While we are looking for someone else to complete us, we are going to be in a perpetual state of self-abandonment.
What do I mean?
Trying to win love and approval from someone is setting yourself up for an emotional roller coaster ride where no-one will ever win. When you focus on trying to find someone to love you or complete you, it means you will never be able to fully be yourself. You will be living in a constant state of doubt wondering what you can do next to keep their approval/love. This type of behaviour only leads to more self – loathing, and judgement.
And if after you’ve exhausted yourself trying to please the other person, they leave you, you will likely spiral into more self doubt wondering what you could have done to make it better or different and so the pattern continues in the next relationship but now your self worth and value as a human being is on the line. So if the next person, the significant other you want to give your heart to, doesn’t love you or provide you with constant validation for all the things you are dong to win their affection, you question yourself, judge yourself, doubt yourself and ultimately your courage and confidence pay the price. The pattern is, as I said an emotional rollercoaster with the odd highs and lows but in the end everyone gets sick of it. So how do you get off this type of emotional rollercoaster pattern?
One of the pathways I teach in my course Being Relationship Ready is to start with some foundations. When a client comes into the program that is so disconnected from self, is unsure how to break the patterns and finds themselves defaulting to what is familiar, not necessarily healthy. We start with learning to love who we are, because we have an intrinsic value for just being human, which isn’t based on what we do. We learn that it’s ok to be vulnerable, and it’s ok to be alone. You will unpack what associations and meanings you have made with being loved.
Everything we believe and know of the world around us was first learnt when we were children. Some learnings develop and change but often the associations we made with love, were deeply ingrained in to us, based on how we experienced love from our parents, or immediate care givers. Many of us come from backgrounds where our parents either fought a lot or we grew up with an absent parent, or an emotionally absent parent. Perhaps there was divorce, separation or even abuse, substance abuse alcohol, drugs, financial…
Giving well intentioned praise to children
So we might not have experienced a healthy love with mutual respect, admiration and trust. We experienced chaos or dysfunction instead. It may even have been the simple act of being rewarded when we did something well, like getting an A+ on a school report and being showered with attention to not even getting a hug when we got a B-.
We can learn to associate; that when I do something good, when I do something that someone likes – I’ll be loved and when I don’t do so well, I won’t get loved. This is how we create a conditional self esteem, where our value is based on what we do and how well that is received by someone else.
When we want to be loved, when we chase love from someone, when we try to ‘win’ someone over in order to feel loved, appreciated admired – what ever it is, we are effectively saying I can’t give that to myself, I can’t love myself. I have abandoned loving myself so that I can love you, which is effectively setting the other person up and yourself, for a whole headache of emotions. It is a relationship strategy that is destined to fail.
I was watching a TedX the other day by Peter Sage called “How to eliminate self doubt forever and the power of your unconscious mind – it is well worth a watch, so google it. but in that he said. “People will never rise above the opinion of themselves… think about that for a minute. And that opinion is largely formed in childhood before the age of 7 from the perception of where we think we did or didn’t get love, from the people we most wanted it from… in essence no one can love us more than we love ourselves”
So when you try and win the affections of another in order to feel loved, you are effectively saying you don’t love yourself. Eventually the relationship itself will work that out and if it doesn’t end as a result, you will likely be in a toxic or at best unhealthy relationship.
So be aware of your needs, what do you want and how can you give that to yourself first…? Sit with that and if it creates discomfort lets chat you don’t have to go through this by yourself, there is a way through.
