Relating with Emotional Purpose.

Relating with Emotional Purpose

by Dexter Valles

Visible or invisible, conscious or sub conscious, acceptable or unacceptable, every relationship has a purpose.

When that is gone, so is the relationship.

Emotion is the equal partner of the purpose. Although quite often, emotion being more experienced in the mind and body, may actually obscure sighting the purpose itself. Interestingly, when the emotion runs dry, so does the relationship. If you are engaged more with the emotion than the purpose which produces or accompanies the emotion, well, it may just leave you stranded and adrift, when it runs out.

So Love, for example, and not Lust which is often confused with Love,  one of the biggest human emotions, is not the purpose of the relationship. But as an emotion, it's quite overwhelming.  Love is often called the seventh wave in a sea of emotions that floats the ship of purpose. Which could be the vision of life together, children, building a great future together, partnership, and so on. Love is the emotion that wraps the vision around the relationship. And holds it together.

So why would the emotional glue run dry ? And strangely, it quite often does, doesn't it ? Sometimes emotional glue is replaced with emotional dynamite !! That is enough to clue us into the insight that the original emotion has transferred out of the relationship, perhaps because either the vision has played out its course and the purpose fulfilled. Or, the vision has shifted or redirected elsewhere or even crumbled along the way. And the binding emotion has metamorphed into something else.

Like Love turning lukewarm, because of an anticipated shared future together with children, morphing into a future of two independent lives held together just by children or joint financial engagements or physical assets and investments; the relationship spiraling down to a necessary business partnership. Or terrible incompatibility with each others habits, wants, needs or desires at close range can erode the vision crafting the very purpose of the relationship, with the core emotions then shifting to ones less binding. Maybe even more loosening to allow for breaking or unraveling of the relationship.

Have you experienced this in your lives ? Has a relationship that enthralled and bound you now become less enchanting or even broken ? Or has it improved ? Did a mild emotion with loose ties turn into a burning flame ? Did you find purpose shifting from casual to imperative ? Or did a need that originally drove your purpose get fulfilled elsewhere ?

Whats the more powerful experience for you ? And what does it tell you about how you have engaged with your life's purpose or purposes with the people you've enrolled ?

• We usually look for 5Rs in the performance of a relationship: Role, Relevance, Resonance & Reciprocity, Rigour and Results. We can call the fulfilment of these, evolved purpose.

Is there still enough evolved purpose to keep you in relationships which have served you well ?  Have you discovered or uncovered mistaken purpose along the way ? Did you not work with sufficient zeal and purpose towards your vision of the relationship?

Are you on the road to make, mend, amend or break ?

It hardly matters anymore in the present, what the past threw up. Although our egos are often in constant battle of what should have been. Who we are or not is then defined by our ego. So out of the window flies the original emotional purpose. And in comes Ego with explosive emotional baggage. The ghost of the past to haunt our future.

Being in the moment, is the most powerful way to exorcise the ghost of past perfidities. Let the past guide but not dictate the present. Look for past patterns that presently play out invisibly in crucial areas of your life .

Its probably good practise to pause and check for evidence of emotional purpose in your relationships. If you find that evidence and the emotional partnership, you could consciously stroke the responsiveness of that relationship. 

If you are struggling to find the evidence, maybe there is a tsunami of hidden emotions building in that sea !! Better get your relationships and partnerships to higher ground !! From there you can retrieve purpose or even redefine it.

Make up your mind and your heart about the energy you need to invest in the emotional purpose that drives each relationship. Release energies you have imprisoned in fatigued relationships to bring fresh perspective to fuel the true emotional purpose of your life.