Meet Your Dream Lover Today

This may shock you (coming from me) but today I am going to introduce you to your dream lover – who is just waiting to have the perfect life long affair with you – beginning today in real life!

But first I want to ask a question and share a little story …

Have you ever thought you knew something, only to have a life event make you realize you didn’t understand it at all?

The first time this happened to me was when I was hit by a car.

Of course I thought I knew that cars were big and heavy and could hurt people, but it wasn’t until one hit me, that I realised that previously I hadn’t really understood this at all.

Before, cars were just sound and vision to me, a bit like watching a movie or watching TV. But after my minor accident I began to start ‘feeling’ the cars around me in the street. A new sensation had dawned in me, causing my whole body and not just my mind, to become aware that I had to watch out.

In a very similar way it was only last year that the story of Narcissus falling in love with his own reflection and the experience of my own personal redemption from this same situation (my own narcissism), became very real to me.

There were a few events that led up to this breakthrough that I want to share with you today; how in the matter of one week my own experience of myself and my life completely changed.

Narcissism generally describes someone who is conceited and self centred — but as you may already understand — narcissism, in reality, has nothing to do with loving yourself at all.

As the Greek myth describes so well, Narcissus was not in love with his true self but rather a reflection of himself. Far from being ‘self centred’, Narcissus was a totally off-balance individual who died lonely gazing at what he thought was his ‘perfect lover’ in his own reflection in a pond. Far from him being centred in himself, he is pictured leaning forward trying hopelessly to find love in the shallow reflection of himself in the outside world.

And longing for this perfect lover doesn’t only apply to people with narcissistic tendencies. Just like Echo in this same myth, people with codependent tendencies also long for their ‘perfect love’ just as tragically, but in different ways.

Someone with narcissistic tendencies searches for completion in the praise and admiration they can win from others for their own achievements – or the personal worth and glory they can see reflected in the eyes of their admirers – while the codependent seeks their true ‘soul mate’ (who will know all of the codependent’s secret hopes, dreams and fears) but will often feel that this soul mate lies locked behind the defensive walls of an aloof (and perhaps narcissistic) partner. So rather then looking for admiration, the codependent instead is forever searching for the key to the ‘dark well’ their true love (who continues to reject them) has locked his or her heart in – so they can set it free and heal their cruel lover – so they will at last finally feel all the love and sympathy they are sure is waiting there locked inside.

Both of these ideas of finding true love are equally as flawed and dangerous as each other, and as repeated attempts at finding ‘their perfect love’ in this way fail, both the Narcissist and Codependent will be likely to begin resorting to fantasy.

Many of us have a little narcissism and codependence within us, and will vacillate between looking for love in the eyes of an admirer or (if that doesn’t work) in the eyes of someone who will feel sorry for us instead.

Then, when neither of these attempts to find love work effectively – we begin sliding further and further from the wonderful life we once dreamed of for ourselves.

So this is the pain of the human condition – We cannot forget the love we crave, but the ways we search for it hurt ourselves and the people around us, causing chaos, destruction and emotional pain.

So if the ways I have just described don’t work, how will we ever find our perfect lover?

The truth is there is one person who will truly love and care for you in the way that you secretly crave. And I am not talking about a divine or religious identity – your perfect lover is a real life, living and breathing human being and I want to introduce you to that person right now …

I hope that this isn’t too disappointing for you, but the 100% rock-solid truth is that only you can be your own perfect lover.

So maybe that’s a big let down and perhaps you are thinking “Oh yeah – loving myself and all that New Age rubbish, I have heard it all before.” or “Hey I have worked for years at loving myself and sure it helps, but still it is not the same as what my heart really craves.” Or perhaps you may even think this idea sacrilegious?

If so I need you to trust me and keep your mind open for a moment (minds work better that way!) and give this idea half a chance.

Because what I have described so far was only part of what hit me last year and these ideas I am sharing are experiential, which (like getting hit by a car) means that they are things that you must experience to understand.

If you truly want to experience self love and all that goes with it – you cannot just read this article – you will probably need to do some things, some of which may even scare you at first.

Before I get to that however, first I want you to simply imagine exactly how your ideal lover would care for you. Even if you are married or in a relationship please give yourself permission to do this and be as detailed in your imagination as you possibly can. Remember the dreams you once had about your ideal love and the actors and perhaps songs that once evoked a picture of this person?

Maybe you imagined someone who would take care of you by cooking and making a nice home for you? Or someone who would support you emotionally and financially while you changed your occupation or went back to school? Or maybe you imagined someone who would give you the life you always wanted. Someone who was sympathetic to your emotional pain and who understood that you only made the mistakes that you have, because you were hurting, afraid or misunderstood?

Or maybe you imagined someone who would carry you off to live in the neighbourhood or country where you always felt you really belong?

Whatever your fantasy, once you are ready please stop and write down some notes about the following points (give yourself the gift of a lifetime);

1. The character traits this person displays (such as beauty, strength or honesty).

2. The ways they would care for you and protect you if they walked into your life as your perfect lover right now.

Make sure that you make notes about this, because I will suggest that these may become a checklist of the most important things you will ever give yourself in your life.

