Category: relationships

  • Self-indulgent self-loathing

    Self-indulgent self-loathing

    Self-indulgence leads to self-loathing because there are too many who think that contentment lies in putting yourself first.

    Putting yourself first is easy.

    Look around and see how many self-indulgent people you have in your life, and then consider how it is that they may really just be trying to take care of themselves because they don’t feel cared for.

    And then consider how many around them feel the exact same way because they’re invisible to the one who is self-indulgent, while finding that to be reason to be self-indulgent too.

    That’s how the crazy cycle of loneliness and isolation of spirit is maintained.

    The lower your self-esteem, the more you try to raise visibility for your struggle.

    ‘You don’t know how hard it is…’

    ‘If only you experienced what I experienced…’

    ‘Nobody understands…’

    ‘Nobody cares…’

    ‘No one gave me a start in life…’

    Whether that is true is irrelevant to what you need to do.

    When you need your struggle to be heard, to be seen, to be appreciated, or to be celebrated before you move on from it, you hold yourself back while looking for validation.

    Only, you don’t think it’s validation. You think it’s honouring yourself.

    Your struggle is for your growth so that you can contribute what you didn’t receive.

    That’s how we improve the world and the quality of lives of those we care for, because that’s what feeds our soul.

    The more you indulge yourself before others, the more you’ll chase fulfilment in a never ending spiral while blaming everyone for not caring, or for using you.

    If you only offer material benefit, how is anyone supposed to take emotional comfort from you?

    Own your life, because if you’re not owning it, you’re probably messing up someone else’s without meaning to.

  • You will, or else…

    You will, or else…

    If it is true that the path to hell is paved with good intentions, then it confirms that good intentions are not enough to create positive outcomes.

    If we raise children with the fear of negative consequences, they’ll never truly connect with the benefit of doing what’s right.

    When that fear barrier is broken, and it will be broken at some point, we lose our children to influences and social structures that offer them inclusion and acceptance, rather than fear and punishment.

    With ease of access to alternate value systems and cultural norms, fear and a demand for compliance is no longer sufficient to influence children towards doing good or being good.

    Methods of escape in the form of substance abuse, pornography, demeaning and abusive social media trends, and more are accessible by toddlers, let alone teens or adults.

    The only sustainable approach towards combating such harmful influences is not through the fear of hell fire, or the threat of punishment,it’s through the establishment of a healthy self-esteem.

    A healthy self-esteem is built on how emotionally available their parents are.

    But parents can’t give what they don’t have.

    That is, if the parent doesn’t have a healthy self-esteem, they will rely on compliance and obedience to measure their worth with their children, failing which they will resort to being more controlling and intolerant towards bad behaviour.

    Given the norms of intolerance and compliance that set the tone for many of today’s adults, connecting meaningfully with our children has become a struggle that many are not even aware of as we interpret the behaviour of the youth as willful disobedience, rather than as a desperation to feel significant.

    If we can’t connect the youth with the value of the value system that we want to instill in them, they will connect with value systems that stroke their need for inclusion and understanding.

  • Do you truly respect yourself?

    Do you truly respect yourself?

    One of the most important questions you could ever ask yourself in any situation is, ‘Who do you want to be?’

    Life is quickly defined or tainted by who we think others deserve us to be.

    We start out believing, often with good reason, that we need to be a certain way so that we don’t enable or encourage others to treat us badly, or to take us for granted.

    That’s when we lose ourselves to the assumptions of what we think others think of us, and along with it we lose our self-respect.

    Self-respect must be measured in the same way as what we use to determine if we are respected by others.

    If someone treats us in a way that lacks consideration for who we are, if they break their promises to us, if they lie or avoid accountability for what they do to us, or how they affect us, we feel disrespected by them.

    Why then do we not feel as if we’re disrespecting ourselves when we treat ourselves in similar or worse ways?

    It’s easy to blame others for our reaction of for not following through on commitments that we make to ourselves.

    But we need to realise that when we do that, we’re effectively giving up who we are for how we need them to treat us.

