Category: relationships

  • Pitying yourself into oblivion

    Pitying yourself into oblivion

    Self-pity is an indulgence in futility that results from picking at our wounds long after the betrayal from another has passed.

    Waiting for someone to care about us before we care for ourselves is not about needing them to care as much as it is about us wanting them to see how important they are to us.

    If they respond positively, it boosts our self-worth because someone we care about cares about us.

    While that may seem perfectly reasonable, it still means that we only care for ourselves if we feel cared for.

    That’s not self-worth, nor is it love. That’s ingratitude.

    Trading with emotions to test a significant other’s commitment to us is passive aggressive guilt-tripping and not love or affection.

    It’s a transaction of benefit because we’ve lost sight of the value of who we are regardless of what others think of us.

    Of course, the critical dependency in this is that our belief in who we are is based on substance and not wishful thinking, or self-aggrandisement.

    Self-pity serves as a distraction from the life that we want, because it demands that we place our life on hold waiting for someone else to care.

    That’s when ingratitude digs deeper into our soul and the self-pity soon becomes self-loathing because we failed the test that we administered on another.

    Doesn’t make sense, does it?

    Neither does self-pity.

    Don’t wait for someone to value you before you value yourself.

    Own Your Life.

  • Bitter sweet arrogance

    Bitter sweet arrogance

    Arrogance is a result of insecurity that is presented as unwarranted confidence.

    While it’s easier to focus on the harshness that results from such behaviour, it’s more important to remember that only an insecure person will have a need to demand significance through arrogant behaviour.

    Arrogance serves as a distraction from our harsh self-judgement.

    If someone behaves arrogantly towards us, it feels like a personal attack because it undermines our significance or the respect and consideration that we believe we deserve.

    Whether we deserve to be treated better than that or not is not the critical issue.

    The fact that we need someone to treat us better than that is what defines where we’re at about how we value ourselves.

    That’s where self-worth or self-loathing on our part either feeds that cycle of arrogance, or it breaks it.

    Think of it this way.

    If an arrogant person is behaving that way because they’re already feeling inadequate, and you demand that they treat you better than that, you’re simply reinforcing their reasons to believe that they’re inadequate.

    You don’t resolve that by pointing out what you deserve from them.

    You solve that by introspecting on why their struggle with themselves has such an impact on you.

    Owning your self-worth is the beginning of finding peace in life.

    But ensure that your self-worth is based on substance, and not just wishful thinking or baseless affirmations.

    If there isn’t substance to your belief in yourself, your self-worth will result in you being selfish and destroying what could be a good relationship.

    It always starts with you.

  • Enabling abuse

    Enabling abuse

    We often believe in others the way we wish they would believe in us.

    Sometimes, when we give up hope in someone believing in us, we find it that much more difficult to believe in others.

    It’s these same emotional commitments that drive us toward making excuses for bad behaviour from someone close to us.

    As with everything in life, without moderation, making such excuses becomes harmful.

    Therefore, when we keep making excuses or creating space for someone who consistently behaves badly despite having been made aware of the harm of their ways, we enable an abusive relationship.

    Many feel guilty for withholding affection or support under such circumstances from fear of transacting or ‘being like them’.

    However, the moment we make it about how we feel or how we want to be seen, we lose sight of the harm that we’re enabling.

    Just because we disagree with someone’s behaviour doesn’t mean that we hate or condemn them.

    In fact, if we truly love or care about someone, we will not enable them to behave badly because we wouldn’t want someone we love to cause harm to others or to ourselves.

    The moment you condone bad behaviour beyond accepting the humanness of one who makes a mistake, you’re not doing it for them anymore, you’re doing it to protect your ego.

    Too many complain about being caught up in an abusive relationship but refuse to take accountability for their contribution towards enabling the abusive cycles in which they’re trapped.

    You have to own your life before you can improve it.

    It always starts with you.

  • Is it worth the effort?

    Is it worth the effort?

    Much of life is wasted exhausting yourself in claiming your rights from others.

    Whether you have a right to be treated a certain way or not is not going to influence the one who chooses to ignore your rights.

    They believe they have good reason to deny you such rights, in the same way that you may have withheld your efforts in fulfilling your responsibilities towards others when life was beating you down.

    Either way, it’s not right or wrong to focus on what rights you have over others, it’s a matter of realising at what cost you go about trying to claim your rights.

    If you’re not aware of that cost to your sanity and your peace, you’ll lose yourself to that struggle and become bitter, while not noticing that the struggle with one distracted you from fulfilling the rights that another has over you.

    That’s how we become part of the problem when we grow fixated on what we deserve rather than who we want to be, or what we stand for.

    If you’ve exhausted all options to communicate to another why their behaviour towards you is hurtful or unkind and they persist, adjust your expectations of them or else you’ll lose yourself to the struggle of trying to convince them of your significance.

    Feeling like you deserve something is entitlement, and entitlement is what feels like betrayal when it’s not fulfilled.

    The only way to break that cycle is to reclaim yourself by connecting with what you’re willing to accept and not what you demand, because demands and deserving things is dependent on others agreeing with you.

    When they don’t, it will break you without you knowing it, and you’ll convince yourself that you’re a martyr for a noble cause.

    Is it worth it?

  • Afraid to hope

    Afraid to hope

    If fear is what shapes your view of what lies ahead, you’re focused on everything that could go wrong because of what went wrong before.

    That may seem like a natural response to protect ourselves from being hurt or betrayed again, but it also means that we’re focusing on everything that appears as a risk.

    The problem with that is that we only find what we’re looking for.

    If we’re looking for risks, we’ll find it. But that means that we’ll miss all the opportunities to get things right, or to create a better outcome than before.

    While there may be practical reasons to protect ourselves from physical threats, it’s very different when we protect ourselves from perceived emotional threats.

