Tatiana Khodakova

“Feeling the need for love is a choice not to feel it inside yourself”

Love cannot be given, it cannot be taken, it can only be felt inside yourself. It is only there. If you stop looking for love in other people, then you can feel it inside yourself.

Love is not different! It is the same. The needs that replace Love are different. For example, it’s thought that love is different for children, parents, partners, work, etc. But the thing is that love is always the same, but the needs that are satisfied in one relationship or another are different. The need for motherhood/fatherhood is often satisfied through having kids, as well as the need for being socially “correct”, or the need for parents to finally leave you alone with the question “when will they become grandparents?”, or the need to “tie” a partner, or the need to take care of someone, satisfying the need to be needed, or the need to fulfill the social message about “a house, a tree and a son”, or the need for “a glass of water”, or the need for tenderness, or the need to give life, etc.

With parents, other needs are satisfied – such as care, guardianship, attention, approval, significance, provision, etc.

With a partner, one needs to be the only one, chosen, desired and satisfies the need for physical intimacy, etc.

At work, for example, the needs for recognition, the realization of one’s interests and talents, significance, finances, etc. are satisfied.

In relationships with different people and in different contexts, different needs are satisfied. But this is not different love. There is only one love, but it is often replaced by the notion “needs”. And then they chase after love, but in fact, an unconscious desire to satisfy their needs is realized.

Yes, you come to all these relationships (personal, friendly, parent-child, work, etc.) with YOUR feeling of love. You can satisfy needs with love. But love is not the same as need!

When people say, “I feel the need for love”, it’s the same as saying, “I feel the need for my body”. The body is here — feel it. And love, it’s in you — feel it.

Sometimes you can hear the complaint, “I don’t feel your love”. The first part of the sentence is correct — “I don’t feel”, and the second part should be replaced with “my love”, that is, “I don’t feel my love”. For some reason, I chose not to feel love inside myself right now.

Not very romantic? I disagree. The need for romance, like the need for aesthetics or physical contact, is a need that can be realized with love. But need is not Love.

A person always “carries” love inside, but looks for it outside.

Therefore, sooner or later, disappointment will occur when the other person stops satisfying the needs, and then you will want to say: “You don’t love me anymore/I don’t love you anymore”. But in reality: “I stopped feeling my love because I mistakenly attached love to these needs (which I satisfied in a relationship with you) in my head”. We can satisfy our different needs in relationships, even destructive ones. For example, the need for “rescue” or the need for pity, for our “importance”, pride, living with a dependent partner. The need to receive attention from parents can sometimes be satisfied by allowing them to control your every step, being an adult. The need to be “in a good standing” will force a person to stay in a low-paid job and not go into a new activity, since their a “good standing” position must be built anew, etc. All these needs were somehow “tied” to the understanding of love – if these needs are satisfied, then they love me or then I love. But it’s not always like that.

Free Love from attachments to needs, and you will feel it immediately!!

When a person can feel love inside himself/herself (the only and unconditional one), claims to others will get away. It is one thing to think that “you don’t love me”, and another – “you don’t want to do something because our needs do not coincide”. They are perceived differently, you must admit.

If you remove needs from the understanding of Love, then Love will remain. And since Love “always exists and does not cease to be”, then some of the imaginary needs will fall away: to prove something, to increase your significance, importance, to strive for power over someone, to deserve approval, etc. – because everything, mentioned above, was necessary to “receive” love. And it is always with you, you just have to “turn” to yourself and feel it.

Each of us “carries” the love inside, wherever we go and whomever we approach. Each of us makes a choice to show it or hide it. You cannot give this love to another person, you can be in love yourself, and the other person can also be in love, since it is inside of him/her (if he/she chooses to feel it).

Showing love does not mean giving it (it is impossible),

Showing love is living in it

Because other people do not need love, since it is in them already too. And then we see, that we live in love, satisfy each other’s needs with love or do not satisfy them, but also with love.

Main photo by Everton Vila
Translated by Maria Zayats

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Tatiana Khodakova

“A pessimist is a person, who complains about the noise when fortune knocks at his/her door” (Oscar Wilde)

A lucky break can change your life. But why are some people always lucky, while others can only watch someone else’s luck?

A lucky break can take a person to a new level of life, like a high-speed elevator, freeing from many years of often futile efforts. But luck is not the lot of the chosen ones, but the ability to notice and recognize random opportunities that life throws you up. Often these opportunities, gifts of fate, turning points in life come through challenges that a person can read as troubles, difficulties, or as problems.

“A black stripe can sometimes becomes a takeoff streak” (Elchin Safarli)

A challenge, if accepted, will later turn out to be a gift of fate

For example, a person works as a librarian at a school. He has a fixed salary. There is nowhere to grow higher than a librarian, and he dreams of a significant increase in his income. After some time, the librarian begins to notice that there are more problems at work (the system is “tightening the screws”), and his salary is only being cut. In fact, the system is pushing him out in this way so that he can improve his financial well-being by doing something else or working in another field. But if the librarian does not read these signals, but perceives the situation as a blatant injustice, is indignant that “they don’t give the tiger meat in the cage”, then perhaps a gift from fate will be delivered through dismissal. And then there are several possible developments. Either the librarian becomes even more indignant: “How is this possible? I dreamed of a raise, and now I’ve lost my last penny!?”, or will accept this challenge and see in it a real opportunity to change his life.

