By Steve Friedman — 2019
How can a spurned lover make his case? In this essay — the first Modern Love column ever published, exactly 15 years ago — one writer counts the ways.
Read on www.nytimes.com
CLEAR ALL
The people in our lives who make us uncomfortable, who annoy us, who we feel judgmental or even combative toward, reflect parts of ourselves that we reject -- usually aspects of our disowned selves, the shadow side of our personality.
If we learn to see our relationships as the wonderfully accurate mirrors they are, revealing to us where we need to go with our own inner process, we can see much about ourselves that we would otherwise have a great deal of difficulty learning.
Everything in our lives reflects where we are in the process of developing integration and balance.