… then you love the person you’re with because they complete you. Not because you need them but because you want them by your side, and that is what love is. If you wish to love another, you must first love yourself. If your parents loved you unconditionally and they themselves possessed an appropriate amount of emotional maturity that they raised accordingly with the complexity of life, you had a good hand dealt to you. Unfortunately, there are few such cases nowadays.

Today, about 99 percent of love derives from the phrase “I need you.” So, you tell yourself: “I need you means that I love you.” However, a princess needs her knight to save her from the dragon, which doesn’t mean she loves him, but she has to love him because he rescued her. So, if you enter a relationship because you need someone and love them because of this, you create an inefficient relationship because it’s not based on love but on need. And if it’s based on a need, then it’s clear that one depends on the other. The more you depend on someone, the more you start hating them because they make you feel powerless. And if you’re powerless, you begin to develop hatred. And then you start hating the person who saved you from the dragon’s lair from your mother or father. Why? Because you are powerless in front of them and do not possess a sufficiently high enough emotional maturity to be independent. You need this person to balance you while they also need you, so you gradually begin hating each other. Such a hate-based relationship disintegrates because hate is a disintegrating energy that allows for disintegration, separation, and entropy. However, you must make a distinction between hatred and anger. 

Anger, love, and happiness are kinetic energies that raise orderliness and enable syntropy. Meanwhile, hatred, anger, revenge, contempt, and protest are kinetic energies that separate and offer you the chance to separate from the thing that is putting you in a position of powerlessness. If you don’t want to destroy yourself, you must destroy the relationship that makes you powerless.

Would it have ever come to this if the couple took time for themselves and talked about it?

The probability that the condition does not become chronic is thus much greater. Conversation and raising your ability to communicate and eliminate imbalances are of key importance. However, conversation alone doesn’t decrease sensory amnesia and sensory alienation because that is only possible by performing AEQ exercises. You must also know that focusing solely on AEQ exercises, not investing any time into conversation, and raising your emotional efficiency isn’t enough to change your life for the long term and eliminate certain chronic conditions. 

A couple would eventually recognize that they are incompatible and would separate, or they could begin coordinating, raising their emotional maturity, and remaining together in a much more mature and orderly relationship. In both cases, we would make it impossible to maintain a dysfunctional relationship in-depth and thus reduce the transmission of this disorder onto their children, or we would raise the emotional maturity of the parents, and they would transfer a much more orderly relationship onto their children along with the knowledge of how to manage disorder as an adult.

Aleš Ernst, author of the AEQ method, AEQ breathing and AEQ relationships