    That’s what happens when we assume that how others treat us is a reflection of who we are, rather than it being a reflection of what they’re dealing with within themselves.

    That’s how life gets complicated, and withholding who we are begins to appear as a needed defence against being treated badly.

    Before you go demanding respect from others, consider what it means for your self-respect if you believe that demanding respect is an effective way to be respected.

    When you demand respect, you only receive good manners or compliance. Not respect.

    Because the one who is disrespectful is only giving what they have.

    Have you got enough self-respect to treat others with respect regardless of whether they deserve it, or have you traded your self-respect for anger and self-loathing without realising it?

  • Your rage, your loss

    Your rage, your loss

    If left unchecked, rage eventually clouds our judgement as we seek vengeance from anyone who reminds us of those who treated us badly in the past.

    When you find a reason to rage at every assumed threat, peace becomes elusive and bitterness takes over.

    Feeling enraged may be human, but acting on that rage is a choice.

    Sometimes we get so caught up in our anger at the world that we lose sight of the fact that our anger feeds the very same cycles that we’ve grown to despise.

    No one makes you angry.

    Anger is your choice of response to someone else’s behaviour because of what they mean to you, or because of what their actions trigger within you, or both.

    And that’s because of what you want to mean to them, but are failing at achieving it.

    So your anger is your demand for significance when who you are is insufficient to achieve that significance.

    Your anger and your triggers are your responsibility.

    Making the world responsible for your emotional response to life gives everyone the power to control your behaviour.

    If you can influence a positive change in how someone treats you, do it.

    If not, walk away.

    Insisting on rage after you’ve realised that you are unable to influence positive change is an indulgence of your ego and not a righteous protest.

    Choose carefully who you want to be when someone treats you badly, or else you’ll lose yourself to become just like those whom you despise for treating you badly because your rage will cause you to become a source of oppression against those who have nothing to do with your feelings of inadequacy.

    Don’t get angry.

    It’s not worth it.

  • Are you accountable to you?

    Are you accountable to you?

    You know that feeling that you get when you see someone say or do something and you just know they’re talking nonsense?

    That’s because they lack authenticity.

    But when you get that feeling and they actually do follow through with what they say and do, and they mean it, then you lack authenticity because you were projecting your insecurities on them.

    Sounds harsh?

    If it does, you’re approaching life from a position of judgement, rather than growth.

    No one does that deliberately.

    NO ONE. NOT EVEN YOU.

    So when you find yourself or others living with a disconnect between who they are and what they say, understand that they’re compensating for an insecurity that they may not be aware of.

    And again, the same applies to ourselves when our behaviour is inconsistent with our values.

    Blaming others for giving you reason to behave badly further erodes your authenticity, no matter how principled you may be in every other sphere of your life.

    The reality is, we’re responsible for the choices we make, whether it relates to how we’re being treated, or how we’re responding to the behaviour of others.

    If life is about wanting to be better than who we were yesterday, each time we get something wrong, we’ll be inspired to try again until we get it right.

    If not, we’ll need distractions like substance abuse, or other unhealthy addictive behaviours including mind altering medications.

    Alcohol, drugs, and other mind altering substances are not just innocent pastimes.

    They’re a need to escape what you’re not willing to embrace because you’re judging yourself based on how someone else treated you.

    Not necessarily the person you’re with.

    The price that you pay, and the price that innocent people pay as a result of your need to cope or escape, is not worth it.

    Step up. Face your demons. And if needed, get help.

    The evidence is clearly against any excuses that you might make.

    Your life doesn’t have to be an escape from your past.

    It can be amazing because of it.

    It always starts with you.

  • Who’s broken?

    Who’s broken?

    There are no broken humans.

    Nor are there perfect ones.

    As we contemplate whether our cup is full or empty, we lose sight of whether we’re in a position to receive what is being offered, or if others are able to receive what we’re offering.

    One of the biggest contributors towards misery and struggle is that we try to solve the wrong problems.

