How we let people treat us shapes how we feel about ourselves. How we treat ourselves impacts our confidence and self-worth. How we treat others influences how we perceive ourselves. Wait a minute, I think there’s a theme here…
How you are in your relationship with yourself and others will always nourish or poison how you feel about yourself. It’s so important to be aware of who you have in your life and the effect they are having on you, and how you treat others and the effect that has on you, too.
If you allow someone to treat you badly, you will, over time, become accustomed to it. Simultaneously you will begin to feel down-hearted within yourself because you have given someone permission to treat you badly and eventually this becomes your normality. Your self-worth will begin to match the treatment and that’s when silently, sometimes completely subconsciously, you begin to believe that this is the yardstick by which to measure your happiness and relationships by.
By allowing just one person to treat you badly over an extended period of time, suddenly, the other people in your life don’t have to do much to measure up. You’ll take people under your wing as someone worthy of your love and time. They could be nonchalant, inattentive or lack respect for you, and you might not see it.
Suddenly you’ve surrounded yourself with two people that are not loving you as you should be loved or treating you as you deserve. You know what this means…further confirmation that you do not deserve better and a further declining self-worth.
Of course, none of this happens in isolation. These relationships lead to anxiety, stress, low confidence, sadness and undoubtedly impact all other areas of your life: your home life, your relationships with others, your career, your physical health, your mental health, how you function within your community, your spirituality, your finances, and so on.
So what keeps people here, imprisoned in this dissatisfying downward spiral? Very often, it is simply a norm they have become accustomed to. It becomes their normality and so they don’t always realise that it is happening. It’s a habit. A habit that can be broken by realising that the pain of changing your situation will be far less than the pain of remaining stagnant.
If, as you’re reading this, you think this is beginning to happen in your life or has been happening for a long time, then it’s time to take action, change the factors that you can control. Who in your life is making you feel unnecessarily worse about yourself than you otherwise would? Either eliminate negative influences from your life or, if they have to be in your life, minimise the time you spend around them.
Recognise the happiness that awaits you once you’ve cleared the time and space that is being drained by people who make you gravely unhappy. Imagine the sort of wonderful, loving, happy people that will come into your life once you’ve freed up your time and mental space for them.
Think of all the horrible memories that the negative influences have created in your life thus far. Think about the hours, weeks and months you’ve lost due to feeling clouded, miserable and lacking in worth. That’s not living, that’s surviving. It’s time you will never get back, but now you have the choice. Do you carry on surviving or do you start living? Every day we have an opportunity to redirect the course of our life. Direct it or be directed.
Are you going to let your circumstances control you or are you going to change the circumstances that you do have control over? Decide now and take one step towards your happiness immediately.
