He loves me, he loves me not?

HE LOVES ME OR HE LOVES ME NOT?

Margherita, just as one does when playing with the petals of the flower whose name she bears, continues to ask herself:
“he loves me or he loves me not?”

Attiva controlli, ricerca costantemente attenzioni, evita il più possibile situazioni esterne che possano mettere la sua relazione in pericolo, cercando di passare tutto il tempo disponibile, tranne quello lavorativo (unico tempo giustificabile), sempre insieme al suo partner.

Margherita strongly believes that only if they are always together will she be able to truly trust him, without realizing that the dysfunctional thought that her actions fuel is: "I'm not going to trust him."I can only trust if I check“.

This type of thinking is paradoxical in itself: if I feel the need to control, there's no trust. Beginning to acknowledge this is extremely embarrassing for Margherita, but only by acknowledging a part of herself that's scared and distrustful can she truly help herself navigate her relationship with trust.

"Margherita's inner journey: discovering that self-love is the first step to truly loving."

“Margherita, where did you learn that trust is synonymous with control and that love is synonymous with possession?“

Her eyes fill with tears, frozen and unable to come out, holding painful memories of her and her parents.

Only by rediscovering the child she once was does she begin to make sense of her mistrust and obsession with control. In the present, she finally begins to recognize that she doesn't like the way she relates to her partner, whereas before she considered it the only way, and above all, the right one.

"From a controlling love to a liberating trust: the path to change."

However, to solve the problem of her present, she needs to work on her past in parallel, gradually recognizing that the game of "he loves me, he loves me not" that she plays towards her partner is the same game of desperate love that she played towards her mother and father.

È una forma di riscatto per quella bambina ferita. Si, proprio così; finalmente riesce a dire a sé stessa che da bambina non si è sentita mai davvero amata e riconosce la voce interna che le sussurra “anyone little girl is preferable to you“, feeling wrong, defective and inferior.

Ha imparato con il tempo a dirsi che era colpa sua se non si sentiva abbastanza amata, mai la prima scelta; solo assumendosene la colpa, poteva continuare a provare modi nuovi e diversi per ottenere quel tanto desiderato amore.

"Overcoming jealousy, regaining trust: Margherita's difficult but necessary journey."

Only by looking at this sad truth can he make sense of his current problem and understand that his jealousy today makes sense, but that to truly solve it he needs to change the question of his favorite game: from "what is jealousy?"he loves me or he loves me not?” A “I love myself I love myself not?”.

To painfully discover "no, I don't love myself," never feeling lovable enough, exactly as she did as a child. So Margherita slowly learns to look at the child she once was, to validate her feelings, to look at her parental figures through the eyes of all those unmet needs, to laboriously begin to place her under the protective wings of her adult self, learning to tell herself "I'm here, for you."

"Recognizing the wound to heal it: Margherita faces her past to free herself from the fears of the present."

Today, in therapy, Margherita is rewriting her own story because only by learning to say "I LOVE MYSELF!" will she be able to interrupt her relational game and love with trust.
Margherita is discovering the obvious, hidden by her blind spot: that the only way to truly love someone is to love yourself. And to do so, you must grieve for not having been loved for who you were and painfully realize the irreparability of the loss.

"The game of 'does he love me or not?' becomes a journey of discovery towards authentic self-love."

La ferita di tutte la più profonda – quella di non essere stati amati per ciò che si era – non può sanarsi senza l’mourning process.” (Alice Miller)

Margherita is a young adult, but the story she is healing in the therapy room is that of the wounded child she once was and who still cries inside her.
Only by healing that little girl's wound will she be able to definitively resolve the insecurity of the woman she has become.

"Freeing yourself from the past to rewrite the present: the cure for Margherita's childhood wound."
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We cannot change a single iota of our past, nor erase the damage inflicted on us in childhood.
However, we can change ourselves, "repair the damage," and regain our lost integrity. We can do this when we decide to look more closely at the knowledge about past events stored in our body, to bring it closer to our consciousness.

It is undoubtedly a difficult path, but it is the only one that gives us the chance to finally abandon the invisible – and yet so cruel – prison of childhood and to transform ourselves, from unaware victims of the past, into responsible individuals who know their own history and have learned to live with it.

(Alice Miller)

"Margherita and her search for love: how self-acceptance becomes the key to a healthy relationship."

A painful, difficult but possible path.

Margherita's story is a reconstruction for illustrative purposes: it does not correspond to a single real person and every identifying reference has been omitted.

Gelosia e bisogno di controllo hanno quasi sempre una storia dietro: qui trovi il percorso di relationship therapy in Florence.