You see most of us have been brought up to believe that loving ourselves will make us egotistical or conceited (or even evil) and this has caused us to deny ourselves the most important gift this life will ever offer …

and that is the chance to be our own perfect lover.

I learned this the hard way over Christmas and New Year the year before last, because with a house full of kids (and their friends) all off school on summer holidays here in Australia, I lost my direction and inner courage to continue giving myself a lot of what I really needed in my life, the first and most important being a quiet place for me to work to be able to financially support my family.

You see I work from home and back then my daughter shared her large bedroom with me (as my office) and that worked fine when she was at school. It is a big beautiful room and she had a desk and a big art table in it for her use too, but with the kids home from school it just wasn’t working.

So I went into hiding and moved my computer into a corner of our much smaller bedroom and without seeing the ‘loveless’ choices I was making for myself, my anxiety and fear began to grow.

My story is very relevant to what I hope to share with you today because this journey I am recommending is not easy and the number 1 thing you will need to be your own perfect lover is COURAGE.

When I look back at the problems I faced the 3 previous summers, me needing a quiet space to work during summer holidays should have been obvious, but unfortunately it took all my ‘bad old patterns’ coming back, such as putting demands on my family / trying to please them to get them to feel for me more / challenging their feelings for me / blame and anger / and even now and then me seeking attention and recognition elsewhere.

I am ashamed to say that it even finally took me having a severe anxiety meltdown, before the fact that I had a few things I needed to sort out for myself became clear.

Once I got through my anxiety attack and decided I better start treating myself better, no one in my family really helped me at all (Steve has been overwhelmed with his own workload too) but no one argued with me or stopped me either.

You see what had happened was really no one else’s fault and the real reason for me not seeing the problem sooner was that I had to do some things that were new and this was why it had previously been so hard for me to see what was needed or face my fear and believe in myself enough to look after myself better.

First – I had to call on a friend and admit that I urgently needed some financial support, which is something I rarely do and always feel very uncomfortable about.

Second – I had to tell my in-laws, as soon as we arrived to visit them for 3 weeks, that before I could do anything I needed to find a room to rent (with internet) for me to work in without being interrupted for the duration of our visit.

While they scratched their heads asking how much that might cost and saying they didn’t know how I would find something like that – I was already out looking at the notice board in the local launderette and was very soon on the phone.

I was scared inside about this new thing I was claiming the right to organise for myself – but after my anxiety meltdown, the idea of my own office had, in my minds eye, become a life rope back to peace and sanity.

Now because I have never done anything like this when visiting my in-laws, no one really understood and no one really believed it would actually happen. Being my own perfect lover however meant that I didn’t need their support, permission or help, instead – even though I felt nervous and scared that someone might try and talk me out of it or stop me, or judge me for giving so much time and attention to myself – I just did it.

So in less than 48 hours after arriving in Melbourne, and with a little help from Steve, I found myself sitting in a beautiful upstairs room, with trees outside the window and smelling the flowers I had bought for myself.

The room I found to sublet comprised the whole upstairs of a beautiful two story house and had total peace and quiet, with the fastest internet connection I had ever encountered.

And that room didn’t just feel like heaven – in a way I believe it actually was.

Because I believe God wants us to know we are deeply loved and wants us to love and take care of ourselves – from the very inner depths of our own heart.

This is not selfish either, because back home while I forgot to love myself guess what happened?

I started believing that the love and support I needed was outside of myself and hence I became egotistical and dissatisfied with how my family was treating me. I also became anxious and hard to live with. Once I saw the light however (after my fall) and became my own perfect lover, I could see that what I had organized for myself was not only good for me but was 100% better for my family as well.

Because loving yourself does not make you egotistical and self centred, but rather less demanding and much easier to be around.

So please go back now and have a look at that list you made. Because the truth is that no one is going to give you those things if you don’t start giving them to yourself.

Are there ways you want to live your life differently?

Well maybe it is time you start taking responsibility for organising those changes (without demanding too much from anyone else).

Do you long for a lover who is honest, hardworking and sincere? This is a message that you need to begin working on those traits in your own character and growing stronger so that you can begin to trust yourself.

Will that be easy? No.

Will you get to where you want to be overnight? No.

Will you always get the life you dreamed of or what you want? No, you will often have to make the most loving choices for yourself from what is available and that sometimes may mean needing to choose to be by yourself or to spend some quiet time contemplating nature or even to go hungry if the food available is not a loving choice for yourself.

Will other people help you? Not if you make your needs optional or ask permission for what you need. We all need some support from others, but you need to keep your requests direct and simple and be ready to accept a “no” if the person you ask can’t help.

Will it be worth the fear and discomfort you will feel by leaving your comfort zone? Undoubtably the answer is yes!

