(This blog is dedicated to all the men and women who have had ENOUGH, have decided that loving themselves is important and that being alone does not necessarily mean being lonely).
Here you go again. You have done it so many times that you know the drill, how the pain will play out and yet, you stay a willing participant in the chaos. Does that make you crazy? Unstable? Not at all. Simply traumatized and in need of healing. This blog is for you.
It may not be easy to spot initially. You feel your partner’s love for you, believe they desire you and what’s best for you and then, BOOM! This feels like Sally and Sue and Joseph and Bob all over again. Different people, different faces, same catastrophic outcome. You begin to feel devalued, unloved and not as relevant as you once believed you were to them. So you love harder, become more selfless and take the blame for why things are going so wrong. And even after all of that conceding and acquiescing to their needs and being reminded that you haven’t given enough, the play still ends the same way: they leave you for someone else or they stay and you know they aren’t really there for you.
Don’t take this as a dig but…ARE YOU REALLY THERE FOR YOU, EITHER?
It’s terribly easy to talk about what your partner didn’t give to you but what do you give to you? These same relationships with different names and faces that take, take and take some more. And there you are, willing to continue giving to them but never asking yourself what YOU need from YOU. What YOU need is to be safe. You need to be loved. You need to be seen as a person worth celebrating and pursued with kindness, adoration and affection. Those needs are like water and air. And if you’ve been oxygen deprived for years, a couple of months or even a couple of days feeding everyone but you, take note! We can only live for so long without the necessity of air.
What are you afraid of? Being alone, miserable, not going out socially and adopting fifty cats to have company? (Cats are pretty self-sufficient so they may not want to canoodle with you all day!) Try telling yourself instead that being alone to heal and to learn why you have this pattern doesn’t mean you will be lonely. In fact, you can count on having so much time learning how to love you that alone won’t even fit into your schedule! When you take the step to “do it afraid,” spending time getting to know and be the person that demands love and respect for yourself, filling your time does change. It changes to healthy people because you will become healthy! It changes to things that are fulfilling to you because you are more fulfilled emotionally on your own. And, of course, it changes to you receiving love because you have first given it to yourself.
Take a moment to examine what you SAY you want in your life. And then challenge yourself to take an honest inventory of whether or not you are actually LIVING what you say and make adjustments. Get support from people who truly love you or therapy to live the life you deserve to live. And that is one where YOU ARE LOVED BY YOU!
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