Are you in one of those periods where everything just seems to fall apart? Where the whole world seems to be against you? Where anything that can go wrong, is going wrong in one way or another?
I have good news for you: Contrary to how it may seem and how it’s making you feel, you are in an immensely powerful place. If you know how powerful this is, you can take advantage of the gifts it contains. But if you see it as unfortunate and a series of bad luck – that you’re in a bad phase of your life – then you are not only prolonging your hardship, you might never gain the potential benefits it can yield.
Know That Feeling?
Nobody likes being on the receiving end of bad treatments. Whether it is by a waiter, a shop assistant, a doctor, a dentist… it leaves you feeling battered. Even if you’re in some kind of accident, where the damage to you was not perpetrated intentionally, it leaves you with the same feelings. If you really tune in, you’d probably get a sense of harshness… an abused kind of feeling.
At the end of the day, everything that happens to you is a reflection of how you are treating yourself. So ultimately that harsh, abused feeling is a reflection of the harshness and abusiveness with which you are treating yourself. In other words:
Sometimes, when shit happens outside, it may be a reflection of how you are treating yourself.
This is good news, because you are being shown where the control switch is that can ‘turn off’ all these bad stuff happening in your outside world!
But the way we’re prone to reacting to this feedback often makes things worse. Whenever we feel betrayed by someone, or if someone lets us down with an unfulfilled promise, or we’re disappointed by somebody’s action, our tendency is to judge the person involved. But what we’re saying is, we don’t have the power to determine how we are being treated, that we’re at the mercy of how other people choose to treat us. The more we see ourselves as victim, the more we’re giving our power away to something outside of us. This is a disempowering way of living and seeing ourselves.
More than judging the other person, we would tend to then interpret it to mean that we are worthy of such abuses, that we must deserve it, etc. So on top of deciding to be victim of other people, we make ourselves victim of our own self-abuse.
We can get locked into such mental self-beatings for a long time, prolonging the ‘bad phase’ where everything seems to go wrong or the ‘streak of bad luck’ we are in – until we are just battling to cope with the difficulties and getting increasingly drained of our resources. Just as you manage to resolve one abusive event, we create another one, and another… until we feel like we’re spiralling downward.
There is a way out.
4 Truths to Free Yourself from Abuses Once and For All
Truth #1: You are the cause of it.
Somewhere in you, is the cause of this event happening. You don’t need to know exactly how you have created it, but a willingness to believe that the cause lies in you, not outside of you, will begin the process of allowing you to reclaim your power so that you can create better outcomes.
You might be instantly gratified when you blame it on others or something outside of you. But it doesn’t leave you feeling good in the long run, since the power is draining out of you when you do so. You are literally taking units of your power and putting them somewhere outside of you. This is why it will make you feel tired, unbalanced and inauthentic. Somewhere in you, there’s a part of you that is connected to the truth that it is leading you further away from your true power.
Stop blaming. Reverse the flow of power from going out of you to going back to you.
Cut off the power drain by discontinuing to argue with the persons involved. You can yield more powerful results by working on your inner space, rather than “saying the right things” or “taking the right actions”. Stop expressing any more judgements about the person, the situation or yourself. Every time you judge something, you give your power away. Stop judging and take your power back. There is no need to involve the other person once you give up the need to appear to be right. It takes a certain maturity to let this go, and the benefits will far outweigh the temporary hurt your ego feels.
Truth #2: It’s a reflection of how you are treating yourself.
No one is abusing you, unless you are also abusing yourself. This mindset will transform it all for you. Having the awareness of how you are truly treating yourself, beyond the surface appearance, gives you the power to reverse self-sabotaging patterns so that you create happier circumstances.
Therefore, it puts you on the cusp of immense power, where you can take your power back – the power to create positive outcomes.
It may shock you at first to consider that this is how you’ve been treating yourself. If you’ve been on the receiving end of someone acting out against you in a dramatically aggressive fashion, you may think, Surely I don’t hurt myself or betray myself on such a scale?
The true dynamics of our relationship with ourselves can remain hidden in the dark recesses of our minds, so that we aren’t really aware of it, but we can see it being reflected to us by how others are treating us. The stronger you react emotionally to others’ abuses, the more likely you are also abusing yourself.
Before you dismiss it to be true for you, consider that self-abusive behaviours may be more subtle than you think. Even if you aren’t physically beating yourself up with a baseball bat, there are other levels of self-abuse. They include:
- Thinking harsh thoughts about yourself, running yourself down, and issuing “I-Should” and “I-Shouldn’t” thoughts to yourself.
- Tolerating situations that are below your standards and people who are abusive to you.
- Compromising your values and sacrificing your happiness to try to please others.
- Holding back from embracing positive developments.
- Unwillingness to heal your emotional wounds. If you take other people’s abusive behaviours as clues into how you are treating yourself, you might gain some fascinating insights. And once you know, you can stop doing that to yourself.
Truth #3: Am I willing to stop abusing myself?
This is the action, show of integrity, stage. It’s where you put the money where your mouth is.
Even after realising their self-abusive tendencies, some people can remain stuck without freeing themselves from it. This is due to a reluctance to give up these tendencies. It may have become such an integral part of their self-identity that it’s a big deal for them to let go of it. So they end up just repeating the story – but instead of the story that they’re prone to being abused by others, they simply replace it with the story that they are abusing themselves. Thus, they keep feeding the story and perpetuating the pattern.
Sometimes, people can trick themselves into believing that they have let go of their self-abusive pattern when in fact they are still tolerating abuses. There’s a level of believing that it is normal to feel abused, such that they may not realise that they’re still tolerating abuses.
Truth #4: Choosing to honour yourself with self-love.
By this, I don’t mean to adopt this as a mental concept only. Anyone can say they honour themselves with self-love. But actually doing it – allowing it – is something else. So here, you’re invited to deepen into a new level of truth within you. Could you stretch yourself a little bit more to accommodate yet more self-love?
Could you breathe in love, positivity, nurturance and good news? Could you wholeheartedly embrace them, as if you’re saying yes to all that is good and positive?
Say to yourself, “I am in total control. I breathe, therefore I am.” And breathe evenly, using your breath to gently erase all the kinks in your psyche, in the way you see yourself. Align with the path of self-love, in honouring yourself. Integrate it as a way of being, by practising this through your daily activities. Let it become a part of who you are and how you do life.
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Great article and under an appreciated blog.
Thank you Amyra.
You’re welcome!