THE FIRST thing a person does to push away his luck is disagreement with challenges: unwillingness to accept and follow these challenges. A challenge is a radical change in life: moving, changing activities, being fired, breaking up, etc.

A CHALLENGE IS A GIFT OF FATE

If you look back at your life, you will find that the most wonderful changes in your life happened because you accepted challenges and agreed to change. Everything that happens is for the better.

And if not? “Not for the better” only happens when a person resists change. When the wind of change blows, and it is usually strong and gusty, then there are options – either set the sail to the wind, or be “disheveled” by the wind into shreds. If a person agrees to follow this “gust” of change, then, most likely, he will be afraid, but over time he will be able to discover that these changes were for the better.

“Fate will pour to each person as many liters of luck as the gas tank of his courage can fit” (Marina and Sergey Dyachenko)

THE SECOND reason why a person pushes away his luck is a small internal psychological capacity. There is such an expression – “died of happiness.” This is not quite a metaphor. Pleasant events can also be stressful. When a person is in euphoria, then his nervous system enters a highly excited state. If the internal capacity, one can also say the internal norm, does not “accommodate” the emotional “volume” of happiness, then the “fuses” will work – those mechanisms that do not let this very happiness into life.

This manifests itself approximately like this – it turns out that half a step before receiving the result (the event that will make a person happy), suddenly something breaks down, suddenly something went wrong, suddenly all efforts went down the drain. If the internal norm is not “stretched” to the level of happiness, then the psyche thus “turns on” the fuse so that the person “does not die of happiness.” Therefore, psychologists recommend that when setting, for example, financial goals, you start increasing your income not in “X-s”, but gradually, by 2-3 times. There are many cases where a person with a low internal financial norm won a million, and then very quickly lost the money and returned to the starting position. This is a clear example of the work of mental fuses.

“Is this really all for me?” – in other words, the state of euphoria that a person experiences when thinking about what they want, says precisely that there is no readiness to have it. Therefore, it is necessary to psychologically “grow” yourself to the state of the norm of your goal. When the reaction to what you want feels like “it’s normal for me”, then the psyche will let the result into your reality.

So, in order not to scare away luck, the FIRST thing you need to do is to realize: luck comes in the form of a challenge.

SECOND: your internal norm must be capacious enough so that the psyche perceives what you want as safe.

“I think everyone is lucky, but not everyone knows how to use it” (R. Litvinova)

AND THIRD — actions. Here, as they say, “lucky is the one, who carries himself.”

• If, for example, you say that you want to be safe, but continue to be in a dangerous place, then you need to lift yourself up and lead yourself to a safe place.
• If you say that you want more money, but work where there is no opportunity to grow in income, then you need to quit or you will be fired. The system will “spit you out”, and this will be a gift of fate, this will be luck.
• If you do not fall into the role of a victim, but begin to actively look around, then you will see opening doors, see opportunities and begin to take actions to create income.
• If you want a happy relationship, but live with an abuser who does not value you, uses and humiliates you, then the situation in the family will worsen, so that you finally take the necessary action.

You can tame luck by accepting challenges, increasing your internal norm, and taking action with the knowledge that everything happens for the best, and that you are not a bystander but an active participant in creating that best.

“I am a firm believer in luck. And I have found that the harder I work, the more it smiles upon me” (Thomas Jefferson)

Photo by Fellipe Ditadi
Translated by Maria Zayats

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Tatiana Khodakhova

“The one, who is happy will make others happy” (Anne Frank)

Modern technologies have made our lives more convenient and help us lead a pretty comfortable lifestyle. We can order food and goods online, buy tickets to various events and trips, use various devices to monitor our health and fitness. And despite such technical progress, we still perceive a woman as a household function. And the most interesting thing is that this perception is most often female. Yes, there are men who are sincerely indignant: “Why do I need a wife if she does not wash, clean, cook, or take care of me?” And indeed, why? What does a woman give in a partnership?

Behavioral traditions of past generations, which we continue to rely on, despite the fact that current living conditions have changed greatly, as well as the state of lack of love formed in childhood, lead to catastrophic confusion in the psyche and complex consequences in female-male relationships.

Wanting to be needed, women strive to give a man their care and guardianship (cooking pies, having sex, ironed shirts, a clean house, etc.) instead of giving their resources to the relationships and being in a happy state, creating the same field around themselves. At this point, women question themselves: “So, doesn’t he need my care?” And maybe he really does not. He does not need a woman, who is trying to deserve his attention, due to her internal insecurity in her value.

There are couples,where such “need” suits the “adopted” man, who needs a “mommy” who’ll make sure that his “underpants are clean and socks don’t have holes”. If this satisfies both of them, then it’s ok. Although with satisfaction and health there might be still a problem, at least in the sexual sphere. The issue will most likely arise sooner or later.

