Why We Love the Way We Do: Dr. Loren Weiner on the Imprint and Romantic Love

Transcript auto-generated from the episode audio; formatting has been cleaned up, but wording is verbatim.

Most of our favorite stories are in some way love stories. And then we also know the other side of this, which is pain and heartbreak. " Well, I'm sure you do because you have an imprint. And if we can't call it what it is, we're using an erroneous definition of love to then go out into the world to find love. When we find out who we truly are minus our imprint, love falls into that space. (gentle music) Hi, I'm Cynthia Marks, and I head up the Holistic Psychoanalysis Foundation, established by my late husband, Dr. Bernard Bail. Welcome to, And Now Love. Today, we welcome back Dr. Loren Weiner.

Dr. Weiner is our in-house expert on all things Dr. Bail. Today, we are going to get into the messy and fascinating bits of ourselves that have to do with romantic love. Who isn't curious about that? There are so many common questions and statements that swirl around this idea of romantic love. For example, how do I know what true love really feels like? " What does this really mean? We hear this all the time. I love the idea of you. What's behind this statement? What am I not seeing? Everyone else thinks that this guy is the greatest guy and that I should be prepared to marry him should a proposal come my way.

Can I change my perspective or my attitude and make love happen where it doesn't seem to exist at all? All of the other bits about this relationship just seem correct. Can we really be in love if we're not physically intimate? I don't deserve love. Hi, Lauren. That's a list. A list. Those are just things I think I hear around and about in books, in movies, from people I know. Okay, well, I think love is a big interest area to so many people, poets, novelists, out there for the most part. Yes, most of our favorite stories. Most of our favorite stories are in some way love stories. And then we also know the other side of this, which is pain and heartbreak.

And why can't I find the right person? Or I thought I did and I was wrong. Or it worked for a while and then it didn't. Or I've yet to be able to find someone. I didn't pose those so that you would have to answer them. But I think that just getting to the core of what you're going to talk about will help some of us see that some of those questions just, we shouldn't be carrying the weight of those questions because they may not serve us well. Yes, and I think we can actually answer some of those questions. And hopefully what I'm gonna talk about gives people a new way to think about what we're really doing.

And I think that's the biggest piece. If we can get to what is unconsciously happening, meaning out of our awareness, but driving us. If we can get at that and understand ourselves from the deepest part of ourselves, the choices we are making become more understandable. And it isn't just, oh, it's chemistry. Chemistry is really important and that plays a big part, but then we can even get under, well, wait, what are some of the things that make up what we've been calling chemistry? And I think people will see some really important things make that up. Yes, me too, I'm very curious. Yeah, so as I was saying, love can happen for some people, some not.

Sometimes it goes well, sometimes that is forever and sometimes it's time limited. And then also the other side of it. So what we are dealing with are some of the things I've been talking about with you over time, first being our imprints. And so for those people who haven't heard me talk about this before, I'll go through just a little explanation of what an imprint is. It is an unconscious event and it comes from our mothers to us when we are either in utero or newborns. And it is our mother's unconscious, meaning all of the parts of her that are unknown to her and specifically the parts that are painful.

So all of her hurt, all of her upset, all of the places where she didn't feel enough or wasn't loved enough or wasn't understood enough or was held back, all of that sits like a ball in her unconscious. And when her baby comes, that gets transferred to the baby. Now, this is in no way conscious by the mother, meaning she does not do this any intent, but it happens. And it happens because that baby is wide open and that baby is there to help this mother feel good. The baby wants to do that because a baby depends on a mother for survival. So we have to imagine that every woman who goes on to become a mother has her own history.

And sometimes that is reasonably okay. And sometimes it isn't. We all know stories, life is hard. You've had many things not go the way you would want them to hope they would in our lives. And we've got the whole history of the world and the way women have been thought about and treated and held back and treated as property and mistreated, not educated, all of these pieces that go into every woman's psyche and tells her she's less than. So you've got less than combined with personal experiences and pain. And you've got whatever that woman's childhood was like, whatever her parents went through, all of this comes together to form this, I'm calling it a ball, but this collection, upset, hurt, often unknown and certainly unprocessed feelings, meaning the woman didn't get to resolve all of that in her life before becoming pregnant.

And I want people to sort of understand that this is one of the biggest pieces that contributes to how we feel about ourselves and how we go through our lives. Because if you get this ball, and of course some people's ball is going to be big and some smaller, but generally what it's giving you are limitations on your life. So it's giving you a message that you can't do this or you're not loved enough or you're not worthwhile enough, you won't be successful, you won't be happy, you're not willing to suffer, simple messages like that. Some people have a lot of them, some people have only a few of those, but most of us, when you look at people's dreams and you listen to them talk, you start to hear that they've got these kinds of ideas, often unconscious, they don't know they're carrying them, but they're in there and they hold us down.

So that's, I would say, the first piece we're working with. Of the way women were treated and how they didn't feel empowered and didn't feel in charge of their own lives or all of the decisions they wanted to make or weren't respected, weren't even able to sometimes get the education they want or have their own money and be in charge of their own lives. That feeling keeps them from being able to give that baby full love because the women have, at the very least, historically, part sitting in them that tell them they are not worthwhile so they're not lovable. Then they can't love themselves fully.

