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Defending myself into misery
Defensiveness is driven by a belief that you’re under attack. Hence the need to defend ourselves when someone tries to correct us. The defensive response on our part confirms that we assume their intention to be other than genuine concern for what we’re experiencing. We also assume that we must be right to feel a […]
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Do you remember you?
Sometimes, we lose ourselves to the hopelessness of others. Sometimes, we lose ourselves to the failed expectations of life. And sometimes, we lose ourselves because we thought it was our failings that earned us pain, while oblivious to the fact that it was in fact our success that threatened the ones we loved. In these, […]
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Where is your humanity?
Taking pride in the colour of your skin or ethnicity distracts you from your humanity. Our humanness, our gentleness, our inclination towards kindness – these are all part of our natural state. We lose it when our need to be associated with significance or superiority distracts us from this, and replaces it with the fear […]
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That war within
Sometimes that village is a family, sometimes it’s a group, and sometimes it’s just one person who represents everything that the village stands for. That child grows into the raging adult who destroys every wholesome thing, because they feel like no one deserves peace if they were denied love and acceptance. When you treat the […]
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Raging for love
Nothing destroys more than ingratitude, and ingratitude for the self is expressed through self-loathing. But self-loathing is disguised in many ways, the most common of which is anger. Anger is a defence mechanism that distracts attention away from what we feel inadequate about. It demands that we be taken seriously when we have no reason […]
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Reclaim your worth
Peace is most ravaged when we convince ourselves that we were treated badly by others, or by someone we trusted, because we weren’t good enough for them. A betrayal of trust, no matter how noble the person, reflects cowardice on their part. We only betray the trust that others place in us when we feel […]
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Escaping addiction
It’s not drugs that steal our children from us. Like us, they also need to feel significant. Taking drugs is not just a bad habit. It’s a means to escape what we don’t want to deal with in the world around us. Is it a bad decision? Absolutely. Because escaping something never resolves it, it […]
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Cyclical abuse
At first, we remain in a bad relationship because we truly believe in the sincerity of the claims of our partner to want to improve, or to overcome what they’re struggling with. After some time, if we’re not careful, our inability to get them to follow through will convince us that we’re not a good […]
