Sabotaging Relationships

“Trouble is part of your life, and if you don’t share it, you don’t give the person who loves you enough chance to love you enough.”
—Dinah Shore

Some of us have issues in our past that may cause us to unconsciously sabotage relationships. We may be afraid on some level to enter into new relationships and that fear can manifest in different ways. We might not even realize that’s what it is, but when we overly find fault with others and things start to change drastically in how we feel about another person, with no apparent reason, we need to look at what is happening.

If we grew up in a dysfunctional family, we most likely have carried many issues into our adult lives. Our issues are carried over into any relationship we have no matter how intimate or casual. Some of our behaviors, many we learned as survival techniques, simply aren’t healthy in adult relationships.

In order to have healthy, fulfilling relationships we may need to look at our “failed” relationships and see what part we played in each of the endings. We can do this in different ways by talking or writing about the issues we had with the other person. We may discover that we are doing things that we aren’t even aware of. It takes some time and effort, but an inventory of ourselves is always a good thing, as long as we see positive and negative and not just the negative.

It’s important to learn as much as we can about who we are and how we operate if we want to have intimate, lasting relationships with others. Being open to feedback from others is a good thing too.

Look within to find answers to relationship problems.

Protect Yourself from Harmful People

“Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. Ye shall know them by their fruits.”
—Jesus

There are people in this world, including those in recovery, who claim to know what’s best for us because they have “the answer” or some sort of formula or insight that nobody else has or at least that nobody has given to us yet.

Beware of these people. Oftentimes they are only seeking to make a buck or to stroke their own egos. Many, many times it’s happened with big churches where the pastor constantly asked for money and claims to have “heard the voice of God” that one should do such and such. Time tells all because these same preachers were found to be having illicit affairs, stealing money, hiring prostitutes, and other various “sins” that they preached against.

There are those in the fitness world who will tell you what is best for you and then go home and smoke a pack of cigarettes and drink a 12 pack every night. In addition there are some therapists who are sicker than the people they seek to help.

We can get input from others and we do need that. It’s certainly an important part of Twelve Step programs for those who attend meetings, but we need to be careful about who we listen to and how much we take from that.

If it feels wrong in your gut, heart, mind or in any way, it’s probably not right for you. If red flags fly when you are given advice from someone, seek advice elsewhere. If someone is trying to critique your every move see how they live and how much work they need to do on their own self before you trust them as your guru.

People can help, but they can harm too.

Surrender

“We must determine whether we really want freedom — whether we are willing to dare the perils of rebirth. For we never take a step forward without surrendering something that we may have held dear, without dying to that which has been.”
—Virginia Hanson

Surrender is a common term in any Twelve Step program. It is giving up our control or lack of control actually, over some person, place or thing that causes us problems. We give it over, surrender it, to our Higher Power.

Many times we are able to see and feel relief soon after we let go of our strong grasp on something and allow God to have it. We let go of false beliefs. We let go of control. We surrender.

Sometimes holding on to something so tight makes it like those toys that squeeze right out of your hand if you get a firm grip on them, but if you just hold them gently they remain still in your hand. When we are anxious and keep a firm grip on something we really squeeze the life out of it. If we are meant to have something we will have it, otherwise surrendering it will allow it to be what it’s intended to be.

If we’ve tried and tried to make something work it may be time to surrender our powerlessness of that person, place, or thing and do as Step Three of the Twelve Steps tells us to do: “Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understand Him.”

Surrender can actually get you what you want.

True Validation Lies Within

“People spend a lifetime searching for happiness; looking for peace. They chase idle dreams, addictions, religions, even other people, hoping to fill the emptiness that plagues them. The irony is the only place they ever needed to search was within.”
—Ramona L. Anderson

For those of us who suffer from self-esteem issues we often seek validation outside of ourselves. But there is a solution to that: we can validate ourselves without waiting on others to do it for us.

What we do is monitor our self talk. We treat ourselves as we treat those we love, with kindness, respect, dignity, compassion, and honesty. When we begin to have a consciousness about how we treat ourselves we begin to see where we may be failing. It takes practice to break old habits, and being unkind to our own selves is a bad old habit that will most likely take a lot of practice, trial and error, to overcome.

We accept the things about us that we cannot change and we change the things we can. But no matter where we are we can love all of us as we do those in our lives who we love. We begin to believe that we deserve the best life and love has to offer and we start to live in that mindset until it becomes reality.

We find that we validate ourselves and seek less and less support from those outside of us. We are stronger and more loving when we love who and what we are.

Try showing love to yourself as you show it to those you love deeply.

Time to Get Centered

“A mind at peace, a mind centered and not focused on harming others, is stronger than any physical force in the universe.”
—Wayne Dyer

When we feel out of sorts with life and those around us, it usually means we have been spending too much time running in the circles of modern life and it’s time to get centered.

Being centered means we know who we are and what we want. It is an inner peace that we have and we know it when we are there. We can return to that place when we do what we know works for us.

Some of us get it in prayer and meditation. Others find it during a long run or walk. Perhaps it can be found in recovery meetings or church services. Sitting on a mountaintop or hiking through the woods may be a good place to return to our center.

However we get there, we must remember to do it for it is what keeps us healthy and whole on an emotional and spiritual level. Additionally, poor emotional and spiritual health has effects on our physical health

We cannot give what we do not have so working from a scattered place will produce scattered results. When we get out of balance and off center we also become unfocused and expend a lot of energy uselessly since what we send out’s direction is uncertain. It’s in this place that those who are clean and sober relapse, people with anger issues lash out, or those who overspend blow money, to give a few examples.