And if you can't love yourself fully and you feel that you are not loved because you're not given all the opportunities you should be given and then whatever happens in your life on top of it, it hinders how much love you can give. Now, this is a tricky piece with humans because we really need to believe our mothers but absolutely love us. You'll hear people say, "Oh, my mother was X, Y, and Z. She was too strict. She wasn't, she was removed. " That you hear this all the time. Well, I would say we have to start questioning that statement we make that seems to excuse all of the behavior, all of the ways our mothers related to us.

And this isn't to bash women. Look, women have been through, as everything I was describing, not being able to fully have control over their own lives and do what they wanna do. Get your education, get your money, have children, don't have children, pick who you wanna marry. So they're at a disadvantage that way and they've been put in a one down position. But we have to get very clear that a lot of times we are making excuses and saying our mothers loved us and somewhere deep inside, we actually know it didn't feel like love. Now, sometimes it felt a little bit like love. There were moments. So we can say, all right, there were moments and then there were moments that really didn't feel like love.

If we do not get to the truth of saying a lot of times, there are mothers who are not able to love their children and the children feel it. And if we can't call it what it is, we're using an erroneous definition of love to then go out into the world to find love. And we'll be looking for what we thought was love. That's the biggest problem. So if I have to say, well, my mother who was very hard to reach and didn't connect to me all that much and would get angry at me might've hit me sometimes, was overburdened and maybe herself troubled and all of that is understandable. But it doesn't mean that the kids feel love.

I have great empathy for all of that in the woman. And this isn't to bash women. Again, I wanna be really clear on that. In fact, it is my call to treat women better because this is what's happening. If you treat women badly, all of that goes into the offspring. All of that goes into the next generation. And we need to speak about women in full because at the moment, they are the people that are responsible for bringing the children into the world. That's right. Boys and girls, boys carry this same ball. That's right. That girls or women do. That's right. Every woman who gives birth, who carries a child and that could be a baby boy or a baby girl does this.

And the children and the offspring do the same thing with her. So it goes into everybody. So this isn't like if we mistreat women, we can push that aside and say, well, that's okay because all the men will be fine. They won't because at the moment, they have to come through a woman too. Now the problem is, I'm gonna go out there in the world and start looking for a partner and I've got the wrong definition of love. Love is what my mom did now, even though it might not have felt like love all the time, but that's what I've got. And now I'm gonna go find that. All right, well, chances are what I'm really gonna find is some version of my mother.

And because if she didn't feel lovable, I'm certainly not lovable. And I don't deserve love because I have feelings that I, as we've talked about before, may have caused her upset. But certainly what I don't get is an overwhelming feeling that I am lovable and that I should have love. And that in fact, to have love may even be a betrayal of my mother because she gave me an imprint telling me I shouldn't have love. So we've got, if you think of a circle, I've got all of these arrows pointing to it that are really working against what should be really easy and natural, which is I go out there, I have a correct definition of love and I find somebody who I love and who loves me and we go off and have a happy life.

But that doesn't happen enough of the time. So we know all of these things are getting in the way. So if we are fortunate enough to be able to largely dismantle that imprint of this is what love is. And we all look to our parents or those who are our caregivers as examples of what love is. And that dismantling, you've taken that away. I think some of us might think, well then how will I even know what love is? My belief is that when we find out who we truly are minus our imprint, love falls into that space. Yes, that's the idea is that I think people imagine it like we're gonna take it all away, the way you might rip a tablecloth off a table.

It's just gone and we might assume everything flies off with it and you're left with nothing. It doesn't work that way because as you begin to work with your dreams, as you find your imprint and get a sense of what it is and you see, all right, here are all the places where I suffer and usually where there is suffering, there's an imprint sitting behind it. I can't get along with anybody, I can't find a partner. Nobody's right, every time I find a partner, they're too possessive. They argue with me, they don't please me and whatever the stories are that sort of repeat themselves and you're suffering, this causes me pain.

That's the place you wanna start looking because chances are we're gonna find an imprint of some sort which just simply means some kind of message or programming that you unconsciously got that doesn't let things go smoothly. It's an impediment. I think this applies to a lot of people but how many times have we been out in the world and said, wow, that person is so special, they're so interesting, I'm so curious. Oh, wait a minute, too much for me, I don't deserve that. Yes, right, people don't even imagine that the person they find fascinating or that seems amazing would ever like them back. Right, and so you sort of unconsciously or maybe consciously even set it up so it can't become a reality.

Yes, you won't go that way and maybe what you end up doing is you turn the other direction and go, oh, well, I'll talk to that person. And lo and behold, what you may find is if we got to examine it, oh, well, I found somebody that I thought might like me and unconsciously I may have found somebody that will repeat some aspect of what it felt like in my family, what it felt like to be with my mother. I'm starting with moms because that's where we all start but certainly after mom, this baby encounters dad and this baby encounters grandma and grandpa uncle and cousins and everybody may actually be sharing imprints with a baby, you know, meaning projecting unconscious things onto that baby.

