In part one, I explained why we need to connect with what we truly want and learn to articulate it and stop putting off being happy. Happiness seems to be something we think will come along in the distant future and in the meantime you’ve got to live a life in pain. In fact, more often than not, happiness is something that we seem to be reliant on external factors to provide, and yet we fail to recognise that misery lives company, so if we are not remotely happy within ourselves, we will struggle to find happiness elsewhere. Why?

We may not believe we deserve to be happy and so we will distrust when the good times do come and can end up inadvertently sabotaging it.

If we carry around self-hate, we end surrounding ourselves with people that reflect the negativity and feed back into the mentality, reinforcing the self-fulfilling prophecy.

There is also the harsh reality that when we go looking for love and happiness whilst carrying our own negativity, we end up looking for love in all the wrong places.

People who don’t like and love themselves have behaviour and ‘vibes’ that mirror these things and people like assclowns and Mr Unavailables are drawn to you because they are more likely to get away with their poor behaviour with you because of your insecurity.

I had to do a total 360 a few years back. I had believed I was happy, was having an extended case of bad luck with men, and that in essence, much of it was out of my hands. But when I started to get real with myself, I realised that I was coasting on pretending.

I was in relationships that were largely built up on illusions, there was more drama than you could shake a stick at, and I habitually pretended to be happier than I felt.

I didn’t wake up each day and think ‘I will pretend I am happy today’, however, I had got so used to not expressing how I truly felt and burying my unhappiness, plus I had become an expert at accepting poor relationship behaviour that devalued me, that the pretending had become my pseudo reality.

I’m not saying there weren’t good times, but I walked around with a grey cloud and secret unhappiness and dislike for a long time. I cried when other people didn’t know about it and I brushed off pain and compartmentalised it for a later date, when I believed that it may not hurt so much to look at.

The trouble is that when you don’t like or love yourself, and spend a lot of your life pretending, caught up in denial, and living relationships that are built up on little or no foundations because you prefer illusions, you will become very distanced from the reality of you.

If you imagine the layers of pretence, hurt, pain, and experience, it’s all just been piled on, and there’s little old you trapped inside.

You become disconnected from you and in turn, you don’t know who you are, you don’t know what makes you happy, and often when I talk to women, in spending their lives chasing and pandering to assclowns and Mr Unavailables and the negative messaging about themselves, they no longer know what their aspirations, goals, desires, or interests are.

Often we sack off friends, family, passions, and interests because we’re too busy firefighting our relationships.

The guy becomes our goal, aspiration, passion, interest, and in essence our life.

We believe that if we can just get them to see how great we are, how much we love them, and how right the relationship could be if they just did X,Y, Z and accepted and validated us, then shazam, we’d be happy.

If the guy is your focal point and you allow him to unvalidate you, rely on him to eventually validate you, and the sun basically rises and sets on him, he not only has too much power, but your happiness is heavily reliant on him which means that when he’s not around, he takes your hope of happiness with him.

The guy who is the source of your misery can also end up appearing to be the source of your happiness and so you’ll go back for more…and end up with more misery with some fleeting highs.

One day, and I hope it will be very soon rather than later, you will realise that whilst there is nothing wrong with wanting to be happy with a partner in a relationship, you will not get this until you address your own personal happiness. If you can’t recognise a good thing in you, how do you expect someone else to recognise it, and how will you recognise good love and embrace it?

You’ve got to be in it to win it.

No-one’s asking you to skip around like a happy clapper or become a narcissist, but if you’re finding it so hard to find a way to start liking you, you need to connect the dots and recognise that it is no wonder that you are not happy.

Take what you don’t want and instead of focusing on that and doing nothing with the information, process it, and translate that into what you do want.

The reader, Loving Annie, that inspired the beginning of part one said “I don’t want to hurt anymore” and she realised that continuing to pursue the guy and certain behaviours would only serve to hurt her. If she didn’t want to hurt, she had to opt out even though it was painful at first.

Funny enough, we fear the pain of taking action but we don’t realise that the initial pain of doing right by yourself is far less than what it would be to indulge in the relationship insanity – doing the same thing again and again and expecting different results.

I said I wanted to be happy but it was just words, and not only do actions speak louder than words, but talk can be cheap. How are you going to make yourself happy?

