Let's Find out
“If I suffer for You, Will You Love Me?”
Most of us grow up and remain in the same roles we adopted from our childhood.
These roles sometimes meant that we denied our own needs while trying to meet the needs of other family members.
Let me explain
Sometimes as kids we are forced by circumstances to grow up too fast.
Perhaps one of our parents was absent due to death or divorce and we helped to take care of our siblings and sometimes even take care of the parent.
Or we lived with both parents. But because one was angry, or frustrated, or unhappy,
we found ourselves in between fights and frustrations hearing details of a relationship which we were too young to handle emotionally.
We could not protect ourselves, and our parents did not protect us either.
They expected us to be strong, even though we were too young for so much responsibility.
When this happened, we learned too young, and too well, how to take care of everyone... but ourselves.
Our own needs for love, attention, nurturing, and security went unmet.
We learned to pretend to be strong...
We pretended to be more grown up and less needy, than what we actually felt.
We learned to deny our own yearning to be taken care of,
So we grew up looking for opportunities to do what we had become so good at:
Being preoccupied with someone else’s wants and demands, rather than acknowledging our own needs and desires.
We have been pretending to be grown up for so long, We have been asking so little and doing so much, that now it seems selfish to put ourselves first.
So we help, and then we help some more…
We continue this vicious cycle, and hope our reward will be love…
And when a woman or man appears in front of us who offers us actual love, actual caring, and actual respect.
We cannot relate emotionally… We are not used to receiving, we are only used to giving.
So what happens?
We cannot feel a “connection”. So we go and search for someone else
Someone who needs us, Someone who we can take care of.
Usually someone who we falsely believe we can "fix".
it's exhausting, It’s lonely, often embarrassing and in fact very wrong.
But it is what we know… It is what feels right to us.
So RIGHT
that we choose to call it Love…
So how can we fall out of this "Love"?
#idoitforthelove
Author: Roshni Jagroep