We tend to spiral more and more from center until we crash in some way. If we can catch ourselves before the crash, we have the quickest success at getting centered again. It’s never too late to stop and get centered before hurting ourselves or others.

Being centered is necessary for healthy living.

Living in the Moment Brings Serenity

“Yesterday is gone; tomorrow is but a dream. Only today is truly ours for the taking.”
—Anonymous

Ah, living in the moment. It has to be one of the more difficult things to do. With our busy lives and burning the candle at both ends, we really do need to plan ahead a lot of the time to keep up with obligations.

If we can ever get to a place where we are able to slow down, we can get out of the tailspin and begin to live a more serene life; one where we live in the moment. It does take an effort to do, but we reap the rewards when we are successful.

As with many things we learn in recovery, it is progress not perfection that will take us to what we want and need. Living in the moment in a healthy way is something most of us have to learn because we may not have lived that way since we were children. We may even need to think about a child and watch a child live in the moment to see how it is done.

The innocence of children who are in healthy families allows them to not worry about things in the past or future. Some of us may have skipped that by living in dysfunctional families where we did worry about what would happen next and plan how we would handle that. We probably also lived for the moment when we were grown and out of the house only to find that was not a solution just the next phase of our life and growth.

We ought to try our best to live in the moment and not worry about what we did yesterday or how we will handle tomorrow. There is serenity in that place.

Live in the moment; it’s where real living is.

Hope Carries Us Through

“Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul and sings the tune without the words and never stops at all.”
—Emily Dickenson

When we get down on life, love, happiness, having a little hope will always help us look forward to what’s to come next in our life. We don’t have to live in the future and out of the moment to have hope.

Hope is intangible. It’s built on knowing that our Higher Power is there for us and will carry us through when we don’t always feel like going on. Hope is faith.

We only need to look back on our lives to yesterday, last week, last year, or maybe a few years ago to a time when we may have lost hope and something happened, something unexpected and good, and we once again were on our feet. We didn’t have hope, but we learned that things can change in an instant. God can change things for the better; sometimes when we least expect it. Therein lies hope.

Hope in times when we may have anything but hope will carry us through.

Don’t Lose Who You Are

“Now I think everyone should ask, ‘Am I going to be able to be the person I want to be in this relationship?’”
—Ali MacGraw

Any time we enter into a relationship with another person, especially one with the potential to be a life partner, we compromise. What we want to be aware of is if we are compromising who we are and what we want in order to please the other person.

Compromising on which restaurant to go to, whether to stay in or go out, which movie to go to, or what to watch on television is not major stuff. But losing ourselves in the relationship by going against what we are to be with the other person is not healthy for us, them or the relationship.

It’s not often easy to set boundaries early in a relationship when we want to spend lots of time with the other person. We want to please them, but those of us in recovery also are intent on being who we are now and we don’t compromise that for anyone.

If someone comes into our life we can know that our Higher Power has a purpose for us meeting, but the reason may not be what we think it is. We can’t put any parameters on that and think just because certain things may occur that we know the reason for that crossing of paths at the moment.

God, with time, will show us what that person’s place in our life is. It may very well be what we expected or it can be the opposite. We can only stay true to who we are and let the rest happen.

Staying true to you is one of the most important things in a relationship.

Reactions Come from Past Experiences

“Most of your reactions are echoes from the past. You do not really live in the present.”
—Gaelic Proverb

Everything we go through in life is a lesson whether we realize it at the time or not. How we respond today is built on many yesterdays. We need to keep that in mind when we react to something someone else does and wonder why it affects us so much.

It is often something in our past or even childhood that brings up a response as adults. It can be amusing to figure out why when a person does something we are bothered by it. I can attribute some of my strange reactions to my family of origin, and other things to events and relationships that occurred after I moved out of my family home. A lot of them I have yet to figure out.

What’s important is to recognize when we are overly affected by something another person does that really has no impact on what we do. If someone eats too fast and we start to worry they will take our food, that’s most likely an unreasonable reaction and we might want to think about it, find its origin and maybe the next time we won’t be affected so much.

Sometimes other people don’t talk the way we think they should, or wear the clothes we would wear, or some other outward thing. It’s really not our concern what other people do, but a lot of our reaction is tied to something that has happened to us. Most likely we’ll continue to be bothered by these behaviors until we find the root of why they bother us.

Today’s responses are built on many yesterdays.

People Pleasing

“I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.”
—Bill Cosby

None of us will ever successfully please everybody. In fact, we may not please anybody most of the time. We all have our own agendas, responsibilities, and issues. Since we cannot read minds, we can never know exactly what someone else expects from us so therefore we’re going on our own ideas anyway.

We might as well be true to who we are and do what we know is the best and right thing for us and hope that we at least please ourselves. If we succeed in honestly doing the right things in our hearts and minds, most likely others will be pleased too.

Where the problem lies is trying to please people when they have conflicting ideas about what we need to do. Or they have different values from one another so that if we’re involved with both, it’s impossible to please them. Even taking the middle ground will not please either of the two.

Not trying to people please may seem lonely sometimes because we may end up not spending as much time with folks who want us to do for them. But we can use that time to learn what pleases us about ourselves and what we want out of life.

When our hearts are in the right place we will please others.