Don’t just say “I want to be happy” – Say “I want to be happy by being and doing [insert your stuff here]”

This makes it real and tangible.

I decided that I didn’t want to pretend anymore. That I would acknowledge how I felt whether that was about myself, another person, or something because my feelings were valid and the pretence was literally eating me up.

I recognised that if I wasn’t going to pretend anymore, I had to open up my eyes to the stuff that I was allowing to go unaddressed in my relationships whether it was with men, family, friends, or co-workers.

When I started to give voice to my true self and forced myself to stop pretending, I empowered myself because when I started to speak up, I was like “HELL YEAH! I am p*ssed off with you and I’m not going to make excuses for it, and I’m not going to internalise your crap and make it my own”

It was freeing. I knew I could be happy because I could make me happy instead of spending my time making myself miserable with external sources.

If you learn how to be happy with yourself, you will recognise the massive contrast of being around someone who is a source of negativity and will only serve to detract from you because they don’t love, trust, care about, or respect you.

If you experience something that makes you happy, do more of it.

And here’s a big thought:

If he’s not actually making you happy and the relationship is making you miserable now, and has been on a consistent basis, he and the relationship are not what’s going to make you happy.

You can’t ignore your present state and the past, plus ignore the consistencies by focusing on a future that may never materialise.

You need to get happy now and start focusing on how to be happy on a consistent basis. Here are just a few suggestions with more to follow in part three:

Stop worrying about what the hell he (or anyone else for that matter) wants and start considering your own needs. Just like when we project what we think, feel, and want onto partners, you must recognise yourself as an entity and acknowledge your needs. His needs are not your needs, and his needs are not the be all and end all.

Set boundaries. Boundaries are the backbone of a happier you and better relationships. Grow a backbone, set some boundaries and enforce them and you will discover that having boundaries and conditions makes for a happier you, because you teach people how to treat you and respect you, which in turn yields happier times. Those that don’t want to play by the rules, tell them to beat it. People with low self-esteem who have poor relationships, have little or no boundaries. Get some!

Say no. Partly tied to boundaries but it’s also a reminder to you to stop being a yes person and fearing what people will say or do if you don’t say yes all the time. No is not a dirty word and the fact of the matter is that saying yes all the time doesn’t get you anywhere but taken advantage of. Often people in poor relationships who are looking for love in all the wrong places keep giving because they not only don’t feel worthy or deserving, but they also hope that the love and giving will be reciprocated and they’ll be validated.

Find something that interests you other than getting hooked up with a man and fixing and maintaining a relationship. There has to be more to you than pursuing men – it’s bloody exhausting and you need a balance of interests that continue with or without a man and give you a life.

Reconnect with family and friends. Chasing bad love can isolate you, often because you end up isolating yourself because no-one understands what you’re doing or you’re too embarrassed to admit that you’re back with the guy. Isolation will only make you cling harder to a bad relationship so put your pride aside and let people who actually do love and care about you back into your life.

Write down your interests and goals. If you don’t have any goals other than a relationship, you’d better make some fast. Do a list of short term (under 6 months) medium term (6-18 months) and long term so that you can get a sense of what you want. Yes include a relationship but put other stuff on there too. It gives you focus.

Forgive yourself. It’s damn easy to feel unhappy and under a cloud when you’re kicking yourself constantly and having an internal conversation where you blame yourself and obsess over the relationship, the guy, your exes and anything else you feel like blaming yourself for. The reason why you haven’t forgiven yourself is because you are obsessing, which is about blame, which is about sticking with the illusion and the denial, which is about refusal to accept the situation.

You’re in pain because you keep fighting it and if you can accept what has happened, you can actually do something about it, which will make you pro-active but will also give you the opportunity to find peace with what has happened so that you can move on. If you don’t accept what has happened you cannot learn and grow from the experience and your mistakes because you’re still disconnected from the reality.

The trouble with illusions is that we can cling to them but it doesn’t change the fact that it’s not real and on some level you know this, which only adds to your unhappiness.

Let go. You will get a lot closer to what you want if you stop holding on to what will only serve to be an obstacle to your happiness because it can’t actually make you happy.

Your thoughts? Back with more suggestions in part 3.

 

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