If Only You Would Change

Have you ever had the thought that if you could get them to change you would feel better about a spouse, friend or business associate? I think most of us have at one time or another, or all the time for some.

When we feel discomfort, fear or anger in a relationship there is often a thought that if we could get the other(s) to change somehow we would feel better. Sometimes we are successful for a while in getting others to change their behaviour but most often one of two things will happen; either they will slip right back into it or we'll find some else who will manage to push that same button. Grrrr.

It gets exhausting after while trying to control people's behaviour so we won't feel bad. After several revolutions around the sun where the same old feelings keep showing up regardless of your efforts to control how life shows up, you really have to start wondering if the problem isn't with them but rather something in you that needs addressing.

I spent a lot of time and effort trying to manipulate people and situations so that I would feel safe and wouldn't get upset. Never did work really. Instead of getting what I really wanted (which I was completely unaware of) I ended up leaving a lot of relationships. I really wanted 'them' to love me and to understand me but I was not willing to be completely honest about that mainly because I was so caught up in my strategies for getting my needs met that I lost touch with what the needs were in the first place. I see this in clients and friends all the time. It's actually part of the human condition. That isn't to say that there is no way through but rather that we're all in this together and no one is 'bad' or 'defective' for getting caught up in it.

The point is when we finally see and admit to ourselves that we are playing out a familiar pattern when we get upset then we have the opportunity to do something different.  The reason it isn't all that easy to spot the patterns sometimes is that the faces and outer appearances vary so the place to look isn't at what happened but rather how we reacted. The thoughts and feelings are what is being repeated and they are what is causing the upset, not what someone else may or may not be doing.

I often get people saying they've never felt this way before when I first ask them whether this feels familiar to them but it doesn't take long in the conversation to uncover the falsehood of that statement. It isn't because people are trying to lie about it, they just don't know how to recognize the thoughts that are so very familiar that they don't even know they have them.

So the first step in making a real shift when you feel discomfort in your relationships is to stop looking out there for something to change and start looking in your own thought and feeling patterns for what is being triggered.

More on this topic in my next post.

Namaste