Thursday 12 November, 2009Contributing To Our Own Pain

Today I was listening to a young woman tell me how much of herself she is giving and continues to give, to the one that she loves. She told me that she fluctuates going back and forth in reasoning, knowing that his actions are not good for her, but she keeps loving him anyway. When she said: “I know it’s logical not to care for him…” I shook my head.

“There’s no logic in love,” I said.       
                        

And there isn’t.

How many of us have loved someone who has stretched us so far emotionally that we were drained emotionally and spiritually, yet we continued to give of ourselves?  Far too many of us.

Yet it can be a complicated situation because we were taught, after all, that Love is all there is, weren’t we? And that forgiveness is the name of the game. It is what we as humans are ‘supposed’ to do.

But when you are loving someone who is taking from you far more than you are receiving in return, things start to change in your own life. You feel awful much of the time, you’re drained and tired, you’re not sleeping well, you look like hell, you overeat or stop eating. Your job may become affected, your other relationships became strained because your friends don’t know why you are doing this to yourself, you’re spending much of your spare time crying or staring at the boob tube…and all the while, the one person that you are pouring your energy out to isn’t even giving you the time of day.

No matter what age you are at, if you are involved in this type of relationship, at some point you are going to have to start asking yourself some questions. The questions of: “Why is he/she doing this to me?” needs to start turning to: “Why am I doing this to myself?” “Why am I giving so much of myself to this particular person when I am only receiving crumbs of attention back?” In most cases, when people start asking themselves these questions, they realize that they don’t really want to hear the answers. It’s much easier to think that giving more love will fix things than to confront and unearth the reasons why you are so persistent in showering all that you have onto someone who is not accepting it with honor.

The young woman I was speaking to today told me that her man will be leaving within a month and that she “has a month to turn things around.” When it was suggested to her that perhaps she back off from texting him frequently and calling him four times an hour, she shrugged and said: “I know that maybe I should back off but I need to know that I’ve said and done all I can.” An intelligent women, she is nonetheless blinded to the fact that she has given all that she can and contributing to her own pain. So her pain will continue.