Meeting someone special can mark a turning point in your life. Sometimes, a simple gesture or a glance can mark the beginning of a beautiful love story. But for that relationship to stand the test of time and become a healthy bond, it is essential to understand that it must be built on three fundamental pillars: commitment, respect and communication.
However, we are often unaware that we ourselves influence the beginning and development of the relationship. There are internal factors—emotions, insecurities, or patterns—that, whether we like it or not, will always come into play when we meet someone new.
This is how psychologist Montse Cazarra explained it on social media.
‘When you bond with someone new, it’s not just you, but different internal parts accompany you on the adventure of getting to know that other person, that is, voices, subpersonalities or “little people” with their own discourse, with a particular history and deeply rooted beliefs that inhabit your emotional world and have appeared throughout your life,’ she began.
According to the expert, these inner parts ‘are neither good nor bad,’ although some of them ‘get us into trouble’ more often than others. Nor are they “your adult self, but rather parts that have learned to survive, to adapt to contexts that were not always predictable, reliable or safe, and to anticipate the pain caused by relationships that were not entirely healthy”. And although they were born at earlier stages of our lives, they continue to appear in the present, unless we have worked to ‘free them from what they carry (painful experiences) and make the way they carry out their task more flexible’.
In addition, the psychologist reminded us that ‘knowing them without judging them will help us to better understand how we function, why we form bonds, why we resort to certain strategies to protect ourselves, and why we act in ways that are so contradictory and antagonistic to what we really want and desire.’
Some of these internal parts that are activated, according to Montse Cazcarra, are the one who does not believe they are worthy, the child who fears abandonment, the one who lives in constant doubt, the one who convinces and deceives themselves with lies and half-truths, the one who lives relationships through fantasy, the complacent one, the one who sabotages, the one who idealises, the one who settles for crumbs, the distrustful one or the saviour. That is why the expert insisted: ‘Knowing them gives us greater clarity about our emotional reality and sheds light on internal contradictions and conflicts.’
