Saturday, November 23, 2019

Being Tender To Those Who Deserve Your Tenderness









“If you’ve ever met an energy vampire (and you probably have), you’ll get the distinct feeling that this person has an intense need to prey off the vitality of others. There is a kind of acute neediness present in energy vampires which can be quite overwhelming and depleting to those they come in contact with.”
Mateo Sol, Awakened Empath: The Ultimate Guide to Emotional, Psychological and Spiritual Healing

We can all become overwhelmed with stresses that are real or sensed. Everyone is one more stressor away from crashing.  We crash differently.  When we crash, we feel differently.  We can arc between guilt, sadness, shame, feel, physical illnesses, sleeplessness, and there is a constant struggle within.  All we need is for someone else to doggedly, constantly, digging into what empathy we have left for self, by choosing to niggle into our heads and adding more and more stress than we already are battling.  While we are trying to wage war within, against negativities, we can have people piling their own on us, if we do not set boundaries.  Sometimes we set boundaries when it all goes down, because we trusted that the other would not continue to pile it on.  

Some people are bone-lonely.  They lose or block out more and more of their network people, family and friends, and then focus in on using those who are use-able.  Sometimes we have to extricate ourselves so that the other can turn back to past friends, to past family, to past networking people in order for us to finally take care of our own issues.  Our own issues really need to be examined, as well, because we allowed this to happen and the more we tried to turn things to the positive, the more the other can push with drama and constant negative issues that you, in no way, can fix, nor should we have to.  

There are brooders out there, stuck in their mires of choice and, in an almost macabre way, enjoying the muddle.  They have learned to get attention through chaos and are constantly building their own sense of poor-poor me in the slightest of things.  But, they do not want to fix things themselves, and make an effort to do anything about it all because it is easier to hook on to someone else and have them be their new reason for feeling negative, rather than picking themselves up and dusting themselves off.  At some point, we need to dive into clearer waters just to get some of the byproduct of their brooding off us.  

There are those who, without, necessarily, conscious controlling, want to control how you feel as well.  They will invalidate your own feelings while magnifying their own.  When we reject ourselves in order to abdicate our own emotional health for someone else, they are empowered to lean harder.  When we step away, it is not out of rejection, it is because we need a break.  Just because we say learn on me, it does not mean, always and forever.  We all have strengths and weaknesses and we all have the volition to use those skills or not.  The pressure can be huge when they are those who constantly feel rejected when every little thing does not go their way.  One builds a sense of guilt if we were to start to pull away to save ourselves.  And, there will be evidence that this has happened before with other people, but sometimes our love and compassion becomes their tool to dig in deeper. 

We all have grief and we all respond to grief in different ways.  We never get over a truly huge loss in our lives, we change, and sometimes that change is permanent and sometimes that change means that our love for the lost grow more dignified and fuller so that we blossom rather than stand around like a dead piece of straw.   Part of the grief process is learning to grow into more of ourselves, rather than who we thought we and the lost one were, in our lives, and who we memorialize as more perfect than was.   There is a time and place for embroiled grief stages and should dissipate and change into growth as we discover we are taking their place in life.  That is how the loss of Man Hands has affected me.  I do not bathe myself in pity as I try to make a new life because of that loss.   It is not easy and it teaches patience with others who do not.  It is way too easy to say we can get through it.  We only get through it and move into something different than our hopes and dreams that were lost with our loved one.  Other people's grief that is mired, can get us stuck too. If we do not realize that we reopen old wounds, sometimes, we are not being tender with each other.  

In part, you can recognize someone who has been sucking your emotional energy, by how guilty you feel if you do not jump to their sad whims and negative needs.  Sometimes our lives being easier, or that we moved more quickly, can turn us to stone and we come to think we deserve someone else's burdens.  It is seriously okay to feel good when others do not, but you can be drawn into their sadness, bitterness, misery very easily if you have been primed to feel what they feel.  Boundaries.  Another case of boundaries that we should have set maybe a long time ago, in order to save ourselves when our own saving is needed.

Every one of us is victim to something, some place, or some people.  We have to seek solutions, of our own, to combat these things.  We either choose to let it all be our problem, or we can nurture and be tender with ourselves so that we grow emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually.  Tales of woe can bring us back down to things that make us tired and have us feel used.  We need to draw within and really take a long look at how to put things into perspective.  We are not empowering ourselves and others, if we do not help them stand on their own two feet.  We are becoming enmeshed and that is not a nice place to be.  Serenity, peace, self-tenderness, can be lost amid the fray and the void is heavy as stone when you realize you saved nothing for yourself.  

Society has become such a narcissistic society.  We are important, but not the only important one.  We are enough, for ourselves, not necessarily for others.  We need to learn that what we expect of people, places, things, is not exactly how it will go.  Being self-dependent is huge. People who need positive or negative ego-stroking are not the kind of people that keep us healthy.  Their needs come before all else, no matter how close you are.  Raising your own energy-field does wonders to the energy in the ether.  Do not be a drainage ditch.  It is so easy to be this.  I have been, as have most, and, in the end, it only makes life more difficult for everyone. Setting boundaries is key, for self and for others you include in your circle.   We should make each other's lives easier, not more difficult.  We need to really watch ourselves that we are not adding to the drainage problems of today's living.

Be tender.  Be tender with self.  Be tender with others.  Don't turn a field of daisies into a field of swamp.  Be careful with yourself that you are not a swamp-field inmate or developer. Be tender but take no crap, either.  Be tender with self yet keep a sharp eye out that you do not drain someone else's positivity that they might have been clinging to.

©Carol Desjarlais 11.23.19

No comments:

Post a Comment