    It’s like putting a bird in a cage to protect it from getting killed by a predator.

    You may protect it from that possible fate, but you also prevent it from learning how to fly away from such dangers.

    That bird then becomes dependent on you for its protection.

    The same is true about emotional threats.

    Only, with emotional threats, we become dependent on holding onto that past hurt or betrayal, or failure, to ensure that we remain alert to any circumstances in which the possibility exists of repeating such an experience.

    When you release yourself from that emotional cage that trapped you, remember to give yourself enough time to learn to fly before you go in search for new opportunities to create the life that you want.

    If you don’t, you’ll look to the future with fear, and convince yourself that hope failed you each time.

    It wasn’t hope that failed, it was a lack of awareness of what we were getting ourselves into.

    Solve the right problem. Don’t give up hope, invest in yourself so that you’re equipped to create the life that you want.

    It always starts with you.



  • You are responsible for your abusive ways

    You are responsible for your abusive ways

    This is true about abusive men and women. Not just men.

    “Stop complaining and just take it like a man!”

    “Why can’t you just be a man?”

    “He’s so useless. I wish my husband was like yours!”

    “it’s not as bad as you’re making it out to be”

    “You deserved it.”

    “If it was another man, you’d be dead by now!”

    “Why do you always make me angry?”

    And so the horrid rhetoric goes as it is spewed from those raging at the weak because they don’t have the courage to face the ones who treated them badly.

    Those who abuse others will draw attention to their victim’s supposed weakness to pacify their own conscience about their despicable behaviour.

    When we can’t face the reasons for our self-loathing, we find a soft target on which to project our rage.

    Believing you’re inadequate feels like weakness, but feeling vulnerable because of that weakness is what stirs the rage within.

    And all that happens because you’re judging yourself based on how someone important may have mistreated you.

    Most often, it’s a parent that didn’t give you a chance to be heard, or seen. And that parent is usually the father, or the absence of one.

    Your parents gave you what they had, not what you deserved.

    Nonetheless, how we judge ourselves becomes our responsibility once we’ve reached the age of self-awareness.

    Any blame from that point on only harms us and those who deserve more from us. It does nothing to change the reality of the past that left us questioning our worth.

    When we give up accountability for how we feel about ourselves, we make others responsible for how they supposedly make us feel, and then use that to justify our bad behaviour towards them.

    That’s why some men can’t deal with successful women, and why some women can’t respect gentle men.

    Your feelings of inadequacy are never enough reason to abuse those who had nothing to do with how your self-worth was formed.

    The only person responsible for how you feel about yourself is YOU.

    Own that, and you’ll own your life!

  • Let’s exchange needs

    Let’s exchange needs

    Men complain about lack of intimacy and women complain about emotional unavailability.

    Sometimes, the roles are reversed, but generally, these are the two most common issues that couples face in a relationship.

    Problem is, neither is the problem that needs to be solved.

    We’re naturally more emotionally available in spaces where we feel seen or appreciated.

    Having no reason to doubt our significance to our significant other is all the reason we need to drop our guard.

    As for intimacy? We’ve largely forgotten what that even looks like.

    Similar to love, we’ve forgotten how to be intimate.

    Intimacy is not sexual acts or raunchy nights.

    Intimacy is about sharing something much deeper than that.

    But we’ve turned these elements of a relationship into commodities and rights.

    It’s therefore unsurprising to find that most couples, even the ones without major relationship problems, are essentially complacent or unfulfilled about their relationship, rather than inspired to live life passionately because of it.

    If you find yourself discussing your rights and your needs with your partner, understand that you’re distracted from why such a discussion is needed at all.

    This may sound naively idealistic, but perhaps our lack of idealism is what has killed the romance in our lives.

    Perhaps it’s our focus on occasions, and functions, and events, and allocated dates to acknowledge or celebrate each other that denies us the spontaneity needed to feel alive.

    Perhaps that’s why we’ve become so transactional in how we live, how we love, and how we seek fulfilment.

    It’s time to question whether you’ve been trying to solve the right problems in your life or have you simply been changing the dressing on a festering wound.

  • Who’s responsible for your joy?

    Who’s responsible for your joy?

    Do you enjoy being held responsible for how someone else feels about themselves?

    When they feel good and attribute that to us, we feel good.

    But does it feel good when they blame us for their self-loathing, or their misery?

    People who willingly accept responsibility for how you feel about yourself prevent you from owning your self-worth.

    As long as you have reason to blame someone else about how you feel about yourself, you have no reason to grow beyond that state that you’re in.

    You’ll place your life on hold, and you’ll grow bitter waiting for them to prove to you that you’re worth it, or that your efforts towards them means something to them.

    It’s not wrong to look for that gratitude, or even reciprocation, from those you hold dear or invest your time and effort into uplifting.

    However, when they don’t return the favour, or even acknowledge your contribution and support, how you feel about yourself remains how you feel about yourself!

    It’s when our efforts towards others go unnoticed or unappreciated that our self-worth counts the most.

    Disappointment, or even betrayal, is never good reason for self-deprecation.

    Self-deprecation, or putting yourself down because of how others treat you, reflects your ingratitude for who you are.

    When you do that, you become part of the very way of life that left you feeling like you’re not worth it.

    Worse still, when we lose ourselves to what others think of us, we also lose sight of those who may look up to us, or who have rights over us.

    That’s how self-loathing feeds the very cycle that weighs us down.

    If you still see yourself through everyone else’s eyes, peace will forever be elusive, and life well forever feel burdened.

    How you feel about yourself is your responsibility, no matter who steps in to make you feel better about yourself.

    The question is, is your opinion of yourself more informed than the opinions that others have of you?

    It always starts with you.