Barry K. Weinhold and Janae B. Weinhold
For the past 23+ years we have been involved in what we recognize as a “divine relationship,” in which two people commit to walk together on a path that heals the hearts of both and opens each to the experience of the divine. What we have experienced is that walking this path together has activated layers of unmet developmental needs and wounds stemming from developmental traumas from the first three years of our lives. Healing these wounds and meeting these needs within our relationship has required we use the forces of compassion and unconditional love for each other and ourselves. Our relationship conflicts have opened doorways that allowed us to explore both higher consciousness and deeper intimacy with each other and with ourselves. What we learned is that the deeper we went in our healing work, the more we expanded our consciousness.
Our experiences have helped us identify the true secret of divine relationships. The books and film on the “The Secret” that have been very popular recently say that we can use the Law of Attraction to draw to us what we want. What this approach totally misses is that what we try to attract with our conscious mind is often cancelled out by what is hidden in our subconscious mind.
Biologist, Bruce Lipton, in his book, The Biology of Belief, offers an explanation for this. His research indicates that the conscious mind processes thoughts, feelings and beliefs at 40 bits per second, while the subconscious mind processes thoughts, feelings and beliefs at the rate of 40 million bits per second. If the conscious and subconscious minds have similar thoughts, feelings and beliefs, then the two work together in powerful synergy. If there is disagreement between them, then the subconscious mind is in charge. We believe that the real secret of “The Secret” is learning how to change the subconscious thoughts, feelings and mistaken core beliefs that cancel out what the conscious mind wants and prevents us from attracting what we say we want.
The subconscious mind contains the wants, feelings, and beliefs that we hold about ourselves, about other people and about the world around us. This information module is known as the “internal working model of reality,” which developmentally is formed by the age of three. Developmental research has consistently shown that those who are unaware of how the internal working model shapes their conscious mind will find it very difficult to create real change in their life experiences over the course a lifetime.
We have learned how to access this internal working model of reality, map what it contains and created effective tools for changing it. Our books are filled with information on how to access and change your internal working model of reality, including our latest books, Breaking Free of the Co-dependency Trap, the Flight From Intimacy, Healing Developmental Trauma and Conflict Resolution: The Partnership Way. These books are all available in our bookstore.
From our perspective, the information we store in our subconscious mind is the primary obstacle to experiencing a divine relationship with our self and others. The internal working model of reality typically contains:
• Early developmental traumas caused by an inability of our parents to understand and help us complete the two main developmental processes of early childhood: Bonding and the development of a Self.
• Unmet developmental needs from childhood show up in our closest adult relationships, such as a need for unconditional love and acceptance for who we are.
• Mistaken core beliefs about ourselves, other people and the world around us, that direct our behavior such as “I am unlovable,” “I have to do what others want me to in order to earn their love” and “I have to protect myself in my close relationships from getting hurt again.”
• Intergenerational family patterns and relational dynamics that we learned from growing up in our family of origin that show up in our adult relationships. Barry identified 12 common patterns that show up in most relationships and writes about them in Breaking Family Patterns. This e-book is also available on our website and describes the following patterns:
1. The Reappearance of Unwanted Parental Traits
2. Parental Disapproval Patterns
3. Revenge and Getting Even
4. Self-Condemnation
5. Replay of Co-dependent and Counter-dependent Issues
6. Acting Weak and Helpless to Get Needs Met
7. Seeing Your Life As a Struggle
8. Sexual Repression
9. Living Out Your Parent’s Relationship
10. Family Loyalty and Legacy Issues
11. The Fear of Success
12. The Fear of the Unknown
We use a very effective writing tool for accessing these subconscious thoughts, feelings and beliefs that we call “The Two Lists.” We ask people to look back at their childhood and make one list describing all the things they wish had been said or done for them as a child and weren’t, and having these things would have made their adult life easier and happier. Then we ask them to look back at their childhood from a different perspective. They make a second list describing the things that were said and done to them as a child that did not do them any good and were actually hurtful, harmful and prevents them from getting what they want and need in their adult relationships.
Each lists represents a different type of developmental trauma containing different kinds of unmet needs and mistaken beliefs, which relate to the intergenerational family-of-origin patterns that people bring into their closest relationships. The first list represents developmental traumas from the co-dependent stage of development, the pre-natal period and the first six months of life. These traumas leave unmet needs for experiencing trust, secure bonding, mirroring from others, expressions of unconditional love and a deep sense of being loveable. The most important healing tool for this list is being willing to ask for what you want and need one hundred percent of the time. This eliminates the childlike fantasy that someone will read your mind and give you what you want without asking.
The second list represents developmental traumas between the ages of seven months and three years. The items on list indicate the times you were hurt, abandoned, disrespected or misunderstood in some way. They also represent unmet developmental needs related to feeling safe and secure in close relationships, to having our feelings and needs understood and respected, to being seen and validated for who we are and to being able to trust our own internal signals, feelings and urges to guide our lives.
We found that the healing of the traumas on the second list requires letting go of the anger and resentment and the need to get revenge about what was done to us when we as a child. We found that the most effective healing tool for this list is forgiveness. Our definition of the word “for-give” means to “give back.” We must give back what others passed on to us that wasn’t useful and actually was harmful to our growth and well-being. Our books contain many other processes for doing this kind of deeper healing work. We realize this is not an easy path and may not be for everybody, but it sure has opened us to an increasingly deeper experience of a divine relationship.
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