Other people project onto us all the time. How many times does one eventually look into another family space, say, oh, not everyone does the same thing. So that immediate connection that you have with those people that are caring for you that you may live with, you're right, is the thing that you gravitate toward knowingly and unknowingly. Right, and some of it we know, right? Consciously know, okay, yeah, I'm into sailing and you're into sailing. I love horseback riding and you do, you know, whatever, I like to run tracks, so do you. Great, we have something in common. I may feel I know something about you.

It would be nice if it stopped there, meaning it was all conscious. It's not, most of it is so unconscious to us. We don't know that we're drawn to, you know, people say, oh, I have a type. Well, I'm sure you do because you have an imprint. So that gave you, whether you know it or not, your type, because it told you what you were gonna be allowed to have and not have. Well, then you have a type. Now, they may look different, some would say, oh, I don't have a type at all. Well, probably also not true. I bet you do, because you have an imprint. And that imprint, again, is gonna say, well, you can only have this much love or no love, or you can be this successful or not.

That narrows the field of the person you might choose, because unconsciously, you're gonna read that other person and go, oh, well, believe it or not, the unconscious can know this. It'll know everything. Wow, if we get together, life is gonna look like this. You already know that. Somebody walks into a room, you know, oh, that person, well, a lot of times, yeah, that person may be great, or it may also have to do with your imprint and you can already tell that person will act out those limitations with you. Now, I go through this and it sounds like, oh, gosh, how are we ever gonna get along? My goodness, how do people ever get together?

We do it, and sometimes we're lucky. And I say that because it really almost seems like luck. I think it's not, but that our imprints don't so get in the way that it stops us from doing all of this. But I think if we can all start to understand that we have to know our stories unconsciously, we have to get really truthful about where we grew up, and then we have to decide we don't wanna suffer. This is a really big one for human beings because we are very wed to suffering. Our imprint embeds that because no matter what imprint you get, a limitation causes suffering of some sort. So by definition, we are sort of programmed for that.

But we also will continue to suffer. We hold on to suffering, and sometimes we, even in the face of all of the evidence, don't wanna let go of something, even though it makes us suffer. So I think humans, all of us, have to start to get that idea that we've had the wrong idea about life. It doesn't have to be filled with suffering. Oh, and we've even created all kinds of entities that help us suffer. We absolutely do because everything we create will be based on who we are unconsciously. So we'll create governments and companies and systems that absolutely make us suffer. We feel we're supposed to.

Now let's go into some dreams. And I have a person who I have some dreams from very early on, this is a person who, a woman, really felt like she wanted to get married, professional woman, wanted to get married and wanted to have children. Pretty basic idea about life. I think everybody around the world can relate to that. It was simple and yet very not easy. She struggled with this and it wasn't that there was anything overtly wrong with this woman. I think lots of people were interested in her. She couldn't find somebody that she felt was the right match. So that was really tricky. And there were lots of almosts.

Maybe he would work, maybe not. And there were many partners to choose from, as I said, people were interested, but she didn't feel that wasn't the right connection. There was always a something off, always just something that sort of stopped it. When you began working with her, a person who would make her comfortable in the world of her imprint. Yes, yes. And her tricky spot was that she would find people, she was attracted to them at first. It would become clear that something about the imprint was in this person. Now, as I'm talking about this, I want to be clear. I don't know that for most of us, the goal is I've got to find somebody that has zero, there's no hint of my imprint in this, but that's going to be really hard.

I don't think you have to do that. But I think what you want to do is you want to know enough about your imprint. We want to diminish it enough so that that isn't the only thing you're getting. You're not getting like a level 10 of the imprint in the person you choose, maybe, all right, three, four, five, can work with that. So yes, she would find people who, lo and behold, couldn't really love her. I mean, they chase her, but they couldn't really love her. It was always unsatisfying. It would always fall flat. They could never live up to what she hoped. Some people have these wild ideas, I need to be brought flowers and champagne, and then we have to sail on a yacht.

These weren't even grand ideas. It was sort of just very important, but simply, I want to feel loved. Now, what she had to work through was being able to start to love herself. That was the first piece. She had to learn that she didn't love herself and that her mother wasn't able to love her. She was a nice enough person. This wasn't a horrible mother in any way, but her mother had had a life that the mother felt she was not seen as a real person. She didn't feel she had real agency. She was sort of infantilized in her life and never really got off the ground the way she wanted. And that left this daughter of that woman with all of these feelings.

I'm not enough, you know, I'm just not enough. And so that really had to get looked at and explored so that she could get enough space between her imprint, move it out of the way enough to start to go, oh, okay, I've been finding all of these people who are a replica underneath of either my mother or father, but always give me the same feeling, I'm not enough. Now, some of it was she was probably more than enough. For a lot of the people she picked, she imagined they were more capable and more loving than they were. And so she would, you know, imbue them with all of these. Some of them had really nice qualities, but she would imagine it was even more.

And then if you imagine it's even more, you're imagining those people are fully capable to love. And if they're not, it must be because something's wrong with you. So again, that's the mother and father. I imagine my mother must be able to love. So if I'm not feeling it, it's me. I'm just a flawed baby. If I were a better baby, a prettier baby, a smarter baby, a harder working baby, I would get all this love she has. But the true story is she didn't have it to give. The mother didn't have it to give. And then that applies to the partner. I would be getting all this love if I were a better human.

