The aim of a relationship isn’t to show up doing what you always do. You don’t have a pre-defined role. No, you don’t. Shout-out to all the people pleasers, including Florence Nightingales, Listeners, Buffers, Good Girls/Guys, Helpers, Savers, and more, of the world. News flash: You’re under no obligation to be the same person you’ve previously been. This is especially so if who you’ve expected yourself to be cut you off from the things that matter most, causing you to get lost in your quest for love.
Engaging with variations of the same person in different packages and using old habits to blame yourself stops you from developing emotionally. You won’t modify your associations, the connections you make with love, life, relationships and yourself. Even when you want to change, doing so will feel ‘wrong’.
The relationships where you will be happiest are where, regardless of their outcome, you strive to be yourself and be in the present instead of living in the past. If, instead of consciously or subconsciously seeking out people who represent hidden pain, fear and guilt, you seek to learn how to recognise healthy, stable, trusting connections, you heal, learn and grow.
Letting go of your relationship blocks and anything not serving you isn’t about making you ‘wrong’. This fear of not being ‘right’ often holds humans back from confronting our pasts. After all, we’ve learned to believe that making a mistake or being wrong about something is bad. Letting go through breaking patterns and being more authentic is about prioritising freedom and happiness over being afraid or needing to be right about something you’ve already decided.
You can overturn decisions, including wrongful convictions against yourself. Some of us have made ourselves serve life sentences for not being the Right Kid. We’ve determined we’re ‘not good enough’ or to blame for old hurts and traumas.
If a painful involvement has awakened you to the need to love and take care of yourself or to address some issues from the past, that relationship has done its job. You don’t need to emotionally bypass yourself and immediately jump to seeing the blessing in disguise. It’s okay to have hurt, anger and disappointment to process. But if you see the relationship (and yourself) differently, you free yourself to move on. You realise that the relationship and breakup gifted you with something, after all: more of yourself.