Angela asked me the following questions:

"My husband was diagnosed with Asperger’s three years ago and I have been trying to leave him for 1.5 years now. How can I leave and grieve without being overwhelmed when he says he will change? I'm not sure if he will ever be able to connect with me emotionally."

Angela, there is much I want to address in your question.

If I were having a session with you, I would start by asking you what attracted you to him in the first place? Did you feel a connection with him at the beginning, or did it feel safe to you to NOT feel connected with him? There is a good reason you chose to marry someone whom you believe can never emotionally connect with you.

The reason might lie with whether or not you are connected with yourself. When you say you are overwhelmed when he says he will change, I hear that you are responding to him from your disconnected wounded self, rather than from your loving adult.

What I suggest to you is that you diligently practice Inner Bonding so that you can learn to emotionally connect with yourself and with your guidance. Whether or not he actually has Asperger’s may not be the point. People with Asperger’s CAN connect, so the lack of connection may be due to something else entirely.

You will not know whether the two of you can emotionally connect until you are emotionally connected with your own feelings and with your spiritual guidance.

This is where you need to focus. Once you have worked with Inner Bonding long enough to feel connected with yourself, then you may become aware of some fears you have of connecting with others. Often, someone is aware of really wanting connection, yet on a deeper level, they fear it. The fact that you chose to marry someone to whom you can't connect may indicate that you fear connection.

I suggest you explore your own fears. You might have a number of beliefs about connection that are getting in the way of connecting with your husband, such as:

• If I risk connection, I might get hurt.
• If someone really knew me, he might not like me.
• If I open to connection with someone, I will lose myself.

Powerful and often unconscious fears of getting rejected or engulfed often underlie a fear of connection.

These fears tend to disappear when you become deeply connected with yourself – your true essence – and your spiritual guidance.

If, however, you really do want to leave the relationship, then what may be stopping you is that you are taking responsibility for his feelings. This is one way the wounded self convinces itself that it has control over others. The fact that you feel overwhelmed when he says he will change indicates that you are not staying connected with yourself, but are instead taking on responsibility for his feelings.

Once again, developing your capacity to love yourself through your Inner Bonding practice will eventually release you from taking responsibility for him. It is not loving to ourselves or others when we take responsibility for another's feelings. Their feelings are often being caused by how they think about themselves and how they treat themselves, and are not ours to fix or change.

It takes two people who are connected with themselves to connect with each other. Something is in the way of the connection between the two of you, and the only person you can do something about is you.

There may be other issues that are causing the disconnection – such as frozen feelings from childhood trauma, or even a highly processed food diet. With understanding and learning, both of these issues can be healed.

Heal your relationship with Dr. Margaret’s 30-Day online video relationship course: Wildly, Deeply, Joyously in Love.

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