Right, that's right. Plus the other half of the partnership comes to you from his or her own imprint. So we're doing a dance, right? Of everybody's imprint and where do we all fit in? So that's important to keep in mind. One of the first dreams that this woman brought about a relationship, not one of her first dreams in treatment, but about a relationship is that she was standing at an altar in a wedding dress. And it looked like a beautiful scene. The groom was not there, just the bride. And beautiful outdoor wedding, everybody can imagine. And she was just standing there. And when we went through the dream, has the story of, well, where's my groom and I'm looking?

And that is true on one level. But what really became clear is that she's dressed in all white, not because she's a bride, but because she's a baby. So this woman was no more ready to be married than a baby is. She had to grow up. Now she wasn't incapable of doing that. Luckily, this wasn't a woman where it was gonna take years and years for her to get some maturity, she did. But that was the first one. And so we can see very quickly how all of these fantasies about who am I gonna be with and I wanna be someone's wife and I just wanna be loved. And I imagine this will solve all my problems. And really the first step was, hold on, you're too infantile to marry.

And let's work on getting you to be an actual bride, ready to be a real bride and not really a baby. Now there were some hints in the dream about the nature of the fabric of the dress and what she had underneath the dress that were the tells, that was the hint that this wasn't a bride. I see. And that seems like it would be hard for a person with a dream to contend with. What do you mean I'm a baby? What do you mean I'm not? " You usually have a feeling about that, right? " It's a big project, but it's also somewhat relieving if you go, "Oh, you mean I've been a baby, so everybody I'm looking at isn't a cute guy.

" Babies don't want cute guys, they want moms. " It's not that you're never gonna be able to find a husband, it's that you've been a baby looking for a mommy and you keep getting frustrated because you find your mother. You do find a mommy each time, you find some aspect of your mother that was unsatisfying. " Now this becomes understandable, this I can fix. You're right, it could be a little bit exciting. " Okay. I do have a chance. " Because I've dated 400 people and none have been right. And I had no idea why, okay, well here's a big piece of why. And the bigger picture as it applies to the imprint as far as I can see, is that experience, that idea of investigating your dreams and discovering what is you versus not you and these things that you've been carrying that apply to all aspects of your life.

What can I do? Look, I get to suffer less. Maybe I don't have to suffer everything. I can let something go. " We wanna keep letting go of suffering. " And this is a well put together, intelligent woman. " She's fighting with all her friends. It's so clear she's infantile. It's not clear at all, I think, to the average person. Clear to the person because once we got into that territory, I think she very much felt, "Oh, I feel all this. " All of the worries that she had defended against and even this feeling that I have to get married, why? " This sounds great. That's what we're supposed to do. But a lot of it was driven by the infantile state of I'm afraid to be alone.

At the root of it, I'm afraid to be alone and I really need to know somebody loves me. Oh, that's a baby's feeling. " And I'm imagining that I am very pregnant with this man's baby and wondering her questions. Does that mean this is the guy? Is this it? Well, what we had to do was really talk about this guy and she describes him and over the weeks of telling me about him and describing him, this is new relationship. And she's already imagining she's pregnant with this man, very pregnant, seven, eight months pregnant. It had nothing to do with the reality of who this guy is. I'm listening to it.

He'll listen, somebody likes somebody, I always listen, okay, let's see, maybe this is a guy. Imperfect as he may be, still may be a good, the right match for you, that's okay. Listening, I can't see it, stop listening, trying to understand. And I start to hear where the suffering comes in. He's late all the time. He doesn't quite make her feel special enough. He's got to cancel, something came up. All of these things, and this is again, not a horrible guy. I'm stressing all of that because this is just regular life. There's nothing here that anybody would see and go, oh, there's clearly a red flag.

But you start listening and going, okay, well, what you're telling me is this is the part of your mother that couldn't show up for you, made you wait for love. You just found that peace. Isn't a man you wanna have a baby with. You're barely into the relationship and he's already running late and canceling, got a call and it's all nice, nice. But you see how this is gonna go. Now, if you want that, it'll be unpleasant, but you're welcome to it. You can choose it, but go in with eyes wide open. Let's discuss that this is going to repeat this part of your experience with your mother and know what you're getting.

You're free to choose it. But just have a look. You gotta go in eyes wide open. So her being that far along in a pregnancy in the dream represents what? Well, the first thing it represented was her fantasy, that relationship was magical, that she's magically gonna have a baby with this man and it's a happy marriage and they should be together. And that's that far along already. And it absolutely was not that. So this is pure wish. And the idea for the reality of him not showing up or being late, how did that present itself in the dream and did that just come about in conversation relative to the dream?

Relative to the dream. That came out of the associations and not even to the dream, but also just listening to how this guy was behaving. First line of defense is how about we just even pay attention consciously to what the person's doing and how you feel. But he looked so good on paper. He had X, Y, and Z and he was handsome and he was charming and all the people around like, oh, that guy, right? And he seems amazing, but he isn't. No, he may be amazing for somebody else, but he wasn't for her because that dovetail with what a feeling for her, which is, oh, I already felt my mother didn't show up and now you don't show up.

