Mental health 2

Random thoughts or not so random ? This has been a topic I wanted to share for a while now but didn’t know how to go about it. Since it’s a Monday and well there is no particular reason behind this but anyway I thought I just wanted to write about the subject (mental health) since I am all for it!

You teach people how to treat you.

Look at your friends and family. When you start letting them cross boundaries; do things that make you upset and never say something, you will teach them that what they did was okay.

And then comes the time when they do it again and you will explode. You’ll remember the last time they did it and think they don’t care about you or respect you.

I’m sure your friends love you, but they make mistakes. By not being REAL and AUTHENTIC with them, you’ve brought resentment into the relationship. You’ve most of all been fake with yourself. That’s not what you want. You love them so you’ll be real with them, so the relationship stays well.  Do you really want to change the taste of dinner with your friends and family, because you saw them as someone who wronged you?

When you’re stuck in place, not moving forward or progressing, because you’re afraid of making a choice/decision – sometimes there is no ‘good’ decision. Sometimes both outcomes are equally as hard, or the fallout will be equally as bad. But just the act of making the decision, just choosing something for yourself – this is a powerful step and it’s something to be proud of.

You don’t need to be known as the giver among the people around you to be loved. Nor the protector, the comedian, or the brainiac. You’re enough. You can be loved for simply being what you are – not what you do, what you know, or what people wish you were.

Not advice from a therapist, but from my own experience, that I just realised very recently: YOU SHOULD NOT SHOULDER THE RESPONSIBILITY OF THE UNHEALTHY/SPITEFUL/UNKIND THINGS PEOPLE DID TO YOU.

So many of us haven’t been taught how to set down boundaries so we end up accepting any behaviour/treatment we are given, and then we shoulder the guilt and hurt passed on from careless people even if it never was our responsibility to. Somebody was unkind towards you? SAY IT AS IT IS. Not allowing yourself to allocate responsibility where it should be allocated = eventually beating yourself down for everything and never getting closure for anything. You are allowed to acknowledge that people were unhealthy towards you. You need to understand that most of the unjustified behaviour people hit you with are just unconscious projections of the personal problems these people have.

You’ll find that the day you realise: your parents had issues of their own they never resolved so it isn’t your fault that they treated you shitty/you did spend years putting in effort for both parties, yet your friends never reciprocated so you weren’t such a bad friend after all/sometimes exes do the worst things and that had nothing to do with you because they made a conscious personal choice to do bad so don’t force yourself to shoulder everything!!

I’m not saying blame everyone for bad things that happen in your life. You need to make sure you learn at least one thing from each bad thing that happens (eg. what mistake they made for you to not to make in the future) so you keep growing. I’m just saying it’s alright to allocate fault where it should be allocated.

Once you successfully allocate who-did-what-wrong (including yourself) instead of shouldering all the fault, you’ll be able to slowly decrease the self-blaming habits 🧸

There are only two things you can control in this world – your responses towards situations/people and thoughts.

Instead of saying this is what I prefer (to my family who doesn’t understand boundaries), say this is what I want.