I can see it…But that doesn’t explain why it hurts so stinking bad when one ends. Why your guts feel like they are being ripped out…and it seems to go on and on hurting.. And you catch yourself saying “but I LOVE him” as an excuse to keep in touch, and not cut it off once and for all.

That would be like choosing a college class because you want to learn the material (or you HAVE to for your degree requirements)..

So you sign up for the class, you're excited (if it was an elective one) you get the text books, if you're like me you caress the text books and love them and love the info you believe they are going to impart to you....

Then let's say you get to class and your professor starts out a HOOT, so much fun and charming and so on, but before long you realize that he's not teaching you what you WANTED to learn but goes off on other tangents, or never shows up to class and expects you to get it all out of the book on your own, or grades in a way that is confusing, and you’re frustrated and feeling like you are NOT learning what you're supposed to be learning..

Next thing you know, the class is over and you weren't pleased with it but no one ever finds you sitting on the steps of the college lamenting "what did I do wrong? How could I have chosen SO wrong?????"... Ya know?

We just automatically say, "that professor sucked, and NOT in a good way"... and if we liked the subject matter we might even take the class again w/a different teacher. But even more often we don't retake it but it gave us an interest in ANOTHER class so we sign up for it....

Now... as to the longevity of a relationship... aka CLASS for this analogy... We don't (at least I've never heard anyone doing this) choose classes because of the number of parts they have... IE Psych 101/102/103/104... Like that... "I'm only going to take classes I think will never end"...

Yet we try and do with relationships... "OMG What is WRONG with me??? It ENDED!!! I finished part 104 and THERE IS NO MORE!!!! How did this happen? How did I CHOOSE so wrong? But I LOVE that class!"...

So why do we treat our learning experiences with other people…aka relationships, so differently…Actually we DON’T treat our friendships as though they are life sentences…We get that friends come and go and that it’s not always a reflection on us, or our choices.

When it comes to romantic relationships though, we constantly see people staying in classes..or uh.. relationships… that seem to have ended. Refusing to leave, until they became negative, unhappy people.... All so they wouldn't have to feel like failures for choosing a class that didn’t last forever.

I do know that there are relationships that go on for a lifetime. I hope we can all say we know at least one couple like that… A couple that, if we want to continue the class analogy, you can liken to students moving on to other, less traditional settings than the classroom... Maybe to do an internship, or some sort of study program or research project that goes on for years...

I have dated several men over the past 2 yrs. A couple of them have caused me excessive growth. I have to confess, I’m not a quick study.

The most recent I call my Butterscotch Pony….I’ll explain. I started riding a horses when I was 4 yrs old. 

 

My mother made us ride bareback until we could saddle our own horse (unless we could con some adult to saddle our horses for us) because she knew it would improve our “seat” and it worked. I rode like I was I was an Indian in a wild west show.

Then, in second grade she did the MOST insulting thing. She signed me up for HORSEBACK RIDING LESSONS!!!!! I was stunned. Was she insane? Had she not seen me ride?

I went to the large stable near our home and was further humiliated to find I was assigned to ride A PONY!!!!!  It was official. My mother hated me.

Well, it turned out I didn’t know it all. At 48 that no longer surprises me, but then it was a shock.

On this PONY, named Butterscotch, I learned to ride Western Pleasure in horse shows. Yes, to sum it up, they taught me to have class… They did have to put a rubber band on my wrist so I could remember to keep it on my thigh and look proper.. But later they moved me up to a full sized horse and taught me to ride English… Oh my God, That was like bareback with class AND a slight saddle. I LOVED it!

So this past fall I met a man and I knew right away that he was not a keeper. He could not carry on a conversation with me, but he made me smile and he was nice to go places with and hang out. He was so kind and loving to me and my kids that while I didn’t think he was meant to stay forever I could see that he was teaching me many things. How to just be… be still.. be looked at adoringly.. how to let someone in my space and relax.. Unexpected lessons. Not unlike that Butterscotch pony.

We spent time together when the Spirit Guides were with their dad. There were so many things that didn’t fit and I told my friends every time they asked that he was not the one for me, but just the one for right now.

He’d drift away at times and I wouldn’t hear from him for days. I didn’t worry because I had known that eventually one of us would have to go..

Then I went to Colorado for Christmas with the Guides and had stress. The Ex and the gal who is like my sister, and 27 yrs younger than he, are now dating… yeah… I think it’ll be on an upcoming episode of Geraldo…but I’ve left my mental track….In the middle of all the….being nice and gracious, on my part…the Butterscotch Pony came back in contact… And he was like a lighthouse marking the harbor back home. A beacon back to my REAL life that I’d thought was so dull and uneventful just a week before.

