Open Heart

When we are born, we are only equipped with our emotions to navigate the world. We can only make decisions and choices based on how we feel. We are still working on developing a logical brain, which only comes into full force in our mid to late 20s. We don’t understand ulterior motives, manipulation, and negative behaviors. As a child, we operate from a place of pure emotion but deal with others who benefit from total capacity, using their hearts and minds.

This puts children at a disadvantage when dealing with people with access to their minds and emotions. As children, we end up being subjected to people not operating from an emotionally and mentally balanced place, and these imbalances become a challenge and burden for us. We navigate these imbalances by what feels good and doesn’t; we are constantly tap-dancing around these emotions. We are not equipped to understand and process our emotions yet (which requires your mind), so we learn imbalanced ways of behaving, enabling us to adapt or even survive our environment emotionally. These behavior patterns become part of who we are, serving a purpose for us in specific environments. These behavior patterns are a survival mechanism to mitigate feeling bad in our imbalanced environment. When we become adults and have more autonomy to choose our environments, we need to look back at the patterns of behavior and see if we can figure out who we are versus who we learned to become to adapt to an imbalanced environment. This can take a lot of time and inner reflection because you could have taken on a persona for years, maybe most of your life, that doesn’t reflect who you are. You may not know the difference between the “learned you” and the authentic you.

For example, if you were raised in a household with a parent/parents who were overly critical without some praise to balance it out, this created an extreme environment for you. This environment creates some extreme “learned” behaviors from you in response to feeling better in this environment. Some of these behaviors may have been to strive for perfection to avoid criticism or become timid to avoid interaction to mitigate any negative feedback. Your parent’s imbalanced behaviors created a learned imbalanced response from you to balance the situation. Now you go through life thinking you are a perfectionist or timid. We claim these as our personality traits and accept this is who we are, not realizing we learned to be this way to adapt to our environment to feel as good as we can in it.

This wasn’t from any ill intent from our parents or the people around us. They were suffering from their own imbalances and had adopted their imbalanced behavior patterns as children/adults to survive their environment. This cycle continues until we become conscious and understand what is happening. We have to see something before we can fix it. You usually recognize this moment of consciousness when you observe yourself with others. There is a moment when you can observe the dynamic with another instead of just feeling it. This is where you use both your mind and emotions to experience the dynamic. This is the beginning of working with your mind and emotions in balance……where you aren’t just feeling the emotional triggers without thought but can recognize them now and see how behavior patterns impact the interaction. This is a moment of freedom because now you have become aware. You can now start to unravel these imbalanced behaviors and learn how to interact more consciously with the world. You are on the path of engaging with the world from a place of authenticity (your true self) versus from a place of patterned behaviors and who you learned to be based on your conditioning. Your emotions become more authentic, and you aren’t operating from triggers. You realize that you are not your behaviors, and your responses become more natural and more authentically aligned with who you are. You start living life versus mitigating it.

When we get to this place of consciousness, our relationships can improve exponentially. We get in touch with our true feelings and engage our authentic selves, and people respond differently to this. You will respond differently to them too. You will become adept at feeling when others are not engaging from their authentic selves, and those relationships won’t feel as good to you. You may lose interest in people you have had relationships with for years because dealing with someone’s unconscious triggers and unproductive behavior patterns becomes exhausting. When we are unconscious of our behavior patterns, we end up making our internal imbalances someone else’s challenge or burden. When we start taking responsibility for our imbalances, not to make it the problem of others, it gets more noticeable when others don’t do the same. The more balanced we become, we become almost allergic to imbalanced people and relationships with them. We start to get more discerning about our relationships because we crave authenticity, and we get very clear on what relationships feel good to us. Your relationships become more intentional, and we don’t fall into relationships anymore……we consciously choose them.

Being the Bigger Person

There are so many tried and true ways of thinking and acting that society has taught us that is not productive and or outright wrong for the situation. This relational wisdom that has been passed on to us has kept us from cultivating better relationships and I am going to address one of them today.

“Being the bigger person”. We generally use this when we initiate engagement with a person that we believe offended us or owes us an apology for some of their past actions or words and they aren’t initiating engagement.

Being the bigger person is an erroneous description of what is really happening within the dynamic. It is almost like we are using reverse psychology on ourselves regarding the situation by telling ourselves that somehow we are behaving “ better” than the other person which allows us to compromise our boundaries and integrity without feeling badly about it. In truth, we are demonstrating a lack of self-worth and inappropriate boundaries and trying to make it sound like a positive thing to do.

A few dynamics are happening in this situation that are not healthy or productive in cultivating good relationships. First is that justice is needed in situations to maintain balance. If justice means an apology needs to be given, then that is what should happen. Trying to circumvent that by being the “bigger person” just erodes your value in the relationship and it keeps the other person from learning valuable lessons in how a healthy relationship functions. Second, people learn by feeling the weight of their actions. When we overfunction in a relationship and don’t allow a person to take responsibility for their words and actions, we are inhibiting their personal growth. In life, we have to feel how our choices/words/actions impact others, good or bad and that is how we grow emotionally and personally. You take that opportunity for growth away from the person even though you might be making it more comfortable for them and maybe even more comfortable for you. Comfort isn’t growth.

