Is this your awakening?

One of the deepest awakenings comes when you realize not everyone grows. Some people stay the same. That is their path – and it is not your to carry or repair… because you can’t fix them.

fb | Buddha’sTeaching

I spent years of my life trying to help certain people heal. I poured myself into them, thinking that they just needed enough love to feel they could find the courage to move forward. What I only learned much later was that people need to want to do this themselves, or nothing we do or say will have any effect on them. Nothing.

That point was driven home to me during my mother’s last hours. In Does asking for forgiveness in the final moments of life count? I wrote the following paragraph, where my mother knew she was finally going to face her maker, and she could no longer keep using the same excuses that had propped her up for her whole life:

Pastor Jay said that in their discussions that my mother was finding ways to excuse her behavior towards us, but it was only when he asked her if she’d like to pray with him, and after he had gone first, then she prayed, and in that moment when she realized she was speaking to her maker and trying to excuse herself, did she realized she needed to become completely honest and it was in that moment that she asked God to forgive her for the terrible things she had done to us.

I think this is a very hard lesson for every good-hearted, loving person to learn and to then reach a point of letting go of trying to help people unwilling to heal.

I want to share Dr. Stein’s list of must follow behaviors if you or someone you know doesn’t want to change. This is all very tongue in cheek, but it shines a light on the very things many people hide behind.

Why would people refuse to heal and to move forward?

In my observations, people who refuse to heal are getting something out of it. People don’t just arbitrarily refuse to heal. I know it may look as though they’re being stubborn or hard-headed, but they’re holding onto something that feels more valuable than taking the risk of letting it go.

What could that be? It comes down to personal identity.

When someone has come to identify so strongly with their pain and their damage that it wraps around inner self so deeply, they simply cannot imagine life without those identifiers, even if they are creating toxic havoc in the lives of everyone around them.

Indeed, they do see the toxicity and damage, but their own denial doesn’t allow them to see that they are creating their own miserable reality. In their eyes they can only see other people’s reactions to them, and those reactions seem so unfair. They see life as things happening to them, and they don’t see their own hurtful actions. If they do see them, they’ve convinced themselves that they were justified in hurting people, they had to.

Learning to release the inner need to help the person unwilling to heal is very difficult.

If we don’t recognize where we end and the other person begins as far as personal responsibility, we’ll keep getting caught up with unhealed and damaged people who are happy to let us take the steering wheel for them as they will have someone to blame. When we take on what is their responsibility to do emotionally, when we pour ourselves out and they don’t change, they now have a scapegoat.

It’s easy then for them then to get angry with us, to blame us, because we had already taken on that mantle of making it our responsibility to “help” them to heal.

When we see this pattern, we can either choose to continue and become an even greater martyr, or we can choose to step out of the pattern.

Refusing to take responsibility for another person’s emotional healing isn’t being disloyal, it’s simply recognizing that it a) was never our responsibility in the first place and b) no matter how much of ourselves we poured into another person, we have no power to make anyone do what they themselves need to do.

We can be supportive of someone on their healing journey, but the load doesn’t belong on our shoulders. It’s their load they have been happy to let us bear.

Note: This is a very good time to reach out to get help. Therapy is helpful to learn how to move through these very big changes. Please seek help if you feel you’re in danger.

• Is it time to stop focusing on what other people need to do and instead start looking inwardly at how we need to grow and heal?
• Is it time to give ourselves the space to grow as a person, to develop our own self-worth?
• Is it time to give ourselves permission to become who we crave to be and not be who we think other want us to be?

Here are some additional helpful thoughts:

• Need to start over in life, or need to make life-altering changes, but don’t know how?
• Relationship affirming behaviors
• Revenge: is it necessary or not?
• Teaching our kids (and ourselves) emotional intelligence
• Changing how we speak to ourselves
• Could you be a “Co-dependent” and not know it?
• 3 Brave but important questions to ask in a relationship
• 19 signs of a healthy relationship
• Green flagged – people who are considered good people have these traits
• How to predict if a relationship will be difficult
• Relationship affirming behaviors
• Useful phrases to use when people speak down to you
• Where do you start when you don’t know where to start?

 ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥

Blessings!
Thank you for liking, sharing this post and for following me!
Tamara

I hope you’ll poke around my Archived Posts Main page divided up into 3 sub-pages: Mental Health and Rewiring the Brain || Healing and Developing Ourselves || Positive thoughts and Affirmations to find a wonderful trove of supportive and encouraging posts!
https://tamarakulish.com/

My books: Developing Happiness When You Can’t Find It and How to Heal Your Life on a Deep Heart Level are available in paperback and Kindle. Audiobooks are available for the busy person!

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