Hey Yall!
At the core of who I am, I'm all about love, relationships and trying to help make them work.
But I am against being held hostage and holding someone else hostage in unhappy and unhealthy relationships.
We have a tendency to hold on to things, relationships and people for too long and for the wrong reasons.
We make life decisions according to who we want and what we believe/think that we want instead of making these important life decisions based on our needs being met.
We want to be married. We want to be married to a specific person. Then we find that getting what we want doesn't necessarily bring us the happiness we thought would come with it. We may think that it does in the moment, but sooner or later, when our emotional needs aren’t being met, we realize it doesn't.
This is because our long-term happiness relies heavily on our needs being met. But a lot of us make life decisions based on specific image of “looks good on paper” being met.
When we make life decisions based on image-based criteria, these decisions reflect the way we want our lives and relationships to look rather than the way we want and need to feel in them. These decisions are based on what can be seen and what it looks like to the outside eye. It's the mental checklist we keep of what we want and how we think it should look.
It's imagery instead of intimacy.
When we make decisions based on our needs being met, it's intimate. It calls your attention to the way you relate with someone else physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually. These decisions go beyond the surface level. They aren’t shallow or superficial.
The ability to meet someone else’s emotional, physical, mental and spiritual needs is not something that can be faked and it’s importance can not be minimized.
It's the quality versus quantity principle.
Image-based criteria is quantitative. It's what can be measured by sight or in numbers. It’s tangible and in some cases shallow (lacking substance/meaning).
Having your needs met is qualitative. It can only be measured in the depth and feeling of the person who is experiencing it. It’s intangible. And for some who don’t understand their own emotional needs, immeasurable. But for those who do understand their emotional needs and what it feels like when they are being met, they know that you can not put a price on it.
Having your emotional needs met is priceless.
You may never know, understand or be able to quantify the depth of love between two people that are in a relationship where each individual's needs are being met.
A lot of us think we know what we need because we know what we want. When in actuality the only way to truly know what you need in a relationship with someone else is by knowing what you are missing in your relationship with yourself.
Relationships are supposed to be complementary. They should bring out the best in you and help you improve in areas where you struggle.
We get caught up trying to force and beg others to give us what we need and what we want, because they are who we want and who we want it from—and the reality is, sometimes, these people are incapable of meeting our needs.
You can't make an apple an orange based on what you need or want it to be. An apple is an apple and an orange is an orange.
And that's ok.
There is someone else who can and will meet your needs. But first and foremost, this someone, must be you.
If you can’t (won’t) do the bulk of this work for yourself, it is unfair to expect anyone/everyone else to carry your load and do this work for you.
That is your responsibility. You are your [own] responsibility. You are responsible for managing your own (emotional) experience.
The only person you can change or control is yourself. The only person you should be attempting to change or control is yourself.
A lot of times, all it takes to meet your emotional needs in the now is to make the decision to not allow things to continue in the unhealthy way(s) that they're going.
Remove yourself from the situation. Give yourself and the other person the time and space necessary to figure out what you both truly want, what you both truly need, and in some cases the space to figure out who you both truly are.
This can be hard.
Some hard truths may come to light in this process. You'll be forced to face your fears. You'll be forced to deal with yourself. But in doing so you will get to know yourself. You will find out what it is that you truly want and need not only from another person, but what you need in life, what you need in your space, what you need from yourself and what you need in a partner.
You will be able to sift through your own standards; that you may have forgotten or let go of in trying to be who you needed to be in that situation/relationship.
Soon we discover that we were actually holding ourselves hostage in certain relationships.
We stayed longer than we should have. We held on when we should have been letting go. We kept going when we should have stopped a long time ago.
I get it!
We want our shit to work!
Here's the thing with wanting it to work.
You have to want it to work for the right reasons. You also have to be honest with yourself. If you know that a person is incapable of or unwilling to meet your needs, then you will not be able to make it work. It takes all participants involved being willing to make things work; no matter how much potential they may have to do so. If that potential is not being applied to you, your relationship, and their willingness to do the work; it won’t work.
It is time to let them go and let them grow.
And this can be frightening for some of us. You may grow apart in the letting go process. That is ok. You have to believe that what is meant for you will be for you and when that time comes it will feel right and not forced. You won’t feel like you are abandoning parts of yourself to make the relationship work.
Some of us are holding ourselves hostage in severely unhealthy relationships. You empathize with your partner even though they behave poorly and treat you horribly. You feel sorry for them because you know what they have been through and what kind of childhood upbringing they had. You defend them to other people knowing that if you spoke the truth of your relationship out loud, even you wouldn’t be able to justify their abusive (physical, emotional, mental, etc.) behaviors. You love them and stay with them despite the harmful things they do and the healthy things that they don’t do. You love them despite the fact that they've taken you away from the life you are capable of having-with the fullness of real healthy love, care, consideration, affection and true happiness. Which only teaches them that it is ok to continue behaving poorly without any respect for boundaries.
I want you to know, if you are holding yourself hostage to a relationship like this, you are allowed to let yourself be free. Some people have taken their access to you for granted. They have led you to believe that this is (they are) all there is for you to experience; that something is better than nothing; that there will never be a better love (than theirs) and that’s just simply not true.
You just have to open yourself up to the possibilities.
Sometimes, the grass is greener on the other side.
Don’t allow fear to convince you otherwise. This is how you move from hostage to happy.
With Love, Kendra a.k.a. KenSights
Remember, Choosing to see the best in people who consistently show us the worst of themselves is how we deny our own reality and the reality of who those people are. This is how we gaslight ourselves.
Let me know what you think of this post in the comments! Please share this with someone who needs to hear this!