Taking over responsibility in your (failed) relationships
Taking over responsibility when you feel wronged and hurt is probably the last thing on your mind, but hear me out. Letting go of the victim mentality and liberating yourself from the resentment that comes with the blame game (that we all to easily play when things go wrong), is the only way out of setting yourself up for repeating the painful patterns that lead to heartbreak in the first place.
Personally, that meant acknowledging that I tend to lose myself in relationships. It didn’t happen often, and it doesn’t happen fast (I am a slow burner. It will take time to gain my trust, but once I give it away, oh boy!), but it did happen before. I have given away my own power and autonomy way too willingly in exchange for love and a feeling of family that was missing in my life for the longest time. My longing for a family, someone to rely on or something as simple as having someone to call in times of trouble, has led me to over-giving. In an attempt to prove my value to my husband, I have been diminishing my own needs and desires and sometimes withholding my opinions.
In no way does acknowledging my responsibility clear my husband from his own wrongdoing. He is still the one who chose not to see me, not to listen to me or appreciate me for the longest time. But the bottom line is: I let him. I let him get away with it. I skipped over my own knowing, dismissed my feelings and, for sure, avoided to tell him the blatant truth about the way I was feeling.
I hesitated to put it all out there, because I feared I would lose everything. My children, my family, and, yes, the comfort of the known.
The moment I started checking and correcting myself, I took my power back. I am responsible for my life. No one can make me do something I don’t really want. The realisation I had about the dynamics in our relationship have been sad and, yes, painful. But reclaiming my power has also been exhilarating and full of hope for the future.
Today, space plays a big role in our (otherwise undefined) relationship. With everything that has been going down between us in the last two and a half years, I need space and time to listen more closely to my inner knowing and have the guts to act upon my intuition. As I am writing this, I am sitting in my own room, my own bed behind me, in which I will get into all by myself any minute now. Demanding space hasn’t come easily, but it is part of a new set of skills and capacities that I need to develope to evolve beyond the self-destructive patterns that have gotten me here in the first place.