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It Is Ourselves We Learn About From Our Relationships
Checking out the personal development marketplace in my area is something I do reasonably regularly, it's kind of incumbent on me to do so, given the nature of my business.
On my last trawl something caught my attention and has been on my mind. It was a statement, about how our relationships define how we see ourselves and how we relate to the world, that sat uncomfortably with me. Not because there isn't some truth in it but because it runs the risk of being a little misleading and so, unhelpful.
It is true that our relationships can bring up all sorts of stuff around our self image, self esteem and a bunch of other self stuff but they don't really define those things, they almost certainly serve to confirm those things we already believed but that's quite different.
It's an important difference.
One of the core purposes of any of our relationships is exactly that, to bring to our attention our hidden (and sometimes not so hidden) beliefs about ourselves and the world we live in - including the people in that world. It isn't by chance that we strike up relationships with people, it certainly isn't by chance that we develop deeper relationships with some and, often, find ourselves walking down the same relationship street preparing to fall down the same relationship holes.
Nobody gets inside us and makes us believe anything, no one gets inside us and makes us feel anything. Others often supply the detonator, but we already had the explosives.
I know this is a sensitive area and some of these ideas people get really (and I mean really) upset about, but if you think about it, it's really very good news indeed and that's because it means WE can change these things, we don't have to be a victim (another word that can cause colourful reactions) to someone else.
Our relationships don't cause our low self esteem (for example) they trigger our existing, possibly denied, feelings of lack of self esteem. Our feelings of lack of self esteem are the result of what we believe about ourselves. Certainly we may have received a lot of support developing and cementing these beliefs and almost certainly this will have come from people who we think should have known better - but they didn't and we naturally took some of this on board.
But that isn't a good reason to perpetuate those beliefs, especially as, much though we'll try not to, we will impose our unhealed psychology on the next generation - like our parents did and theirs before them. Really, the buck has to stop somewhere and it may as well be with us - since our happiness is largely dependent on our healing of our own issues.
If we are unhappy about any aspect of any relationship, it is us that are being asked to learn and change.
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