People will have no reason to remind you about what they’ve done for you if they felt appreciated by you.
This popular meme encourages a selfish view of life and convinces us that we’re victims of manipulation rather than giving us reason to question if/how we may have wronged someone, or taken them for granted.
If this meme were true, then every parent who sacrifices their own joys and advancement in life for the benefit of their children will have no right to feel betrayed if they’re neglected by their children later in life.
It’s become fashionable to write people off just because we’re not getting what we need or want from them.
The fact that we feel entitled regardless of what they’re going through is often ignored.
But the circle of life is such that what we judge others about today, will meet us as a test under very different circumstances tomorrow.
When you write people off because of what they complain about regarding feeling hurt or betrayed by your actions towards them, you will remember them when someone you are convinced will always have your back turns around and walks away from you because they want something from life that they can’t get from you.
When someone says ‘after all I’ve done…’, step back, dismount your high horse, and consider why they may be feeling betrayed or used instead of getting defensive and assuming that they’re toxic.
How you respond to someone in their moment of duress is a reflection of who you are, and what you need from them.
That’s why abandoning family ties, cutting off parents, demanding divorce, and breaking social bonds has grown to define our self-care routine.
When we stop needing others, they become optional while we think it’s our right to live our best life regardless of their contribution towards getting us through our worst times when they could have been living their best life.
Be careful what advice you take from the Internet.
You could end up living your best life, alone.
#hope #expectation #sincerity #selfworth #selfawareness #mentalhealth #mentalhealthawareness #lifecoaching #zaidismail #theegosystem #ownyourlife #narcissisticabuse #narcissist
Tag: narcissist
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Mental health myth – Social contracts
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Respect is not earned
The old saying of ‘respect is earned’ robs you of self respect and replaces it with entitlement.
How we treat others is a reflection of who we are, not who they are.
Our ability to self regulate our offering of respect to those who may treat us badly is a reflection of how much we need them to treat us well before we feel good about who we are.
In other words, the less grounded we are in who we are, the more likely it is that others will impact our moods, our temper, and our overall emotional wellbeing.
Trust, on the other hand, is earned through consistency of effort about what’s important.
Trust cannot be negotiated or contracted.
If we have reason to doubt someone showing up for us, we won’t trust that they will.
That reason is sometimes because of them being unreliable, but is also often because of how someone else in the past may have disappointed us or betrayed our trust when we needed a similar thing from them. Like comfort, support, or just being there for us.
If we go through life trusting recklessly while withholding respect to those who, in our eyes, don’t deserve it, we will find ourselves reeling from betrayal long after it has passed while disrespecting those who don’t understand our pain.
Problem is, even we won’t understand our pain, so we’ll never be able to communicate it in ways that will allow those close to us to understand why we’re raging.
It all starts with self respect and self worth.
Without that, you will need others to treat you well before you treat yourself well.
Own your life.
#hope #expectation #sincerity #selfworth #selfawareness #mentalhealth #mentalhealthawareness #lifecoaching #zaidismail #theegosystem #ownyourlife #narcissisticabuse #narcissist #rage #anger #angermanagement #marriage #divorce -
The struggle for self-worth
Our relationship with our father, whether they’re present or absent, still with us or passed on, shapes how we feel about ourselves more than any other influencing factor in our lives.
It’s not about whether they were good or bad as humans or as parents, but rather what we took from our experiences with them, or what we took from their absence.
A father who is absent because he has to work long hours to provide for his family, could still have a positive impact if he is not harsh and impatient with his children when he does have a few moments to share with them.
Similarly, a father who is present but always fixated on rules, boundaries, rituals, and the like, will create an emotional barrier between him and his children that will convince them that who they are doesn’t matter, and that what they achieve is all that matters.
That directly conflicts with our core human need to be of significance.
What we take, or what we believe to have been their motivation to be that way towards us in our early years, is what shapes how we show up for others in our later years.
Most people who have had a difficult relationship with their father know exactly how they don’t want to do things, or how they don’t want to be as parents, but that doesn’t mean that they know how to achieve what they want in their relationship with their children.
That’s how, without meaning to, we often become exactly like the parent/so that we once judged harshly for failing us as a parent.
The most effective way to break this cycle is to understand the true reasons why your father may not have been what you needed him to be despite his best intentions or efforts.
It’s only in seeing the demons of others that we will realise that how they showed up for us was not because of who we are, but rather because of how our needs from them provoked the demons that they were grappling with.
That’s how we learn from the shortcomings of others, rather than falling into the same deficiencies because we think we’re better than them.
See the human behind the role and you’ll feed the soul of those who desperately need it.
#parenting #narcissist #narcissisticabuse #lifecoaching #zaidismail #toxicparents -
Don’t outsource your dignity
Dignity is the ultimate social currency.
With dignity comes accountability and self awareness.
Or perhaps dignity is only possible through self awareness and accountability.
But accountability is an outcome of self respect and integrity which in turn demands that we care more about who we are and what we stand for than what we want others to think of us.
That’s when it gets complicated.
It gets complicated when we focus on what we are likely to lose from others if we take a stand about what we believe to be important.
But that complication is not because the issue is complicated.
It’s because we complicate our lives by contaminating it with what we want others to see in us instead of being true to our values and principles regardless of what they think.
Dignity demands that we be open to correction because of the shame we feel when we are dishonest.