I heard one time that high-vibrational people can admit they’re wrong and apologize. I think what this is really saying is that these are people who don’t let their egos get in the way of their personal growth. They don’t look at being wrong or apologizing as a character flaw or weakness but as an opportunity to understand and improve. The “better” person is a person who can reflect on past actions and words; feel and understand their impact, apologize when it is warranted, and learn and grow from it.

I think we should start applying this phrase more appropriately. Instead, let’s define the bigger person as someone who takes action to create harmonious relationships where both people feel empowered and valued. Where there is fairness and justice in the relationship. Let’s stop lying to ourselves and telling ourselves that a lack of self-worth and lack of good boundaries is some kind of moral high ground.

This is just another example of ways society has erroneously taught us to engage in unhealthy relationship dynamics. We all go through life not even questioning this and believing this is the right way or a good behavior when in fact it is sabotaging your ability to create healthy balanced relationships by not requiring emotionally responsible behaviors with those you are in relationships with.

What is Guilt?

I want to explore the emotion of guilt. Have you ever wondered what prompts this emotion and why we feel it?

From childhood, whenever someone tried to make me feel guilty, it would evoke anger in me and I wasn’t sure why or where the anger came from. Looking back at it, I must have instinctively known or felt that they were trying to emotionally manipulate me even though I didn’t have the logical wherewithal to know or understand this. All I knew was that I felt I had done nothing to feel guilty about and that what they were trying to do didn’t feel good to me. I didn’t succumb to the emotion they were trying to impose on me that I wasn’t feeling authentically.

Now that I can analyze this, I realize that people use guilt to control others by trying to bend their will or make them feel a way they aren’t naturally feeling. I couldn’t understand this at the time but could feel it. This is a tactic in emotional manipulation. They use your feelings against you and try to sabotage your decision-making by placing doubt in your mind about your feelings and inner compass to manipulate you into making different choices that suit them.

In life, we all have free will. We get to make our own decisions and experience the results of those decisions. That is how we learn, grow, and live a full life. Sometimes our choices won’t and don’t align with those around us, and sometimes we make poor choices or mistakes. Those are our choices to make and learn from. When our choices don’t align with those around us or impact others, we may resort to using guilt to control a situation. Whether it is because they want a situation that serves them better, or maybe they think they know what would serve them better, in the end, it doesn’t matter; it isn’t up to them to make that determination. When our actions don’t align with someone else’s preference, this creates a feeling of loss of control for them. This loss of control makes people resort to tactics that aren’t always noble or loving

This is where the guilt trip comes in. A person can then decide to use guilt to try to change your mind or make you feel bad about the decisions that you have made. Instead of having a direct exchange about the situation to understand, forgive if necessary, and accept, they instead choose to use guilt by weaponizing your emotions against you. When you guilt a person, you undermine them emotionally, many times to get your desired result out of the dynamic. This isn’t a caring or loving action but a tactic to gain control over someone else’s free will or emotions. Unfortunately, I see this as a normal relating style in families. It is a learned style and utilized because people either have not learned how to express themselves more constructively in relationships especially when they reach an impasse or it is used when others feel that they deserve or have the right to have some control over another. (For instance, when the parent never fully acknowledges that the child has become an adult and they feel they still deserve some control over their lives).

We can approach these impasses with others by appealing to someone’s logic and reasoning to try to help them understand why we are making or made the decisions we have in life……But, it isn’t our responsibility to get them to agree or accept our choices. We have to be OK with dissonance as an outcome. We aren’t responsible for another’s emotions and how they feel about the decisions we make in our own lives.

To add another layer to this, we do more than an adequate job of feeling guilt without someone trying to put that on us. We can feel guilty about a decision that doesn’t align with another or may disappoint another without them saying or doing anything. This is when we sabotage ourselves emotionally. Why would we do that and undermine ourselves emotionally? This isn’t a very loving act towards ourselves. We aren’t allowing ourselves to potentially make mistakes, learn and grow, or assert our own free will in a situation that may cause angst for others. This is part of the human experience. This is where we need to get emotionally balanced so we can accurately discern between the emotions we should be feeling and when. We can’t take on another person’s emotions or their imbalanced view of our responsibility in the relationship.

Is there an appropriate time to feel guilty? I think when we knowingly do something with ill intent towards another. We only have control over our intent. There may be actions in our past that we can look back at and feel guilty about how we handled a situation seeing how it impacted another person, but that is wasted energy and emotion. Sometimes we are not in a state of consciousness to know better or understand the dynamics while we are in a situation but if our intent was not negative towards them, feeling guilt hinders your growth. We grow by making amends and forgiving ourselves and I truly believe that when we KNOW better we DO better. Most people are making decisions for themselves, not against another, but many people don’t see it that way.

Many people make everything about themselves, even other people’s choices for their lives. We can’t own their misperception of the dynamic and surrender our will and emotions to try to please them. We can always consider others’ perspectives of dynamics when making decisions but sometimes we have to accept that others may not like our decisions.

In a balanced interdependent relationship with another, you should be confident in knowing that you have value even when others are upset with you or disagree. You can disagree without guilt. That is a marker for a healthy relationship with yourself and another. This is where we have to work on clear thinking and emotional balance, so we learn to love ourselves enough not to feel guilty when it isn’t warranted. Taking on the responsibility for another’s emotions or making someone responsible for your emotions is a burden and an imbalance that will plague a relationship. If you eliminate unnecessary guilt, you are well on your way in your journey to greater balance, and this is a needed exercise in self-love.