And that continues to make me feel bad. I'm gonna suffer. That doesn't make me happy. It reinforces, it's what I know. So I found it and I was sure excited by it, right? And now we're gonna have a baby together. Oh my God, if you can't depend on him to show up on time and pick you up for a movie at the right time or dinner or whatever you're gonna do, go for a walk. Do you have any idea what that's gonna look like when you add a baby into it and everybody is exhausted and everybody's imprint is stirred up because babies stir up all of our own infantile feelings? I think what she was really saying is I already had to be my own mother.

That's why the pregnancy. She's the baby and the mother. She had to do both. And so this guy will repeat that for her. She will be the baby and the mother again. Do it all on her own. Me, I'm taking care of you. And I gotta take care of myself because he's not gonna take care of her because he's not gonna fully show up. In a dream like that, if all of us were paying enough attention and really having respect for our nightly adventures, it seems like a big dream. You imagine yourself to be that far along in a pregnancy. A person could just stop for a moment and think about that. Wow, this is a big dream.

This is a big thing that I'm doing in this dream. Why am I doing this now? What does this mean? Who am I thinking, who am I in a relationship with and why am I pregnant with this person? You would start to be able to maybe put some pieces together. If you let yourself, if you weren't swept away because the wish here, her wish is so strong, which is please, I want a partner. And I want the sign that this is the right guy. Right, so most of us would go, that's it. Oh my gosh, that's it, right. Because you have to deliver the heartbreaking news. This is not the guy. Now, but what it asks of us is to be honest.

Can you be honest with yourself? Hold on a minute. If you didn't even have this dream, you've been disappointed by this guy over and over and you keep making excuses and he's got these good qualities so you'll forgive this and forgive that. And none of these are that egregious. He has good reasons for why he couldn't show up. It feels bad to her if she never had a dream but could just be honest and say, but this doesn't feel good. And to allow herself to have those feelings unique to her, perhaps, and to keep in mind that they're valid. You've got to live with the person, right? Would rather hear what seven other people have to say.

Seven people, you could ask 40 of your friends. Some people would do that. They'd ask everybody they know. And what they're doing is completely abandoning his or her own feelings. And that's what we were taught. That's part of the problem is when you have to take in somebody else's feelings in an imprint, some of what you do is also then become that person and abandon yourself. You don't get to fully be yourself. We cannot tolerate feeling our mothers didn't love us or our fathers didn't love us because that is too destabilizing for a baby, an infant and a child, sometimes for an adult. And so we've got an enormous amount of denial that we build up before we ever get to choosing a partner.

Now she's using the denial fully in this dream. I'm gonna deny all the things I've told you about him, therapist, and I'm gonna deny all the ways it's made me feel. And I'm gonna fantasize that I'm eight months pregnant and here we go. So far from what she will be happy doing long-term. So she's gonna be very unhappy short-term if she decides to face this, but it will save her a world of pain and maybe a long marriage and kids and unhappiness that you have to then separate from down the line. Better to get truthful with ourselves if we can. Get truthful. And it's hard because you don't, it's sort of like, oh, you mean I got, all right, I gotta give up that steak dinner.

What if another one isn't coming? Right, what falls in that place? But the better you treat yourself in that way, the better when you really attend to your true feelings, then you open up space because you're loving yourself. You open up space for more love to come. Some of them people say, well, I'm just gonna date him for a little while. Well, three years later, I'm still, because I love him and I can't, and he's got all these qualities or she's, yeah, she's really, she goes through my phone every night and doesn't trust me and does all these things, but I love her. We have to be careful what we get ourselves in because we don't let go easily.

I would say everybody listening, if you're looking for love, just if you can proceed slowly, give yourself time to feel what's coming at you. And if you're allowed internally to how you feel with the person, even if they look amazing on paper, see. Now, some people say, but how do I know these people aren't great and I'm just passing them up because I'm not supposed to have love. So I'm gonna find a problem with everybody. That's a reality, that can happen. And you have to sort of sort through that too. That's where dreams can become more helpful. Then I have a dream, she was worried that, okay, you know, I've done five years of work on myself and I'm starting to love myself more and address my own feelings and mature and I'm feeling much more ready.

And she does find somebody that seems like a good match for her and certainly has his own problems. And one had to assess some of those, his background, his family, and see, is this guy gonna be able to himself get married and have it be okay? Or is there too much family pressure to not have it go well? But in the early times when they're dating, she has a dream where she's out on like a resort or a golf course or some big grassy area and there's like a water feature. And she's standing there talking to the guy and she sort of gets this flash, like she sees this partner that she's currently dating, but in two forms and the dream sort of shifts between.

And one is just the guy, and this is not a wealthy guy. Smart guy has prospects, but at the moment she's dating him, isn't wealthy. And then he kind of switches and he suddenly in the dream got like he's some wealthy successful businessman and rich. And that's the whole dream. She wakes up, she doesn't know what to make of it. And as we talk about it, her worry emerges. She said, "Am I a gold digger? " But what she was worried about is that because he wasn't wealthy, she's imagining she would only like him if he were wealthy. " So, and I need that, I need that security. I need a guy who's already done that so I can't have this guy.

