When Loving is Unloving


August 9, 2018

I’ve been realizing in the last few months is that the way I love other people—despite all the depth and beauty and the many wonderful things it’s taught me over the last few years—it’s been very unloving to myself.

Honestly, there have been times in my life (even fairly recently) that the way I love others is downright hateful and abusive to ME. This isn’t actually about them or their actions, though there’s definitely something to be said for looking at the types of people I tend to enter into relationships with.

Ultimately, this is about me and my relationship to myself, as well as how that sets the foundation for what my relationship to others looks like.

I’m not just talking romantic either, I’m talking about ALL relationships.

Click below to start watching…

Hi friends, welcome to another vlog. I have a few exciting updates today. First of all, Journey Mapping is available. It’s available only to my email list through August 19th. And if you wanna sign up for that and you’re a subscriber you can save $200 and get instant access to Foundations for Unshakable Joy which is an old program of mine but it is amazing and it has been retired for a while now. You can sign up anywhere on CallOfTheVoid.TV to get access to that.

The next exciting thing is I am buying a 4Runner. So I have wanted one for a while and the most perfect 4Runner just kinda landed in my lap. And I’ll be picking it up in the next month, probably I have to fly down and get it and drive it back up. But I’m getting that and I’m excited about it because like I talked about in my last vlog, there’s that adventurous part of me that needs to come out. And having an SUV that can drive over any terrain that I can sleep in the back of and is very very mountain-friendly is important. So I’m very excited about that. And the last big news is I am moving.

So yes, I am moving. I am moving to the Glenwood Springs area. That will happen anywhere in the next two to possibly six or eight weeks. I really have no idea. That’s a big part of it is my landlord is letting me out of my lease. But when I get to leave depends on when the new person takes over and when they wanna move in. So it could be very quick and it could be a little bit extended. I’ve lined up a couple of places that I can land if I haven’t found a place in the area that I wanna be yet. So that’s all taken care of. For those of you that are local, don’t worry I will have a shindig or two before I leave where you can come and see me and hug me and yell at me and tell me why Glenwood is horrible. And then mingle with all my other friends. So that you guys can play and have fun together once I’m gone.

A lot of people ask me why the Glenwood area and I actually went up there this last weekend to get a feel for if I would wanna live up there, which I do. The canyon itself, Glenwood Canyon, is one of the most beautiful canyons I think I’ve ever driven through. I had the opportunity to play on it. So I went whitewater rafting for the first time and it was amazing. We slammed into a rock and we almost tipped over at a really really rough area. But it was so much fun and I met some really really sweet local people up there. I spent time near the river. I went on a hike. I went to the little towns all around and went to the hot springs and I also drove the three hours to Arches which is in Utah which is absolutely stunning. And that’s really why.

So Glenwood is three hours of beautiful Rocky Mountains, back to the Boulder Denver area. And three hours of Utah Desert to Moab and Arches. And I love the mountains. I love the Rocky Mountains. I love the desert. So what I’ve really been craving is to be centered to those areas so that I can get in my new vehicle and drive in any given direction, as short or as far as I want, sleep in the back of it, camp, go on adventures and really immerse myself in the kind of surroundings that make my heart most happy. So that’s a really big piece of it. I just really wanna live there.

I’ve wanted to live there for the last year and a half. I actually had the same exact trip planned a year and a half ago. I had the Airbnb booked and then that’s actually when I stopped being able to swallow for the nine days and of course it was many many months after that before I really recovered. But I got a little scared. I got a little spooked about leaving my community.

Another aspect for wanting to move which is smaller but it’s definitely a part of it, is I’ve been doing a lot of unraveling and untangling myself in relationships and really looking at some deep core patterns that have been there forever. We all have our wounding, we all have our attachment styles, we all have our personality types, we all have our trauma and our different experiences that shape us.

