Tag: relationshipgoals

  • 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.

  • Conveniently judgemental

    Conveniently judgemental

    Judgement is only ever supposed to be the first step in correcting what’s wrong.

    Sadly, it’s most often the only step that we take when faced with unbecoming behaviour from others.

    Worse still, judgement is easy to dish out about issues and incidents that are none of our business because having an opinion on something topical is the easiest way to feel relevant.

    Judgement is easy.

    All it requires is the ability to compare what we see to a rule or a law that we believe is revered by others.

    Such comparison requires zero understanding behind the behaviour, nor does it demand any action on our part to improve the situation.

    All it requires is an opinion without empathy or compassion.

    When passing judgement establishes our relevance in social circles, we grow emboldened by the attention we receive from those who agree with us, eventually assuming ourselves to be a moral authority that can speak on behalf of the Almighty.

    That’s when we find justification to pass judgement about the faith and beliefs of others, and we become argumentative about religion and philosophy, and the personal matters of those we have no intention of assisting.

    Passing judgement without understanding or accountability for the impact of such judgement is an indulgence of the ego and serves no good whatsoever.

    Unless you are duly appointed to judge between two parties, restrain yourself from having an opinion on every person or issue that crosses your timeline.

    Peace is found in leaving alone that which does not concern us.

    And harm is caused by involving ourselves insincerely in that which does not concern us.

    Check yourself before you feel a need to share your opinion on someone else’s life.

    Or else you may be tested with that which you judge others about.

  • Your misery is your downfall

    Your misery is your downfall

    We rarely share with the world the conversation that we have with ourselves in our head.

    Our internal conversations are only shared when we’ve exhausted all avenues in trying to understand why someone important to us could have had reason to treat us so badly.

    The harsh tones and unwarranted criticism that we try to convince ourselves is true about who we are or what we’re worth is how we project on ourselves what we think a significant other thinks of us.

    In other words, we put ourselves in their place and then assume why we would treat someone that way if we were them.

    What we forget is that we’re not them, and they’re not us.

    And the same way that our insecurities about ourselves are closely guarded secrets, the same is true for everyone else no matter how amazing we think they are.

    Self-loathing is born when we assume that how others show up for us is a reflection of how they feel about us, when the reality is that they treated us the way that they did because of who they are and what they were grappling with in their own minds.

    The moment we lose ourselves to self-loathing, we focus on demands for our rights to be fulfilled despite not fulfilling the rights of others.

    We focus on playing on the sympathies of others so that they don’t think less of us when we fall short in showing up for them.

    The war within results in the harsh treatment, or even abuse, of those around us.

    While we’re feeling justified in our rage or complacency because of the self-loathing that has taken over our perspective of who we are and what we’re worthy of, we treat others the way we were once treated, with insensitivity and inconsideration.

    That’s how we pay forward the misery that we received, while complaining about the miserable state of life.

    We always want to believe that we’re justified in feeling miserable about life while failing to see that we’re taking for granted the very life that can lift us out of our misery.

    Ingratitude for who we are is the root of our self-destruction.

    It always starts with you.

  • Are you sure you have an attitude of gratitude?

    Are you sure you have an attitude of gratitude?

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    Are you sure you have an attitude of gratitude?

    With all the ‘attitude of gratitude’ narratives, I thought it might be helpful to identify when we’re not being as grateful as we think we are.

    Gratitude for the self is reflected in how you value who you are without a need to diminish the value of others.

    Sometimes, we convince ourselves that we need to take care of ourselves at the expense of the rights that others have over us, while not realising that this mindset is one of a victim who feels oppressed.

    Defensiveness and imbalance in how we deal with life is therefore a common outcome when we lack gratitude for who we are.

    Gratitude is not reflected in putting yourself first.

    Again, that’s a victim mindset.

    Gratitude for the self is reflected in how you feel about yourself when others are grappling with their self-worth while blaming you for it.

    As mentioned before, gratitude is what we do with what we appreciate, that’s why the truth of your gratitude for yourself is reflected in how you exercise your abilities to create value in your life and the lives of those around you, despite not being acknowledged or appreciated for it.

    So, if you connected with any of the 9 points in the above post, you have some introspection due.

    You cannot give what you don’t have.

    If you’re lacking in gratitude for yourself, you’re likely teaching your kids and others how to be selfish, or how to be martyrs, but it’s unlikely that you’re teaching them how to be grateful for who they are.

    It always starts with you.