We all receive messages from our parents during our childhood, some are explicit and others are implicit. From all this, we interpret things in a certain way and we continue with those ideas till one day we start questioning them. For example, something I hear frequently in therapy is: “my parents didn’t love me” and then we close our hearts to love and be loved. When we get older and have a partner, we can feel that we aren’t really loved. We can feel for instance that “he is just looking for sex” or “she is with me just for my money” among other beliefs. We reduce everything to fit our inner programming of beliefs such as “nobody is going to love me for who I am” so we don’t go beyond till the suffering of sadness and loneliness forces us to go beyond.

Once we look a little further, we can question ideas such as: is it true that my parents didn’t love me? Or could it be that they didn’t show it in the way I needed at that time? How did they express their love even if that wasn’t what I expected or needed?

Let us look at the pitfall this pattern can create for couples: a woman who has doubts about her partner’s love will perform a lot of “love tests”, always reaching the same conclusion: it’s never enough. She will never be totally satisfied because her inner programming acts as a filter and doesn’t allow otherwise.

When this inner programming comes out of the shadow of the unconscious, it can be looked at and questioned. The key to access our inner programming is to understand that it is manifested as a repetitive behavior pattern. If we go over our past relationships, we will be able to see the similarities in our reactions, so we could ask ourselves: what recurrent patterns have created conflict in my past relationships? This can help us start to pull the thread of our inner programming.