Thriving in the Flow of Single

By Terry Lowey

Thriving in the Flow of Single takes on the tried and not-so-true assertion in our culture that the life of a woman in a partner relationship has more value than that of a single woman. Refusing to succumb to the programming-driven negative self-talk of a patriarchal upbringing, the author sets out on a journey of self-discovery, liberation, and authentic meaning. Follow her unedited, uncensored journal, as she painstakingly examines and releases limiting beliefs that have not served her, seeking and sourcing a broader, abundant, inclusive, and expansive experience of deep love.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press
• Release date: Dec 19, 2014
• ISBN: 9781452597911

Terry Lowey

Terry Lowey has practiced as a marriage and family therapist for over twenty years. Her first book, The Secret of the Wizard’s Wand, was published in 2007, and her numerous articles have appeared in We Connect and Healthy Beginnings magazines in Reno/Tahoe, Nevada.

Book preview

Chapter 1

A Place To Start

H ow do you describe yourself? What words come to mind that seem to accurately portray you? Your answer to this question will foretell the very quality of your life, for those labels carry the power to inspire or deflate, to encourage or deplete. If the words are unconsciously in play, then your brain will be running you. Life will feel seemingly out of your control to influence. The more conscious awareness you develop of those particular words, the clearer you will become on which forces steer you on your journey. The more care with which you choose them, the more you will deliberately effect how you feel. How you feel will in turn be the strongest of all indicators of your life experience.

Words carry impulses of consciousness. (Deepak Chopra)

The next question is perhaps more relevant than the first: What definition folds out of each of your singular words? Carefully follow the stream of meaning. If you do this exercise in earnest, you will see before you your personal mission statement, your north star, your GPS. Embodied in these simple words is either the fuel that will compel and propel you to manifesting a great and meaningful destiny or the vacuum that will pull you tight into an impervious shell that allows little light in and has little to emit. Sometimes we create both states, being uplifted in one arena of our lives and dismal in others.

The beauty is that the words are ours to bring to conscious awareness and then to craft into whatever brilliance we choose.

To be sure, others will attach their meaning to our words or will devise words of their own to describe us and will insist on the accuracy of their attributions. We will be nothing less than programmed to accept the proscribed meaning of the majority. Many, perhaps most will cave to the pressure and hand over the power to others to define them, never realizing that they can retrieve themselves and their vision for their lives by carefully choosing and developing their descriptive words within the framework of such concepts as authenticity, non-judgment, creativity, abundance, and grace.

There is one word that is at the heart of this writing. It is an often maligned word and one that is increasingly emerging in my awareness as the bearer of gifts of significance. It is a word declaring status: SINGLE.

Chapter 2

Why Me?

I don’t remember the exact moment the idea came to me, but I do recollect dismissing it readily. It persisted, as did my objections. A blog entitled SINGLE: I might as well have named it LOOSER, which was the image with which I was tormented at the thought, the prospect, and then the serious consideration of it. The fact that my reaction was thus only served to further prove my case to myself – I am strongly subject to and influenced by a negative association attached to being single.

I don’t torment easily. As a cognitive therapist of more than 20 years who practices what she preaches, I have learned the art of the reframe – have taken great strides to master it. I can recognize the positive, the gift in any given situation with a clarity and swiftness that has done nothing short of transforming my worst misfortune into positive life altering lessons. Sometimes I have accomplished that prematurely, not allowing the feeling to truly be felt first (which, I have learned, is of great value).

I am well acquainted with happiness, joy and dreams coming true - even beyond my dreams. And yet…being single seems to have haunted me since the moment I first understood the concept. Now, that is pretty strange considering I have experienced relationships with two boyfriends seriously and was also married the first time for 24 years and the second for 5 years. Altogether, more than 34 years of my life have been spent with a partner and still my brain insists that I am somehow defective and sorely lacking in the relationships-with-a-partner category. I suffer from real ‘scarcity issues’ in this realm, like someone who is a millionaire and lives in fear of being broke.

I have, shockingly, observed myself morph into the 16 year old awkward teenage girl who got migraines on New Year’s Eve because she didn’t have a boy to kiss at the stroke of midnight. After all, the most stunning girl in high school had shared her words of wisdom (and warning) that have never left me. We were at a baseball game at a park in the springtime. I was there with my girlfriends and she was there to watch the athletic prowess of her tall, blond boyfriend. When she acknowledged my presence (a coup in itself considering my typical feelings of invisibility, or at least puniness, in those days) and she said, and I quote, You should always keep a boy. Easy for her to say.

Fast forward 2 serious boyfriends and 2 serious marriages, close male friendships and 43 years later…I am supervising a clinical staff meeting with two of the brilliant therapists that I had the distinct joy of working with and the lone male among us who is a man of few words, is decidedly his own person and who has been endowed with a Yoda-like wisdom, (when he does choose to speak people tend to listen) makes a statement that holds me in rapt attention: We are still operating in a patriarchal system. Now, I knew this, and yet had not yet connected the dots of the obvious link between that fact and the intermittent perseverating stream of thoughts cascading through my brain and then impacting every atom of this mass of energy called me: that somehow my existence is ‘less than’ if I am a single woman. There is, in truth, a widespread and pervasive covert shame attached to female singleness, about not being attached to the more positively identified male counterpart.

One recent assertion that the social status of men is favored over that of women in our culture (and, no doubt, in varying degrees on most of the planet), is noted in the June 9, 2014 issue of Time magazine in an article entitled America’s Transition, referencing the increasing emergence of the transgender population into mainstream society. Paisley Currah, a political-science professor at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, shares that his (initially tenuous) experience of transitioning into the male body he most resonated with, was surprisingly smooth. He expressed his personally-informed conclusion that there is a stronger negative stigma attached to men transitioning to women than women to men, further remarking that he doesn’t get as many late papers now as when he appeared female.

Such nuances are felt, internalized and serve to chart a course, discouraging us from authentic inklings, suggesting instead that we remain carefully within the boundary lines imposed from without. Yes, we are blessed more than most of us appreciate with freedom of expression in the United States and much of the Western world. Still, the call to conformity is a powerful current, which renders being true to ourselves a conscious uphill climb, especially initially. We are not socialized to listen and be directed by our inner knowing, which is the only path to authentic, creative and optimum dynamic flow.

Don Miguel Ruiz calls the process by which we adopt the beliefs that are insistently taught to us by others about what is true, and from which premises to operate as we walk through life, domestication. Most of us strive to be good, domesticated humans. In my grandparent’s generation this paradigm was so adamant that children were overtly encouraged to be ‘seen and not heard.’

Medical intuitive and spiritual guide Carolyn Myss refers to the negative and false attributions perpetuated by society as psychic free radicals and declares that they drive emotional discrimination.

The assertion that individuals who are in partner relationships are somehow worth more or have superior access to happiness is an example of just such a catabolic belief - it tends to break down rather than build up. No useful purpose is served with this belief. No one’s life is enhanced by it. Quite the contrary, it does harm because it is fear-based,