It demands that we protect the dignity of others because we must not be able to live with ourselves if we willingly and consciously look away when another is treated poorly.
What we would want from others in our time of need or vulnerability is what we must offer.
If not, we sow seeds of hypocrisy in our hearts which eventually contaminate the entirety of our being because dignity is lost and validation from others becomes the only peace we will know.
Your dignity is yours to claim.
Don’t outsource it in exchange for popularity or personal gain.
#selfworth #selfawareness #mentalhealth #mentalhealthawareness #lifecoaching #zaidismail #theegosystem #ownyourlife #narcissisticabuse #narcissist #rage #anger #angermanagement #gazagenocide #Palestine #freepalestine -
Check your entitlement
Expectations breed entitlement.
Like the entitlement of privileges that weren’t earned, or a free pass to abdicate responsibility because we’ve got it tough. Or entitlement to a homeland that belongs to someone else.
Conviction and sincerity are lost when we do things hoping for a good return.
We should do good because of who we are and what we choose to stand for. Not because we expect a return.
A return on investment is for business transactions, not for moral positions.
If you choose to fight for a cause, do it because it resonates with your values.
You honour your value system when you live by it, especially when it’s inconvenient or unpopular to do so.
When your values are used as a trading commodity with others, they’re not values, they’re tools for manipulation.
Accountability is a trigger for too many.
If you feel triggered when someone calls you to account, you have work to do on yourself.
Our triggers, frustrations, annoyances, anger, and emotional volatility is ours to own.
We cannot make others responsible for tiptoeing around it just because they ‘don’t know what we’ve been through’.
Their empathy or compassion towards us is a reflection of who they are, in the same way that ours is a reflection of who we are.
Outsourcing that or claiming that someone deserves not to receive it from us is an indulgence of our entitlement mentality, and not a defendable moral position.
Own your life. It always starts with you.
#hope #expectation #sincerity #selfworth #selfawareness #mentalhealth #mentalhealthawareness #lifecoaching #zaidismail #theegosystem #ownyourlife #narcissisticabuse #narcissist #rage #anger #angermanagement #istandwithpalestine #freepalestine #gazagenocide -
Honour yourself
Self-respect is more about who you want to be, rather than what you are willing to tolerate.
Claiming your space while diminishing the contribution of others in your life is not self-respect, it’s unintended ingratitude.
Self-respect is reflected in how you hold yourself accountable for the impact of your actions on others, and not just for your intentions towards them.
It’s about showing up beyond words or explanations, and ensuring that your actions reflect your intentions, especially when the feedback you receive confirms that how you treated others is not what you had intended.
But none of this is possible if you don’t have your own internal compass by which you hold yourself accountable.
That compass is the values that you claim to stand for.
When you lack that internal compass, you will be driven by how you feel in the presence of others.
When our feelings dictate our reasons, we hold others accountable for what we took from them, or from life, without stopping to consider that maybe we were wrong.
Maybe we understood things poorly, or interpreted things incorrectly.
When feelings drive rationality, our struggle becomes our war cry and everyone around us becomes responsible for honouring how we feel regardless of the merits of our reasons for why we feel that way.
That’s when we become oppressors while feeling oppressed.
Self-respect is born when we choose who we want to be regardless of what bad behaviour others may deserve because of how we think they treated us.
In that choice lies peace and the promise of contentment.
Anything less will leave you a slave to society, or an oppressor towards those who fear your outbursts.
Who do you want to be?
#selfworth #selfawareness #mentalhealth #mentalhealthawareness #lifecoaching #zaidismail #theegosystem #ownyourlife #narcissisticabuse #narcissist #relationshipgoals -
Stop judging. Be human.
⚠️ TRIGGER WARNING
This meme showed up on my timeline earlier and highlighted everything that is wrong with the way in which we treat each other.
There are a few terms that I generally disagree with (sometimes very strongly) if used to describe people.
These terms include broken, damaged, toxic, and basically anything that reduces a human to a single repulsive notion.
We lose our humanness when we see someone’s bad behaviour and assume that to be the totality of who they are.
No one is toxic. We may have destructive behaviours, or dysfunctional perspectives and so on. But that doesn’t make us toxic.
It makes us a human that is struggling to find our humanness in the absence of understanding or compassion from someone significant.
What’s more ‘toxic’? A single person that is allowed to define the tone of an entire family, or a family that lacks any conviction in their own self-worth to be defined by a single person?
Enjoin what is right and forbid what is wrong, not only when it’s fashionable or easy, but especially when it’s difficult.
If we give up our ability to create good with those around us, we lose our right to complain about them letting us down.
If someone is angry or bitter, they’re feeling unappreciated.
Reduce a person’s sincere efforts towards fulfilling their part in a relationship to nothing more than duty and minimum expectation, and you’ll very quickly inspire ‘toxic’ behaviour on their part.
Drop the labels and start seeing the human behind the behaviour.
There will come a time when you will need others to show you the same empathy and compassion.
Just because you’re struggling to strike a balance between enabling bad behaviour versus understanding it doesn’t mean that the bad behaviour is toxic. It just means that you are not equipped or are not the right person to influence the positive change that you’d like to see in them.
Stop judging. Be human.
#emotionalabuse #mentalhealth #mentalhealthawareness #mentalhealthrecovery #selfworth #selfawareness #lifecoaching #zaidismail #theegosystem #ownyourlife #narcissist #narcissisticabuse