I have really been looking at my close relationships over the last six months and something that became very apparent to me in the last few months is that the way that I love. There’s a beautiful side to it. The way that I love is so deep, it is so unconditional on a deep soul level. Maybe those people don’t stay in my life, maybe they hurt me, and I need to let them go. But I love so fully and so deeply. And there have been a handful of relationships that I love the person and know them so well and see them so fully, that I allow them to treat me in ways that don’t always feel good.

The way that I love other people, friendships, relationships, all of that has at times been very unloving to myself.

It’s kind of in the vein of that saying, you have to learn how to love yourself before you can love other people. And I understood that at a certain level. But this has really started to show me how that shows up in my life and what that has looked like is I have let people be incredibly unsupportive, manipulative, they have gas-lit me, they have been mean or hurtful to me, and I let it go because I understand why they do it. I know them so well and I love them so much. I understand that they’re just projecting or I understand that they’re just triggered or this is their stuff or this is the ways that our attachment styles or personality types are bumping up against each other.

There’s something really good about that, being able to do that. And again there is a way that it has been very unloving to myself, to allow for that. And I give, I give, give, give, give, give. And I show up in certain relationships in a way that is supportive of the other person and what they want and need without really taking myself into account.

Some of that is just the type of people they are and maybe they’re not the right type of people for me to be in a relationship with. Some of that is also the way that I go into relationships. So I’ve talked before about the winning strategy which I can talk more about in another video.

But my winning strategy, the way that I got through life, that I survived, that I stayed safe, that I kept love, safety, and security was by understanding people and what they wanted and needed and being the best damn version of that that I could possibly be to ensure that they would choose me, they would love me, they would find a place in their life for me. And I’ve untangled a lot of that. I don’t operate from that space but I have created relationships from it that are very close personal intimate relationships.

This isn’t even about those people so much as it’s about me seeing that the way that I love other people at times is very unloving to me. So part of what feels so good about this move is not that I wanna isolate myself. That’s not the case at all. I meet people everywhere. I know I will have friends out there especially adventure buddies.

It is allowing me to step even further out of some of those relationships, so that I can spend some time loving myself, the way that I love other people.

Really loving and understanding myself, really creating a life that is nurturing for me, that is built 100% around what I want, what makes me happy without having to consider other people, without having to bend or fold or try to fit.

Is this a skill that I could learn in a relationship? Absolutely. The truth is, that’s not what feels right for me right now. What feels most aligned is focusing on the life that I wanna create. Starting there, living it for me, going and living in the mountains, buying the 4Runner, starting to create a life that fits with what I really want and having more time and space around me to really start loving myself the way that I love other people.

I don’t know what will happen with those relationships. I may step back into them, I may not. What I do know is that if I am ever to step back into some of them they will be nothing like they were before which is one of the reasons that I don’t know that they will survive this because again they were built on that foundation of me prioritizing their wants and needs, allowing certain behaviors, showing up in a certain way. Not having my own wants and needs, not having my own preferences, not asking for things from them. So I don’t know what relationships will look like for me going forward.

I do know the most important relationship is the one we have with ourselves.

And I’ve done a lot of work around that but choosing to move to Glenwood, choosing to leave everything known and familiar and the people that I love and that helped me through such challenging times, it feels like the most loving and honoring thing I can do for me. The thing I think I wanna leave you with today is around that loving yourself piece.

So we hear it. We hear it all the time. You can’t love another person until you learn to love yourselves. And you can. You can love other people. But maybe asking yourself, is the way that I love other people truly honoring and loving and nurturing to myself? Or is it self-sacrificing and self-compromising? Is it denying my own wants and needs? Is it making sure other people are more comfortable than I am? Because I’m good at it and I understand where they’re at and all of those things.

You’re a person too.
You exist too.
You get to have wants and needs.
You get to be messy.
You get to do things wrong.
You get to make decisions that people don’t agree with.
You get to live your life how you wanna live it.

And that is how we find the relationships that are most aligned for us. We show up and we live the life that we’re here to live as the person we’re here to be. And the right people will come in and the wrong ones will fall away.

Where have you been unloving to yourself while loving other people? What will you do to shift that today? How can you love yourself the way you love others?



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