Learning From Our Painful Relationships

photo credit: Sydig­ill

When we approach our painful rela­tion­ships with the inten­tion to use them to dis­cover more about our­selves, we grow expo­nen­tially. For exam­ple, when instead of fight­ing against the way some­one treats us, we look at how our inter­ac­tion with them reflects our own thoughts, feel­ings and behav­ior towards our­selves, we do bet­ter because we put our energy towards the things we can do some­thing about, rather than invest­ing it in blame and futile efforts to change them.

Rather than stay­ing fix­ated on what they are doing to us we instead become increas­ingly inter­ested in treat­ing our­selves bet­ter. We focus more on how we don’t take care of our­selves and become more com­mit­ted to tak­ing bet­ter care of our­selves, (which may include leav­ing an abu­sive rela­tion­ship). Rather than resist­ing the way they treat us, we use our inter­ac­tion with them to dis­cover how to be kinder to ourselves.

The seem­ing mir­a­cle hap­pens when they begin to treat us bet­ter too which, in real­ity, is them reflect­ing to us our kinder atti­tude and treat­ment of ourselves.

When we use the world as an instruc­tional reflec­tion of our own atti­tudes and beliefs, and shift accord­ingly, abu­sive dynam­ics dis­ap­pear — either because we move away from them, or because our inter­ac­tion with them changes for the better.

Think of it as an ener­getic thing. As long as we abuse our­selves, by the way we think about and treat our­selves, there will have to be some­one in our life who mir­rors that abuse to us. It is uni­ver­sal law; as within so with­out. When we shift, the world out­side us changes to reflect the shift.

The energy we expe­ri­ence in the world is always, and can only be, a mir­ror image of our inter­nal rela­tion­ship to our­selves and the world. Why? Because the world is designed to do just that — the world is set up to mir­ror our indi­vid­ual and col­lec­tive state of consciousness.