Pod discussion from yesterday - relationships

Relationships - Post 1
Okay, I won't feel the need to preface my thoughts with IMHO anymore.

My mother used to always say to me "nobody can make you feel bad". What she meant was it was up to me to decide whether what someone said made me feel bad or not. Growing up, my mother almost always made me feel bad. She was very negative, critical, judgemental. BUT it was my insecurities or my desire to please her that made me feel bad. She wasn't really making me feel bad. I was making myself feel bad.

Now she has Alzheimer's. Again, she makes me feel bad. Or I should say thinking about her being in the situation that she is in makes me feel bad. Again, it is me making myself feel bad. Not her. Not even her illness. But how I choose to feel about it.

I'm 51 years old. I walk into the local drug store and the young girl that works there says to me "Awww, you look so cute in your shorts and anklets and sneakers."

Now, I could take it as a compliment but my insecurities don't let me. I take it to mean "Why don't you learn to dress your age."

I'm not learning a darn thing from her comment other than the fact that I choose how I want to interpret it. AND I am seeing a reflection of myself at her age, when I used to judge women of my age for how they dressed. I thought

As for someone else trying to change you, I would NEVER assume that someone else, spouse or parent or anyone, knows better about how you need to live your life than you do. If you drink to excess or have some other negative habit, of course the people that love you are going to try to change it. But no one else should be able to tell you what to eat, how to dress, what job you should take, what friends you should have. I really believe that "should" is one of the worst words in the world. Nobody knows how we "should" live our lives but us.

As for relationships, they are pretty hard. A lot harder if your ego gets in the way.

Relationships Post 2 - First of all, like everything else in life, being treated like crap is all in the definition. I think many of us are programmed to expect a relationship to be a certain way and if it is not, we think that our mate is not treating us well. Or, we compare our relationships to others and if someone else's mate is doing something better than ours, well, then we decide to be unhappy.

I have been in a million relationships in my life. Maybe a million and a half. Very few of them had anything to do with love, although we used the words "I love you" all the time. Words don't mean crap. If someone loves you, you know it, and it has nothing to do with many many gifts they give you and if they rub your back at night and if they remember your birthday.

If you are in a relationship in which you don't really LOVE the other person and they don't really love you, then you are really cheating yourself.

If someone really DOES treat you like crap - they degrade you, insult you, are mean to you, cheat on your, steal from you, lie to you then for God's sake, get out of the relationship. Even if they are constantly telling you that you are wrong or doing things wrong.....It is hard enough to be ourselves in life without someone else making us doubt ourselves.

I spent a lot of years thinking that all the problems in my relationships were my doing. they were. But only because I wanted to BE in a relationship so badly that I was getting in all the wrong relationships. Better to be in no relationship than the wrong one.

Relationships Post 3 - I didn't learn love when I was growing up either. I grew up in a household where no one ever said I love you. No one ever hugged each other. And there was constant criticism. My mother and father were constantly fighting. My mother was constantly degrading my father in front of us kids. It was awful. So I did what a lot of women do and I started "dating" at a very young age and thinking that every guy that I went out with was "the one".

I had no idea what love was because I had never seen in. And the truth is that there were probably men along the way that tried to really love me and I didn't let them because I saw the tenderness and the openness that they were trying to share with me as some sort of weakness. How was I supposed to know what real love was since I had never seen it.

Then I got involved with a church that was full of people telling me they loved me etc. I married a guy that I met in the church and from the beginning, he kept telling me how I "should" be. I shouldn't cuss or have an off-color sense of humor or dress any way other than how he wanted me to dress. I really thought he knew what love was and I completely changed myself for him because I thought he was right and I was wrong.

It didn't take me very long to realize that I had changed into a completely different person. A Stepford Wife, if you get the comparison.

As for knowing real love when you find it I can only tell you this. When I met my current husband, I tried really hard to break up with him. I didn't think he was right for me at all. He didn't fit any of the images I had in my mind of what my dream man should be.

I thank God every single day that my husband didn't let me break up with him. It took me awhile to see my husband for who he is and to realize that what is inside a person is so much more important than his habits or abilities or what he has in life. 

Relationships - rest of posts for the day -
I won't say that I don't believe in therapists. I will say that I have gone to several in my life and none of them were helpful. Some of them were pretty detrimental.

I think that just about everyone in the world has problems of some sort. And sometimes people try to get in relationships with people whose problems aggravate their own problems. An example: if you are insecure (and I am) then it is very detrimental to be in a relationship with someone who is hypercrytical. If you have trust issues, then it is detrimental to be in a relationship with someone who flirts a lot with other people. Being in a relationship like that makes you constantly be on guard and you can't really heal yourself.

...... Commitment, whether it is marriage or some other form of commitment, makes a LOT of difference. If you KNOW someone is going to stay with you and you KNOW that you are both going to figure out life together, it makes things a lot easier.

.......Well, this is advice that I'm sure you have read a million places. It's better to try to fix yourself and your own problems rather than try to fix the relationship. Heal yourself. Work on your own issues. Not for the relationship. For youself. then no matter what happens, you'll be okay.

One last thought. You've heard the expression toxic relationships? Well maybe some really aren't toxic but they give us a rash. At least until we get our own personal immune system working well.

I mean that all in an emotional context.

:-)

Happy trails!