The Truth Can Be Harsh
While you've been complaining about how you can't get your ex back you have also been making sure he or she hears the worst about themselves straight from your lips. You talk about them behind their backs and you look at them as though the ice in your blood could reach out and stab them. And yet you want to get ex back, you say.
We all do things to ourselves that cause pain. We don't think we mean to do them, but really, we do. We fight with someone and break up with them to protect us from ever having to bear being left. We may have no indication that was going to happen, but we'd rather protect ourselves than become a victim.
We scour the shelves looking for a fat loss solution when we are still clutching a bag of potato chips in our hand. We pretend we want to lose weight, but we also know that the weight keeps the guys away, and we can then remain in control. We don't want to be a joke or experiment, and we certainly don't want money riding on our behaviors.
We can drown our faces in the finest beauty cosmetics but if we feel unsafe being loved we will throw daggers at the world and keep everyone at arms length. We feel the uglier we can become the safer we are from someone's ill intentions. We are truly just trying to protect ourselves. We shield ourselves from the potential for pain by shielding ourselves from the potential for love.
We do these things because we want to be the best person we can be. We tell ourselves how horrible we are because we expect it to motivate us into being better people. We lash out at ourselves, sometimes physically, because we understand that the more pain we feel now the more we will want to move away from the discomfort and change our lives.
It would be wonderful if we could all put down our weapons of choice and start to realize that there are other factors in play here. We do cause our own pain to make sure that, at the very least, we get to be in control of it. We don't ask for help and we never look back.
The problem is that the more we protect ourselves the more we end up hurting ourselves. We believe that no one can be as good as they seem and that no one will ever want to hear everything that we've kept locked in our heads. We are, by all means, individuals trying to figure out how to be a community.
Tags: barriers, mind, pain, relationships.