Slave to Love
The fear of being alone is what causes most people to enter into or remain in bad relationships. Fear, being the poor adviser that it is, leads to poor choices. It tends to keep company with scarcity and evokes the flight or fight response regularly. The energy associated with it is downright toxic.
What starts as simple enjoyment of the way we feel when our partner is around, can, when coupled with fear, move into attachment and even addiction, in which we feel tremendous suffering when they aren’t.
Essentially, when our well being is dependent on another person, we become enslaved to him or her. Take it another step further and you might even say our very survival is dependent on the relationship.
I call this type of relationship, the “save me from being alone relationship†in which one or both parties will literally put up with anything as long as they are assured they can hang onto the relationship.
People become each other’s life preservers.
Typically, my observation is that in most of these over-the-top co-dependent relationships one person plays the role of savior or master and the other plays the role of saved or slave. The person saved from being alone becomes indebted to the one who is doing the saving and is willing to do anything to repay this debt and please their savior.
The savior or master, on the other hand, holds all the cards and is in a position of power in the relationship. They call most of the shots and tend to exert great control over the relationship. There is a sado-masochistic dynamic at work here as well.
The slave is held hostage by the fear of being alone and the master uses this need as leverage against the slave. Both the controller and the controlled are each happy with this arrangement, because each is getting what they need.
This dynamic works until the master gets bored or the slave gets tired of being controlled or when either one or the other or both finds a new master or slave.
To break the spell or enchantment may require cult member style deprogramming as the fear and survival needs that created this dynamic may be buried so deep in the subconscious that neither party may even be aware what is at play in their relationship. Bringing the nature of the relationship into conscious awareness is one step on the road to healing.
But this begs the question: what does fear have to do with love?
Absolutely nothing.
Love doesn’t take hostages; fear does.
Love isn’t about control; fear is.
Love isn’t worried about the future; fear is.
Love is without conditions and restraints. Love is about freedom.
Fear has its own agenda, and that is to make sure you survive.
But life is not about mere survival. It’s about growth and learning and living…really living.
No one can save us from being alone.
We’re all alone. We’re born alone. We die alone.
Holding on tightly suffocates what’s near and dear.
Is that what we want to be doing?