And what became clear as we talked about it is that this was actually a really good dream because what she was saying had nothing to do with actual money. It had to do with the riches of love. And she was saying, "This guy who is not wealthy is actually wealthy because we can have a loving relationship. " That is not easily apparent in the dream, but it was listening to her tell me all of her thoughts about the dream and her worries and how this man was treating her. And that this was somebody she actually enjoyed her time with. And this was somebody who called when he said he was gonna call and was very forthcoming about his feelings.

Not overly so, not smothering, but just enough that it fit with her. Now, did that fit with some of her pathology from her family also? Absolutely, but that's okay. We're not looking necessarily to say, oh, you've gotten rid of your entire imprint. That's not gonna happen, but we're gonna diminish it. We're gonna make enough space that it's not only about an imprint in your life, but you get some freedom from it too. So over the course of these few years, her dreams were changing, her relationships were changing. Yes, yes. I mean, she was still dating. She still had her goal in mind. She wants a husband and a family.

So now she's also working on a career. She's got friends. This is a full life, and we are seeing the dreams changing. And primarily, one of the things that's shifting is the infantile nature of her personality. And that's what allows this imprint to diminish is that she is coming into her own being. She is shedding her mother's feeling of never being enough and becoming enough for herself. And that's the biggest piece is she has to be a person she likes. She has to start to be able to love herself. That is also going against the imprint. That is betraying what she feels her mother gave her. You're not enough and you can't be loved and don't love yourself.

She has to go against that. So there's a lot of, over time, dream by dream, building up the strength, the muscle, the emotional muscle to do that. That's really what you're doing. So each dream we go through, yes, we can use them to sometimes say, should you date this guy? Should you not? Does this seem like it's got legs or not? But this whole time she's building her internal world and her ability to love herself and realizing all the places she felt she had to suffer. So that's really important. We've gone over, in lots of the dreams we've talked about where people are to be a zero and a nothing and not to have love and to be asleep to their own life.

So as you are trying to climb up this hill, it doesn't mean we don't have moments. Kind of, wait a minute, there's this comfort zone. I know it wasn't really loving. It didn't make me happy, but it sure is what I know. Let me just go back into that safe little spot. Yes, we get it. So we get all of this, up and down, two steps forward, one step back, and you keep going and you fight. And you know, at least the therapist knows, hopefully the patient intuits it, but also starts to get a sense over time, you're climbing a mountain and you're healing yourself. And that's very important. And that the more healed you are, the better your life is.

You don't have to have a perfect partner. Now, one of the things, but I also want to insert something really important. And this was very important to Dr. Bale also. So couldn't discuss love and not bring this in is some of what we bring to all of our expectations about love relationships. And I think we do it with parents and romantic friends too. All of them is long ago memory from a different time and place of our union with God. So we come from God down to this plane and live this life. And we have a memory of what it feels like to be held and loved by God. It's amazing. And then we're disappointed by earth and what humans can give because they cannot give what God gives.

We don't have it. We just are not God. And we are fallible and we are here all working on some curriculum that we chose so that we could evolve our souls. But those curriculums often involve suffering and failures and letting people down and not being able to do what we can do. Hopefully we're working on making that happen. We're working on evolving. But we have to also know that sometimes we're really disappointed because people are not God. That idea that unearthly feeling of love is something that we all begin with. Yes, we are capable of receiving that. I know we are not all capable of giving that here on earth because that is some of the curriculum, some of the problems, some of the challenges we are working on on this plane.

So some people are gonna, what are you talking about? I understand that, but maybe they'll open their minds up and just give this a thought. So an imprint as painful as it is also gives you your challenge in this lifetime. So it's as though you made a plan with God and said, listen, here's what I wanna work on. I'm gonna grow this soul. I've gotta have experiences, okay? So I'm gonna choose you, you, you and you and we'll all come to earth together. Let's be a family. Now you won't love me that much and you'll be mean and maybe you drink too much and we'll figure out how this goes together. You get here, you've forgotten all the planning but you're busy doing all of this.

So this is very important. He saw this in dreams. He would see people talk about lifetimes, about reincarnation and felt that was really what the dreams were showing that people would talk about this. Some people are gonna go with that and say, that makes sense. Other people are gonna say, I don't buy it. This is not Bail's idea alone. This is many millions of people around the world feel this way. Other religions talk about reincarnation and about the need for the soul to evolve and we do that over lifetimes. Now he added this piece about an imprint and he saw this in people's dreams and it is his way of describing what he saw in terms of and how we got it.

So some people say, yes, we come and we suffer and our job is to get over our suffering but he's saying, well, here's where you got your suffering and you have to know where you got it so you know how to return it. It didn't belong to you. It was not you but it is what you chose to get so that you could work through whatever challenges your soul wanted. So we've all made these agreements and I think his idea was, look, eventually you work through this. You go through your dreams. If you're lucky enough, you work with someone to do this so that eventually you forgive. But some people like to jump to forgiveness.

