understand yourself

By Julia Armstrong

Love really and truly does make the world go round. What we all want is to be loved and accepted for who we truly are, rather than when we are thin enough or beautiful enough or clever enough or successful enough.Right now – loved, accepted and celebrated.

Real love accepts another for all they are and desires to encourage them to grow and flourish to be all they can be.

To do this for another you must learn to love and accept yourself, as what you cannot accept in yourself you will certainly find difficult to accept in another. The magic is that one of the ways to give this gift to yourself is to start to think in terms of what you can give someone, how you can be more loving, how you can learn to get into their world. In doing this you will heal yourself.

Bad Behaviour

So how do we practice loving in this way? It sounds good, in theory, until someone does something we don’t like one bit! When you feel irritated or you find you dislike something in another person, or they criticise or hurt you in some way that leads to your reacting to their behaviour, stretch yourself to discover what pain lies at the root of your reaction. Seek to understand it. Your reaction comes from your own pain, your own wounds from your unmet needs in childhood. In seeking to understand the other, and in noticing your own reactions, you will stretch yourself and you will grow.

Sometimes a behaviour you dislike can reflect an aspect of yourself you disowned as a child because the adults around you told you it was not acceptable. As a little child, our parent’s approval guaranteed our survival and so disapproval literally spelled danger! These disowned aspects of yourself can often be projected onto other people, and be manifested in your making up what is going on for them through the filter of your own lens. This isn’t necessarily aspects you find difficult either, sometimes what we admire in the other is something we haven’t been able to claim for ourselves. You might find admiration turning into reactivity in the form of envy, which will alert you to a possible direction for you on your own journey toward wholeness.

Projection

So your own process is twofold – notice your reactivity and seek to find and understand your core pain. Without taking the first steps along this path you might keep projecting your own story onto the other, which can only serve to confuse the relating. For instance, your father might have always ‘told you what to do’ and you may have reacted by feeling that your own opinion was of little value or perhaps that you had no control over your own life. Then as an adult you may very well find yourself reacting when your boss or your partner ‘tell you what to do’, which can put strain on the relationships. It might be that your boss is simply talking over goals for the day and your partner may be making suggestions about how you both spend your weekend. People can do similar things  but with a different intention, which is why seeking to understand our reactions gives us the opportunity to love more freely, move towards the other and really hear them with compassion.

Don't be treated badly

This does not mean you should put up with being treated badly or put yourself in harm’s way. If you allow yourself to be treated badly, your work will come in seeking to explore why you would allow this and so the process is the same. Even in the perpetrator there will be pain and unmet needs to understand.

The unconscious mind doesn’t know the difference between someone being kind to you or you being kind to another. The same positive feelings abound in both directions. So by committing to understanding yourself and stretching to understand others you will expand and grow.

In being loving you will find love flows back to you.

Julia Armstrong:

Julia has worked with people for over thirty years as a relationship coach and therapist. Her skills lie specifically in enabling people to have healthy and happy relationships with themselves and others. Julia's work leads others towards real connection, healing and personal growth, allowing relationship to become a place to experience living with more joy and creativity. She is currently running workshops in Brighton and Eastbourne – please see www.juliaarmstrong.com for details.