Posted by mmorand on April 26, 2009
Feeling Resentful Anyone?
Hello out there!
What you’ve got in front of you is a fairly lengthy, but I trust, extremely helpful and informative article on how your feelings of frustration, resentment and insecurity in your relationships with others are really stemming from unconscious assumptions that you have made about the other person or about relationships on the whole.
I then share with you some concrete suggestions for what to do when you realize you’ve made assumptions and how to get to a place of peace within yourself and within the relationship. And, when you feel more peaceful and secure in yourself and in your relationships you will feel less inclination to use food to cope, guaranteed.
I hope you enjoy it and benefit from the tools!
P.S. Dn’t forget to email me and share your thoughts / experiences with these tools. And if you want more tools and articles make sure you’re signed up for our free bi-weekly newsletter: Food is not the Problem: Find out what is!
Have a great read.
Love Michelle
The problem with assumptions is not that we make them – although that does often cause resentment and confusion in our relationships with others – no, the real problem with assumptions is that most of the time we don’t even know we’ve made them – or that someone else has made some about us – until something happens in the relationship, contrary to our unconscious assumptions, and we feel the sting of perceived betrayal or the pain and grief of conflict where we thought we had unspoken agreement.
We typically just assume that others share our values and that their definition for, say, reliability, is the same as ours. We assume others think like us, feel like us, and will act like us in similar circumstances and when they don’t – and they won’t –we feel betrayed, misled, and start to question who this imposter is and what happened to the person we though we were in a relationship with!
This is a key step in the relationship process; seeing the person as they really are and not as we assume, and therefore expect, them to be. It’s the point at which we have the opportunity to step into true, adult love. Or, it could be the point at which we realize we really don’t like who this person really is now that the blinders are off. Either way it’s a very significant point in life. But this key moment of true seeing that comes to all relationships in time, is also limited by any other assumptions we’ve made about who this person is that we haven’t yet uncovered. In other words, often, at the same time as we’re seeing that we’ve made some erroneous assumptions (ie. reliability doesn’t mean the same thing to you as it does to me), we’re often still being unconsciously driven by other assumptions (ie. that you will surely see that my definition of reliability is the “right” one and you will change your behaviour to coincide with my definition) that have not yet been revealed to us. Sound like Greek?
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Hello All! I hope you had a positive and forward-moving week.
This is week two in our series on Self-Care. If you haven’t read last week’s post, click here to access The First Step to Self-Care. Last week we explored the different roles you have in your life and took a look at what you currently do in those roles vs. what you expect of yourself or what you’d like to see yourself doing based on your core values.
Next week we are going to pick up where we left off with the identification and articulation of our goals and come up with three small steps that you can take over the next little while for each of your goals to ease your transition from “here” to “there.” Any lasting change to our thinking and our behaviour comes gradually. It just doesn’t stick if we try to rush it. That’s because we don’t have the understanding or the life experiences that help us see the value in sustaining that change when we rush it rather than truly embody it. We also need to learn to make space in our daily lives for these new and different behaviours and, when we already have full-to-bursting lives where many things are falling through the cracks, it takes some time to create the space for something new without simultaneously increasing your stress level (which rather defeats the purpose of any new life enhancing behaviour, I think).
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