It takes the height of arrogance and frankly, a big lack of common sense for one human being to say, it really is an excellent idea for me to tell someone else how they’re supposed to be or to live their own life. That’s just not the way healthy relating is designed to be. Healthy relating is about giving each other feedback and suggestions and talk about what does and does not work for each of us. We can put that under the category of having good boundaries and good communication. We’re not connecting to each other in order to say, there’s a mould that I have designed and I want you to get inside my mould. When that happens, you may find yourself getting caught up in that and throwing that right back at the other, or speaking that within yourself to where you truly start believing you have to fit some person’s mould and to wallow in shoulds and musts…… and when you take a look at all of the emotional duress, the anxiety, the depression, the anger, the guilt and all that goes with it, you realize… That’s not a good way to live or to share with another human being.

Think of this: what would happen if you were to decide, you know what, I’m not going to do that anymore. What would that be like if you were to declare that – whether you want to say it out loud or you just simply want to say it with your actions? You might be labelled as an ingrate, you might be told that you’re being rebellious or you’re not a very enlightened person or you’re not a team player, or you’re just some sort of an outlier or a non-conformist… when basically, all you would be saying is, all I want is to be free. I want my own sense of peace, I want my common sense to guide the way that I do life! Is that such a bad thing for you to declare?

How about, instead of collapsing in defeat, or feeling like you have to plead your case over and over so that someone can be okay with your decisions, or to hide your desire to have your own way of seeing things where you feel like you have to steal freedom, (like, when nobody’s watching, I’m gonna go over here and just try to be myself…) What if you decided, I’m not doing that anymore? I’m just going to establish who I’m going to be through my own inner wisdom and authenticity and experience of life.

Now, this implies a couple of things that I hope that you will be in an ongoing process of honing in on in your own way of life. First, I hope that you’re constantly taking a hard look at what your well-conceived ideas of what a good life consists of – the values, the principles, the standards that you want to live with, the healthy ways that you want to manage your emotions and then, second, I’m hoping that you can take that thinking that you have and apply it to the very specific circumstances you are in right now, so that you’ve got a well-conceived idea of what the good life looks like FOR YOU, moment to moment. When you know that you have a reasonable, healthy, authentic manner of doing life, then you can say, please, you can either TAKE ME AS I AM, or agree to disagree on the way life works for each of us, or decide to part ways… 

Then, you’re actually making a pretty good combination of thoughts there…

Basically, what is being said by each of the individuals is, I figured out what a healthy life looks like FOR ME and you can either have the same view as me (the ideal circumstance), you can have a totally different view while allowing and embracing our differences, or you can have a very different view that makes it impossible for you to embrace and respect and allow mine and then we need to part ways.

A MEANINGFUL relationship – whatever type it is – is about asking one another: “how can you and I coordinate better so that we allow and support each other’s uniqueness and authenticity, even when – or especially when – our views of the ideal life are opposite?“

Unhealthy patterns can otherwise manifest as one or both partners trying to fake being okay with the other’s views and thus become inauthentic towards oneself and the other… and then there could be lots of uncontrollable anger, or they can take it to the other extreme where there’s a lot of the deep, harsh, persistent, pervasive passive-aggressiveness where people are not cooperative at all, where they go into the deep freeze and denying any wrongdoing on their part (and, by the way, someone goes into that heavy denial, we have a word for that: it’s called lying), they’re just not honest… they’ll just lie about who they are or they just throw insults and call back all the nice things they once said, they can sulk, they can retreat, they can disappear…

Whenever people go into those kind of behaviours, it just illustrates all the more the legitimacy of the other saying STOP. 

If you are in a context like this, please realize that your desire to live the life that you deem ideal for yourself is mainstream, it’s not a weird thought. It makes no sense for me to lose myself to someone else’s view of life. If my own view of my life is solid, secure and healthy TO ME, I can allow the other to have his/hers and then together decide if they can coexist in the same time-space paradigm. 

Simply put, I want to be respected. Simply put, I want to be treated as someone who has the right to a certain view, I want to be treated as someone who has dignity – no apology offered for that. I’m weary of trying to defend all these things that require no defence in the first place. I’m weary of having to apologize for things that require no apology. I’m a person of good character and I have the right to live my life as I deem authentic FOR ME. I like the way I prioritize my life’s responsibilities, my dreams and wishes, my liabilities and my sorrows, and if you want to complain about my free choices, I’ll listen and then I’ll make my adjustments, if necessary, according to what makes sense to me. If having my own separateness and my own distinction makes another feel angry and unsettled, what that says to me is, we aren’t a good fit. Why would we need to have a relationship where we’re chronically angry at each other? Retaliation motivates me to claim my freedom. I don’t need to be filtering my way of life through someone who feels like they have to come against me simply because I want to be me! Change can be good and I’m ready for some change 

So I’ll leave you with one huge thought and that is, it’s NECESSARY – it’s not just good – it’s necessary for you to be you… and so when you say, I’m not going to let somebody control me, hold on to that thought… move forward and don’t look back if that isn’t possible in your current situation!!