Romantic Mythology Pretense
With this strategy we only link up with others who complement the role we wish to play, or agree on the story we wish to act out. These stories arise from our favorite childhood fairy tales that appear to explain our childhood experience in the first eighteen months of our life. We seek out magical possibilities to offset the cold, mechanical reality we perceive is dominating our world. Acting from romantic scripts might be initially fulfilling until we realize that it is all fantasy, and promotes the idea that we are a victim of our love. By being identified as a Romantic, we can get away with inconsistent or irrational behavior that masks a lack of appropriate boundaries. When we operate from this pretense, what we lose is our Aliveness and Authentic Life Expression. We naturally attract Expectors and Seducers and have our greatest conflicts with Controllers.
The pretense of Romantic Mythology creates frameworks of feelings, and emotionally stimulating possibilities. The goal is to sell open-ended, ungrounded, idealistic, spontaneous approaches to living. People using this pretense therefore resist overt structure and preconditioned thinking. We wait for others to take the initiative in order to see if our potential partner knows what to do without our saying anything. If our partner’s expectations and actions are congruent with our own romantic story, then we believe this person is the ONE! We then engage others for the purpose of bringing in new ways of thinking and a sense of fantasy, which keeps us from grounding and manifesting our own vision. We typically sabotage our ideas by not taking appropriate steps to make them real. We would rather have the fantasy over the reality. Mythologists have a sense of waiting for the right things to occur, which, if they do, seem mystical and miraculous.
Romantic Mythology Pretense Objective: Getting others to enjoy our presence.
Wouldn’t it be great if we could fly to Paris to breakfast?
I support you being connected to the big picture of __________.
I’m honoring you, so you will engage and accept the possibility of _x_.
I love how you love me when you do __________________________.
Unconscious Assumption: We need to be hopeful and we discount our physical reality.
Affirms respect for others in making choices (provides support).
Believes in our imagination anything is possible, operates openly.
Operates from how things could be, encourages fantasy exploration.
Is not happy when others demand action, or refuse to play along.
Releasing Romantic Mythology
Affirm fear of being accountable to others. Make more “I” statements.
Take responsibility for appropriate self-action without automatically including others.
Honor and preemptively reveal intellectual fears of not measuring up and engage the ideas of others without needing to deny personal ideas.
Stop rescuing others.
Don’t allow ourselves to be distracted from our personal issues.
Simplify and take action immediately to make ideas real.
Anti-Romantic Mythology
We are repulsed by Romantic Mythology, because we are fed up with others’ fantasizing about things, which they never follow through on. Instead, we now fear that our engagement with others’ doing Romantic Mythology indicates that we have reached a stalemate where nothing will occur. As a result, we attempt to focus others doing Romantic Mythology into taking any action, rather than just talking about it. We begin to appreciate how others can sabotage themselves by constantly diverting their attention away from the obvious next steps. In effect, we need to let go of seeing action as the only way of moving forward and recognize that individuals need to be seen where they are before they can begin to move forward. Anti-Romantic Mythology means that we have come to an internal decision not to waste our energies or misuse our imagination to lose ourselves in our fantasies, realizing that doing so keeps us from being authentic within ourselves. We are left with the natural impulse to be balanced in the engagement of our life energy by taking appropriate action. We release Anti-Romantic Mythology patterns when we are no longer fearful that they will throw us off or distract us from our own development process.