STOP PUMPING THEM UP! PERSON PUMPING AIR AROUND SOMEONE ON A PEDESTAL

When your interest isn’t reciprocated or a relationship ends, how much it hurts and whether you feel broken as a person is very much tied to how much you’re persecuting you while pumping up the other party. It’s totally understandable to consider someone who you love or care about to be special, as in you feel differently about this person than you do to everyone else and it’s in a good, healthy way, but there’s love and care and then there’s idolising, glorification and the attendant devaluing of the self that goes along with it. They’re ‘special’ for all of the wrong reasons.

It may come as a shocker to you but… they’re only human. Stop attending daily rejection service at the Church of My Loved One’s Ego.

Feeling bruised for a little while after the breakup or non-reciprocation is one thing but consistently persecuting and beating you up over where you’ve ‘failed’ while making them out to be The Most Important and Special Person In The Universe will gradually cripple your self-esteem and distort your perspective.

Say it with me: they’re just not that special that it warrants you decimating your sense of self along with your zest for life. The fact that your relationship has ended or your feelings weren’t reciprocated doesn’t mean that all hopes and plans that you had for you are done.

Taking this relationship or experience and judging it as being a formal and permanent declaration and prediction of what your future will be is very fatalist thinking.

Your involvement represents a period of time in your life and the things you’re very focused on represent moments of time or a series of moments of time but they’re not all that there is and will be. You’re not only giving over all of your power to this person and but you’re in essence saying, “Go on with your messiah-like self. I’m less of a person with or without you and you’re more of a person with or without me.”

This is really about a breakup between the two you’s – the you that you don’t like and the you that you thought you’d be.

You might be glorifying the hell out of them because when you acknowledge what actually happened or how you truly felt or who they really were, you feel guilty for thinking ‘bad things’ (too much people pleasing going on there) and/or you see acknowledgement of the truth as some sort of ‘failing’ on your part. You can’t win with you.

 

It’s not about glorifying yourself and then ‘villainising’ the other party but the truth is, if you truly love this person then you have to honour what you had and those feelings by keeping it real… even if by recognising the truth and coming back to earth, you also have to acknowledge and accept some uncomfortable truths. Bullshit – even ‘well intentioned’ BS – isn’t love.

They’re just a human and they are flawed like every single person on the planet. They might be ‘perfect’ to you because you love them but if your reason for seeing them as perfect is linked to your sense of inadequacy, it’s not love – it’s need because this person is seen as vital due to how little you are giving to you.

As long as you’re bullshitting the hell out of yourself, you’re not in love with and missing this person – you’re in love with and missing memories (probably exaggerated ones using a low self-esteem filter in your imagination), you’re missing the illusions or you’re missing and in love with the possibility of potential (yours or theirs).

Sure, you can keep ‘pumping them up’ but it’s an unhealthy distraction which paves the way to self-destruction. What are you really avoiding? What do you get to keep telling you that keeps you in an uncomfortable comfort zone? Why are you giving you the beat down over this person? That’s not love; it’s pain.

You’re not doing justice to either you or this person.

Stop the glorification of people, especially based on superficial reasons, assumptions or envy. It’s inverted ego issues and you’re actually making a narcissist out of this person in your own mind and attitude. Bad enough to deal with a narcissist but this pedestal building is delusions of grandeur about this person. They’re just another human! Even an actual narcissist is only a big fish in their own harem pond!

You may be glorifying this person because they appear to be, do or have something that you want but don’t make the mistake of mixing up envy with love.

It’s also best to dodge the trap of believing that if you’d possessed this person then you would have acquired whatever you envy or would have seen a rise in value due to association. This is unhealthy – we’re people not commodities. Once you start to appreciate who you are instead of engaging in very unhealthy comparison, you can address how to evolve you and your life into something that makes you happier off your own steam.

And you know, there are people out there who are greatly admired and loved but we live in a time where you don’t even have to be particularly talented, skilled, doing great deeds, or even a very nice person in order for that to happen. Unless you’re greatly admiring, loving and revering somebody for who they actually are and it’s truly notable, it’s just worshipping a false idol. Being given the time of day by a person, being in a relationship, them being ‘popular’, ‘beautiful’, ‘intelligent’ etc isn’t a justifiable reason for all of the idolising and ultimately, unless you intend to only ever admire and ‘love’ someone from afar, in order for a mutual relationship that leaves your self-esteem intact to happen, the pedestal has to come down and fast.

When you put somebody on a pedestal, the only place for you is beneath them.

You might feel that it will hurt more to come back to reality but when you stop exchanging your worth with the worship of this person, the hurt and sense of rejection will begin to recede and that self-compassion that results will gradually help your self-esteem to recover.

We all want to matter and that’s human nature but if you wouldn’t expect or be comfortable with someone exaggerating the hell out of you while devaluing themselves, you definitely shouldn’t be doing this to you. Do for you what you expect from others and you’ll have self-esteem and one day this person will matter for different reasons – this experience can pave the way to a better relationship with you and with others that will need no glorification.

Your thoughts?

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