    When we focus on how we feel about things, we lose sight of why we feel that way.

    The same applies to how we feel about people.

    When we honour those emotions without understanding where they truly stem from, we grow passionate about addressing those symptoms by claiming our rights, or demanding space, and so on.

    That’s how we go about trying to solve the wrong problem.

    The problem with that is that when we’re distracted by the symptoms of a problem, we forget that the real problem continues to fester, growing more intense and toxic as we lose ourselves to it’s symptoms.

    Like looking for pleasurable distractions in an illicit relationship because we feel neglected by the partner that we have.

    Or extending ourselves to help others while believing that our own family doesn’t deserve our efforts because they take us for granted.

    We make such poor decisions when we’re distracted from why it is that others have such an impact on how we feel about ourselves.

    Each act of ours that goes against our claimed values reveals a struggle within that is provoked by what we’re facing in life.

    That’s when we need to look within, rather than blame others for our behaviour.

    If not, we become the proverbial broken cup that can never be filled, because life will always feel like a struggle instead a pursuit of passion.

    Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.

  • Judging self into misery

    Judging self into misery

    When we internalise our struggle to the point of believing it to be so unique that it cannot possibly be grasped by anyone else, we give it a power of magnitude beyond the experience itself.

    Misery intensifies the more we dwell on it.

    When we live inside our heads, we convince ourselves that our struggle and our pain defines our courage because if only ‘they’ knew what we were dealing with while still showing up, they wouldn’t judge us the way that they do.

    We judge ourselves harshly long before we give the world an opportunity to judge us.

    We then take that self-judgement and treat it as a truth of what we think others think of us.

    Then we treat others based on that assumption that we made from the self-judgement while blaming them for judging us.

    Crazy, right?

    That’s what holding on to pain or misery does.

    It distorts our grasp on reality because we only find what we’re looking for, while we ignore or dismiss anything that conflicts with that.

    It’s not as confusing as it may sound.

    If you go to the grocery cupboard looking for a can of tuna, you’re not going to notice if you have enough rice left, because you weren’t looking for rice, you were looking for tuna.

    Same with life.

    What you focus on is what you’ll find, and that’s why you won’t see what others see if you’re busy judging yourself or waiting for justice, because they’re looking at your life very differently.

    That’s how we create self-fulfilling prophecies in relationships, or we create anxiety about what we need to deal with in life.

    Step back.

    Take a deep breath.

    Break the routine.

    And surround yourself with people or an environment that helps you to regain perspective beyond what is weighing you down.

    That’s how we reconnect with hope and with joy in life.

    It always starts with you.

  • Too good to be true

    Too good to be true

    I’m often asked why is it that someone with a solid self-worth can have their sense of self totally destroyed by a bad relationship.

    This is why.

    Despite our best intentions, placing someone on a pedestal is never a good idea.

    Not only will it blind us to their humanness, it will also distract us from our potential.

    Worse than this, it distorts our judgement of ourselves when they don’t respond or react the way we need them to.

    Firstly, when we elevate someone in that way, we forget that it’s based on our perception of who they are, and not because they claimed that spot on the pedestal that we built.

    Secondly, because of this misplaced belief in their excellence of character or accomplishment, the success or failure of our efforts to earn their praise or affection leaves us questioning our worth because of how much credibility we place on their reactions towards us.

    Remember, we placed them on that pedestal, so they probably have no idea why our expectations of them are so high, making it easier for them to fail us without them knowing why.

    When they falter, we see them as falling from grace because we assume that they always thought that they were too good for us, meanwhile they never saw themselves that way to begin with.

    Worse still, that unreasonable expectation that we place on them could easily provoke their insecurities, resulting in them deliberately resisting what we need from them.

    That sets in motion a cycle that destroys an otherwise good relationship when we blame them for not living up to the expectations that we imposed on them, while accusing them of setting such high expectations.

    Be mindful of what you take from others versus what they’re offering.

    Otherwise you’ll create self-fulfilling prophecies while blaming the world for your misery.