So from these ideas here are 3 new rules I have adopted in my life that I hope you might consider adopting too …

1. My needs and desires about the way I wish to live my life are no longer optional.

2. I will no longer ask permission for the things that I need to be happy.

3. I will not expect people to guess my needs and will ask clearly and politely for the things I want/need help with.

Being your own perfect lover means working to give yourself what you need, regardless of what anyone else thinks. It means finding courage to claim the freedom to live your life the way that you need to, while demanding as little as possible (particularly emotionally) from anyone else.

Because self worth is experiencing and giving yourself love, not just talking or thinking about it.

And further, once turning to my own ‘inner perfect lover’ for advice, I discovered this …

~ My Own Inner Riches ~Sitting quietly working in my new ‘room in heaven’, I had a realisation where I felt – perhaps for the first time ever – my own genuine and intrinsic self worth.

Because if I am to be my own perfect lover, what could possibly be more valuable to me than myself?

For the first time in my life I experienced that what was inside of my chest was worth more than all of the gold or riches in the world, and this same moment I suddenly saw and experienced two things; The first was a flash where I saw that what Narcissus needed and longed for was not the image he saw in the cold water of his reflection but instead to feel his own incredible self worth inside his own warm and living chest.

It was like I was Narcissus and I felt the cold hard reflection come up and join me and then my heart expand with love and joy at discovering the warmth, love and reality of cherishing and valuing myself.

Narcissus’ shame was not to love himself,
but to foolishly look for that love anywhere but inside himself.

The next thing I felt was that all of the anxious memories that had too often defined my life, began falling away like old leaves.

This was no day dream or wishful or fuzzy thinking either and I will tell you exactly why …

Because true love is a verb.

Giving yourself the things that your heart truly longs for (like the quiet office I had given myself) is not wishful … it is about doing and will take courage, determination and hard work!

At first you will say; “But I can’t afford the life that I want,” or, “My partner won’t let me do that,” or if you are more honest perhaps, “But I feel nervous because this is all new and I am afraid.”

It takes courage and strength to love yourself, and giving yourself a new and kinder life than you have in the past may be harder than you realize at first … but if you don’t have the courage to learn to love and respect yourself, who else will?

Loving yourself is also tough because it means giving up all your old bad habits, such as the junk food, drugs and stimulants that you rely on to make yourself feel better about denying yourself the life you truly long to be living.

– Or your addiction to fantasy with soap operas, pornography, romance novels, music, movies, magazines, computer games or TV.

– Or your reliance on blame and always feeling you need things from others (that you won’t even give yourself) because you don’t have the courage to take some risks and step out of your comfort zone and start taking the steps necessary to create the life that would express who you truly are.

Well you can cringe and beat yourself up about your bad habits if you want to – but I am telling you now that you will never get rid of them until you replace them with something new and filled with more love for yourself.

For instance, if you are a drinker and you try and stop drinking without first finding some new pastimes which you enjoy and that are more loving towards yourself, what do you think will happen?

From experience I can tell you that it will only be a matter of time before you are back filling in your spare time drinking, because it is a habit and what feels natural to relieve your stress and anxiety, even though it actually creates more stress and anxiety for yourself.

Further from this I want to be straight with you and let you know that the things I recommend in my ebooks are not what will bring heaven into your life. My ebooks simply offer new ideas of how to live a life of self respect, replacing some of your old habits and responses that are no longer working for you (or perhaps never did but you learned simply from bad example) with better ones.

What will bring heaven into your life is for you to face your fear and decide to become your own perfect lover and find the courage to replace your old habits with new ones to love and support yourself as you want to be loved.

If you are truly working at change, these new ideas will feel strange and scary at first and some may indeed be challenging, but most of the time it will simply be because these ideas and suggestions will be new.

If you have never made an online purchase or purchased an ebook or read a self-help book for instance, even deciding to get started on this may be something that feels foreign and a bit scary — and that fear is completely normal.

But if you are to grow and develop as a person and move towards a better life full of love, you avoiding the anxiety that trying new things causes and just saying “Don’t worry and just be happy”, is never going to cut it.

I have written 5 ebooks now and the first Back from the Looking Glass (which is now in it’s 11th edition) is about how I turned my marriage from one of emotional and physical abuse and humiliation to one of the best marriages that I have ever seen. The truth is however that while I was working through the steps I offer in that ebook, I was so scared that a lot of the time I felt like I might throw up!

So here is the catch 22 – if the new ideas you are trying are not putting you far enough out of your comfort zone to feel some distress, you are probably not genuinely growing and the things you are doing to improve your situation are probably not going to work at all.

Just like exercise, no pain no gain!

Here’s to you experiencing your own true self worth and truly knowing that you are loved.

Kim Cooper

PS. If you want something special and meaningful to give yourself, please check out The Little Book of Empathy Love and Friendship. This is a magazine style PDF with lots of colour pictures and easy to grasp concepts about being loved and accepted in your home and community. It is a great choice as a gift for you or your partner or for a teenage child who may be feeling in need of some emotional support.

Another good choice as a gift idea for a teenager is our audio Lovable me or for a girlfriend 10 Steps to Overcome Codependence.