I just have to forgive. And the problem with that is when you look at the dreams, the dreams have not forgiven. It's a nice intellectual idea. I have no problem with that but it takes working through emotionally things are resolved, bypassed a few steps. Right, that happens a lot and they'll call it spiritual bypass and people like to go around and imagine. And I understand the desire. It just that it seems when you look at the dreams and you go in there, it has not been healed. There's too much of that left in all the dreams and it has to be worked on. And that's what I think we're supposed to do is work on it.

We're not just amazingly, we're not to be God. But I could be way wrong, but isn't love sort of the truth of it all? Isn't the love that we give and we take this indescribable experience that we've had with God? And do we not all start out with that fabulous thing that I can't put words to? And because of the imprint then we lay all this other stuff on top of this just glob of love. Yeah, right. So you come in knowing it and then you get an imprint. So yes, it sits on top of what should be your ability to fully love. Now, could you love like God? I don't know that I could answer that. My assumption is probably not quite, but probably we'd still happily take that.

That humans are coming in with this peace of God in them. So is an enormous amount of love. And then we get an imprint because we're gonna pick our challenge in this lifetime and we're gonna get it. And that does change how we can love. Our unconscious is what connects us to spirit. And if we have to take in somebody else's big ball of pain into our unconscious, we sort of cut off or diminish how much untouched space we then have left to commune with God. So we're also diminishing our connection to God. So that also shrinks how much absolute pure love we can feel at any given time from God. So yeah, all of these are working together.

We've kind of got this system of, all right, we're gonna come from pure love, we're coming down to earth and then we get all of these things that pile on, separate us from it. And our big task is to heal enough to get back to it. All while having some distant memory that it exists and maybe not knowing what that is, but I think that's what that is. That's a big deal of stuff. It's a big deal of stuff. But our dreams are there to connect us and help us know what is trash or try to sort through and figure out what's trash, what's not ours, what is human piece of the challenge that we're working on and how much of the trash can we then see through our dreams and get out of the way so that we get ourselves back to where we wanna be.

So we could come into this earthly existence sort of pure. Hope is that we figure out ways, likely through our dreams, to recover from that suffering or dismantle the suffering so that we change the course of our lives by shrinking the imprint so that, let's say when we're reincarnated, the next life's experience is more elevated or just completely different path. That's a big question. Let me take some of it, which is, yes, it seems there is sort of a nascent being that arrives and comes in contact with a mother who has all sorts of unprocessed feelings and imprint. That baby bumps into this mother and the delivery of that is painful because this nascent soul coming from the abundant love has to bump into human pain.

That feels terrible, terrible, terrible. And it is all of mother's most painful things. You can think of like it's the haunted house. You're walking through and behind every door there's like a ghoul, a bad feeling about herself or a bad experience. All of that hits this nascent being that just came from God. So it is really disruptive and very painful and this being will do anything to make that pain stop. So we wall it off, we imagine we get rid of it. Now we think we've hidden it, but it is still directing things because it is a set of rules and limitations about what we can be and how much joy we can have and how much suffering.

So we've got this and it is all about suffering. The questions we should be asking is, do I have to suffer? In what ways do I suffer? And we have all kinds of reasons we imagine we're supposed to suffer. We think we caused our mothers this pain that she shows us in the imprint. We think we're the reason it's there. Well, if we caused it, I guess we deserve to suffer. So we have this masochistic piece and all of this is around an imprint. And that's what Bale found looking at dreams. And that's why this was so important. He's incorporated things from his enormous broad readings and interest in different cultures, different religions, psychology, psychoanalysis.

People understand all of these things about being human. But he saw this in dreams that this is the origin of our earthly pain is what we receive from our mothers. And that then we are going through life not fully being ourselves. And in part living our mother's life because we've now got a big piece of her in us guiding things. So that is her life and it is the suffering part of her life. So yeah, we wanna diminish suffering. Human beings have to realize we're doing that and we have to decide we no longer have to do that because we are lovable. Each and every one of us started from God and has a part of God in us.

We are lovable and we don't feel that. So we build cities and governments and systems as you were talking about earlier that ensure our suffering. We stay enslaved in some way and we project control onto a very few who get to be the parents. And we all get to be the children who have to just dedicate our lives to keeping those people okay and empower. And until we all get the idea of where that came from why we have it, what we're doing and that if we really wanna evolve our consciousness we all have to change that. And if we change that and all of us actually can go inside and do enough work to get to go.

I am actually completely lovable. If we can all do that, I don't have the answer to what can come. But what I've seen in dreams people begin to open up and hint at incredible things for humans, for humankind, for all of us. We changed the frequency. I'm in California, I can say this. We're vibrating at a certain frequency but really when we are in sync with more loving energies then I think we will be shown different realities that let us have truly happier, fulfilling, loving lives. And that's a big shift. But that requires every individual. Everybody has to get on board. So the last dream that she had before it became sort of more clear in her mind, before she felt she could rely on the information is that she's in a limousine with this partner.

Partner from the last journey? Yeah and she's in a limousine. It's a big long stretch in the inside and they're going down what is akin to like Fifth Avenue in New York. And all of a sudden she starts to look outside and sees that there's like a, almost like a ticker tape parade. It's like just confetti and everything all over. She's like, what is going on? But there seems to be some sort of parade. And at first she doesn't know what to make of this. She's a little uneasy and then sort of starts to settle in and feels okay. And then at some point looks down and there is a baby in her arms and she feels good.