But mostly such female “need” does not satisfy t the man and he leaves the “cozy” home — either completely o goesr to his lover. And the woman then falls into the state of “I gave him and did everything for him, and he is so ungrateful …” This happens because she gives all of herself to him, and not to them, as a couple. She has fed the “chick”, and he feels like a baby in a cozy “nest”, to whom everything is given in the “beak”. But he cannot feel his testosterone — masculine nature in such conditions.

Women who unconsciously “fall into” the “maternal instinct” in their relationships with their partners fall into such painful traps. Traumas in a woman’s personal experience (often childhood) force her to “earn” her need and try to give everything to a man so that he will appreciate her.

There is another unconscious female “game” that some women constantly play:

• Find a strong man
• Submit him to her will
• Prove to him that she is stronger
• “Break” him with your “adoption”
• Regret that he turned out to be weak.

What is the reason for such “games”? In a strong and tough maternal instinct, which a woman cannot control and a man cannot resist it.

A woman is responsible for how the relationship in a couple is being built. If she cannot control her maternal instinct, which a man is not able to resist, then he either submits and loses his strength, becoming a “son” — ceases to be a man, or at some point he leaves when a woman “goes too far” with her “care”. If a man submits to the maternal instinct of his woman and stays with her, then sex “leaves” the relationship, because you don’t sleep with “mommies” and “children” don’t excite you.

Of course, you want to do something nice for your man, but try to feel  the difference when you are in a state of “motherly” care for him, and when you feel high and full of energy and bring all this state in your relationship. When you just feel good with yourself, you walk next to a man and glow from within, you want to cling to him and you notice how his shoulders straighten and he grows in his strength — there is a woman next to him in whose field he wants to be.

When a woman splashes “milk cans”, she finds a man who has not grown up and is looking for a mother. “Mom” irons shirts, changes socks, makes sure her man comes home on time, that he does not “drink away” his salary, signs up for personal growth courses, etc. And very soon she will stop seeing a man in him, and a strange state will arise — like if she continues to be in a relationship, but something feels wrong, as if she is in a couple, but does not feel like a woman.

There is an opinion that the men are afraid of strong women. But this is a myth that crumbles when a woman knows how to realize herself, her strength, not proving to her man, that she is cooler. The first and the most important thing that a woman can give a man is her happy state: when she knows how to be happy without him, when she can fill herself with love, when she takes care of her mood so that she feels good with herself. And when she shares this state of “I feel good with myself” with those around her, people want to be around her. A woman can cook deliciously and clean the house, but this is secondary. Because as soon as she is perceived as a robot, she stops being a woman. When a woman deserves love through performing household functions, she can be appreciated as a robot, her borscht and the comfort of the apartment can be loved, but not her  — it is impossible to love someone, who does not know how to love himself.

If a woman does not love herself, then she cannot give love to the relationship.

Relationships with a hint of maternal instinct lead to chronic dissatisfaction with your man. When a mother sees potential in her child and nurtures him, sending him to various clubs and sections, she thus corrects his behavior in accordance with the vector of development. And this is normal in parent-child relationships. But when a woman looks at an adult man through the idea of ​​”developing” his potential, telling him that he is “great and can do more”, and flatters herself with the thought that she will make a “general” out of him, then the wife thus falls into the position of a mother and confuses an adult man with a child.

The development of potential depends on the man himself, and not on how his mother directs him.

A woman “in maternal instinct” falls in love not with a man, but with his potential. If she indulges herself in hopes that, say, a “Zaporozhets” will become a “Mercedes” thanks to her efforts, then she will systematically be disappointed and give out chronic dissatisfaction in the relationship.

Therefore, it is worth asking yourself a question and answering it honestly: “Do I agree to live with the man, the way he is behaving now? Or do I hope that he will change?”

If I agree, then everything is fine. Leave the man alone with your claims and live with him as he is, asking yourself more often: “What am I giving myself in this relationship? How can I bring myself to a state where I feel good?”

And then there will be a high probability that this man can begin to change, because he himself wants it.

A woman gives in a relationship a state of her own happiness with this man and a state of gratitude to the man for everything that he gives her. A man becomes stronger, brighter, more powerful thanks to a woman. Not because she raises him, but because he brings BLESSINGS to a woman.

What can a woman do for a man? When she is not a “mother for her son”, “not a shirt-boy for her neighbor’s boy”, but when she is a woman for her man, she can give space to which he will bring blessings. And she is able to accept with joy and be grateful.

When a woman can accept from a man, ask and take with gratitude — this is where a man grows.

And what do women often do? They give-give-give, and then lament that he finds a mistress, where he can give.

So what does a woman give to a man? She gives her joy, accepting his blessings, giving him the opportunity to love her, give her gifts and feel the state of “I can give to you”.

A man expects sincere eyes, joy, “clapping hands” from a woman when he comes and brings a “mammoth”. And if a woman is always dissatisfied and has stopped enjoying gifts, then he becomes uninterested in giving.

Relationships are based on gratitude, where he gives thanks, and she is grateful.

Photo by Mihail Tregubov
Translated by Maria Zayats

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