When I returned to Oklahoma before New Years we spent the next week together and had so much fun. I no longer found fault with him because I’d already decided he wasn’t a keeper. I didn’t have to evaluate him for the long haul, just enjoy him for today…

That’s when it happened. I see it now in hindsight. I had the thought “I could just keep him, you know” …just as a guy I did things with… a boyfriend that just stayed that way. If we never lived together, or took it any further it could just be boyfriend/girlfriend stuff. Separate houses and lives but together. At least until my kids were grown and “on their own”.

Two days later he was gone. And I haven’t seen him since. It was a sad parting. I still don’t understand it.

I hurt to this day, a month later. But I think I’m starting to understand why.

I asked my girlfriend LD, who is gorgeous and brilliant and a dating expert, why. Why did this happen? How did I go from “take him or leave him” to “but I LOVE him” ?

Hormones, she said. Women get hormonally attached when they have sex with a man.

Well that’s not fair, I said. Why don’t the men get attached and she said that men have to go out and hunt/provide and if the women didn’t get attached they’d just leave and the children would starve….

Hmmm…… Okay…. I can see that…..but WAIT! I slept with BP repeatedly, in the beginning, and never got attached. Not even a little bit. I thought he was GONE before Christmas…

And it hit me….I CHANGED MY STORY ABOUT HIM!!!!!!!!!!

In the beginning I told the story to anyone who would listen that he was not a keeper, but just someone to snuggle with on the couch and have fun sex and go places…. Just until the right one came along… And when he’d drift away it would take a day to notice that I hadn’t heard from him… No hormonal attachment, no sadness or heartbreak…

Then AFTER Christmas and the drama on the prairie, I CHANGED MY STORY

I started telling a story that I could just keep him until my kids were grown.. live in separate houses, be boyfriend/girlfriend open endedly…. And WHAM! The hormones descended, and the expectations followed and so did the sadness, disappointment, and hit to my self esteem when he left…

That’s when I realized it’s not out of a fear of being wrong that we cling to relationships that have outlived their expiration date…It’s because we told ourselves a story about them…A fairy tale even…Like “This is the ONE!” or “My last first kiss” and so on….

It is in TELLING a story that we unknowingly enlist our inner mental Border Collie… That amazing creature will go in search of any and all evidence to back up any thought we think for more than a minute….

I’ve mentioned here before that I teach my children that they will find what they look for… That they can walk into a room with 12 people in it, 6 nice and 6 jerks, and if they have a belief that people are always out to get something from you they will run into only the jerks…

When there were just as many nice people there. The odds were that they could have run into them instead…But it’s like those keys we couldn’t find… We get what we match up to vibrationaly…Our vibration is determined by the way we feel, which is determined by the thoughts we think…Or as I like to call it, the story we tell…

Butterscotch Pony’s abrupt departure kicked up some negative beliefs that I had not been able to put to rest before. They say that a belief is just a thought you keep thinking, so I knew I had to start with the underlying thought behind feeling bad…

I was thinking I was “not good enough”,  “not worth fighting for”, “not worth doing what it takes to keep”…. And I’ve experienced being treated this way since the Ex….but ESPECIALLY the Golf Pro!

The thing is I KNOW I am a good person, and good wife/girlfriend, a good friend! All the men that left told me that I was like no one they’d ever known. That they could be themselves around me in a way they never had with anyone else…

After enough of them said that, I ended up telling myself the story that after finding me they decided there must be OTHER fantastic women they hadn’t discovered too and they better go look….Along with the  “not worth it” stories….

My friend LD set me straight though… she rewrote my story and I’ve been telling it HER way… And you know what? It makes sense… It FEELS good, which is our EGS (emotional guidance system) telling us we’re on the right road, believing a true thought…

She said “I want you to rewrite the story from "I'm worth having but not worth keeping." to "I'm worth having SO much that even emotionally unavailable men who know they don't have their ducks in a row and can't keep me can't resist trying."

I think you have to realize that they all WANT you. YOU have to pay attention …and decide if what they offer is enough or not. And if it's not, let them move on and say "NEXT!" and DON'T talk yourself into keeping them when you know they're not EVERYTHING you want. This is not about YOU not being worth keeping, this is about you ALLOWING unavailable men who can't keep ANYONE to come into your life and your heart...”

I know that we stay in relationships that make us feel bad because of other stories we tell as well… Stories like “this is the best guy I’ve ever had, even though he’s not all I want.” “There’s no one else beating down my door and I’m afraid that if I let this go I’ll be alone”… And I know that, for some, being alone is worse misery than being with someone who makes them feel bad…

It’s hard to tell a new story when you’ve spent so long with the old one… I know…Sometimes it’s a start to just stop telling the old one… and …maybe question it a bit…

I’m working on it… I’ll keep you posted…

 Angels on your body,

Prairie Girl.