She feels comforted by this. This feels natural to her. And this partner, that's the one she liked is there. And seems to be there's good feelings between them as well. And that's the end of the dream. When she gave me her associations, what this seemed to be was almost akin to a victory parade. And so she had victory. She found the person that she want to have a baby with and live her life with. This would be victorious. She would be happy doing that with this person. And she was still scared. I mean, even in the dream, she said, what do you mean I've got this parade and there's a baby on my lap.

And it's almost like, I know what you told me last time there was a baby. I don't know if I can relax into this. But we had to listen to all the associations and see what she felt. Because that's what makes the difference. Because it could have been a picker tape parade that told an opposite story. Here's the thing, if it's all just intellectual, we can make up any story. We can remove things, important details. We can deny things. We can do lots of different gymnastics. So I had to be hearing the true story of what it's like to date this man. How she feels dating him. What does he do? How does he treat her?

How does she treat him? How are they together? The reality of it. And then we're also looking at the dreams. And he had some tricky things she had to see, you know, are some of the crazy things in his family going to be too intrusive in this relationship? Will it be allowed to go through? You know, these sorts of questions. But she really loved him. And she really felt that this was the first person she felt comfortable with, actually. And that's big. Her imprint never let her feel comfortable with anybody. That was the tricky piece with hers. She would find them. But even those people who were a good match for the mother and the imprint, her experience of that was never, this feels great.

It was always, huh, I don't think he's right. I don't feel good about this, but I can't let it go. And I do love him and maybe I should stay. You know, she was always in a state of anxiety about it. And somewhere feeling it wasn't right, but maybe she didn't know enough and she doubt herself. And maybe she should stay. And now, and maybe she's afraid to leave, she knows he isn't right. It'll take her six months because what if nobody else shows up and those are six months of lonely nights. And it was always fraught. This was the first time it felt calm and good. So for her, that was important.

And I knew that we had worked enough on her feelings that they weren't going in the wrong opposite direction most of the time. So she didn't carry that idea that, oh, right, I have a definition of love. It's completely bananas and backwards, but I don't know that so I use it. She had worked through her definition of love quite a lot through understanding her story. And that let her finally get to a place where the baby had grown up, could pick somebody, and then we would at least know there was certainly a child in their future. So that's sort of in a nutshell what we can all come to terms with.

What about us walking, thinking, feeling in the real world is truly us and what are we carrying? How have we defined love based on our imprint and what we've been carrying? And how do we change that up to get to the space where our things are guiding us and letting us really know what love is rather than that picture of what love be? Yes, and I'll just reiterate, it's getting really truthful about the fact that most of us were not loved. Or if we were, we got little bits of love, but we still had big pockets where we weren't loved, even with very well-meaning kind parents, because they have been born from mothers who over history carry the lineage of mistreatment and being seen as less than and not being able to fully love themselves.

So even if a mother had a pretty good life, she will have the capacity to hold on to more of that love that came from spirit. But the history of women on this plane has been one of putting them down in brutality and teaching them that they are not worth what a man is. And every woman carries that, and every woman passes that on to her offspring. When we can get clear on what wasn't love, we can stop living in denial, we can stop trying to make our parents feel okay. I'm not saying we have to go to parents and berate them with this, but that internally, we have to be really truthful and go, "Oh, you know what?

" It didn't feel like love growing up. I felt really ignored. I didn't feel like anybody really understood me emotionally. Lots of things were ignored. People were asleep. People were out to lunch about things. It didn't feel great. But I've got to know all of those places so that I don't confuse them for the myth that that's love. Yes, that's a lot to contend with. All want to think that we were loved. Yes, so that's why this topic, romantic love is sort of such a loaded topic. It's something most human beings are searching for at some point in their life. And yet it is so difficult, so painful.

We write love songs about it and novels, and we make movies and poetry, everything. And so it shows that we seem to know what it is or want to know what it is. Like there's a feeling we're chasing. " Yeah, I want that thing. " Look at-- It exists, right? Don in that film. That's me. I feel hopeful. Yes. And then we keep doing things to sort of undermine that. Yes, we know it exists because we had it with God. People who create these stories, you know, that we adore throughout time. Right. Know that it exists even if they don't have it themselves, they can still somehow present something in a way that we know it exists.

So, well, that's hopeful, isn't it? Yes, so we can get to a more loving place. We can get closer to what we have some inkling existed in our relationship to God. And we can give that to each other. And in doing so, we change the world. I think we need to have another conversation about this sort of thing. We can have lots of them. Thank you very much. And I think just through our conversation, you addressed all the questions, except for the one about physical intimacy, which we'll talk about another time. We can talk about that another time. That sounds good. Thank you for having me. Thank you, thank you for being here again.

You're a treasure and I can listen to you talk for hours on end. I'm sure that our audience can too, so you'll come back for more. Please follow, rate and share this podcast and pass this episode along. Romantic love to someone who might need it. This is, and now, love. Look at that title. Listen to your dreams and live from your heart. Thank you.