My mom taught me self-love, and when I watched my mom’s reactions and decisions through her divorce process, I could see what the practice of self-love meant. I could see my mom’s sadness and pain, yet not once did she blame herself or beat herself up wondering if she had been a “good enough wife.” She knew that she had done her best for the relationship as a wife, as a best friend, and as a woman. My mom didn’t blame my dad because she didn’t attach her own value as a person to his decision to leave.
My mom respected herself enough to not see herself as a victim, so she simply wasn’t one. The truth is, people can only victimize us in this way when we give them responsibility for our happiness. It is easy to feel lost when we feel like the people we love don’t value us, but it is so important to know that the value of who we are as people does not diminish based on how other people see us. Don’t let your worthiness be determined by how someone treats you.
When we are in relationships, our happiness is still and will always be our own responsibility. And if your happiness is your own responsibility, then no one can ever make you feel diminished or unworthy. And that is self-love and self-respect.
Nobody Can Make Us Happy or Unhappy
<Perspective>
One of the main reasons why we unconsciously give our happiness away so easily to others is because we think that other people make us happy or unhappy.
When we go into a relationship or marry someone, it is because the person brings so much joy into our lives. When we fall in love, every other kind of happiness that we’ve ever felt can pale in comparison; so much so that it’s natural for us to settle on this one thought: this person makes me happy.
But that isn’t true.
It is you who made yourself happy—you made the choice to allow yourself to open up to someone incredible. You made the decision to commit to someone to whom you feel extremely connected. You made the choice to stick around and to hang in there through all the challenges and difficulties.
Nobody can make us happy, we have always been the ones who have brought happiness into our own lives.
If you’re feeling happy because you have great friends, it’s because you have chosen to surround yourself with genuine, generous, and loving people. If you’re feeling happy because you have a great family, it’s because you have chosen to be consciously grateful for them.
Similarly, nobody can make us unhappy. No wife, no husband, no boyfriend or girlfriend, lovers or exes, family or friends can make us unhappy—we have always been the only ones who can cause our own suffering and our own unhappiness, because it is always our response to the circumstances that determines whether we are happy or unhappy.
It’s never what happens or who happened, but how we handle it. It is also not whom we have or don’t have in our lives, because we cannot have a healthy relationship until we know that our happiness cannot be given to us by someone else.
We don’t expect people to lose weight for us, so why would we expect people to make us happy? We have to do that ourselves.
This is a perspective that my dad has never been able to truly understand. So much of his unhappiness lies in him being constantly at the mercy of people and circumstances—the smallest thing can make him angry, put him in a bad mood, and affect his entire day, if not his entire week.
Most of us don’t consciously think, “I blame the weather, the traffic, the waiter, that stupid person, my partner, and/or my boss,” but that is essentially what we’re doing when we have a tendency to be easily upset by people and circumstances.
When our thoughts carry us in a direction of blame, it is very easy to feel sorry for ourselves because we feel like people and things are always creating unhappiness in our lives. But our happiness is not in the hands of people and circumstances, it is inside of us.
As long as we are seeking happiness externally instead of cultivating it internally, it is likely it will be very hard for us to live with gratitude, because every time we feel grateful about something, we will find fault with a dozen other things.
Nobody can make us happy or unhappy, but we can always make ourselves happy.
Fulfilment in Love and Relationships
Understand the Relationship You Have with Yourself
<Understanding>
One of our deepest needs for happiness, or even for survival, revolves strongly around our connections and relationships with people. However, it is often our connections and relationships with people that cause us the most problems and bring us the most unhappiness. The one thing we need the most is also the one thing that challenges us the most. It would be very ironic if it didn’t make so much sense—where there is comfort, there is also challenge. The yin and yang of life is what creates balance, and to deny one by craving more of the other only serves to make us miserable.
Our quality of life is greatly impacted by the quality of our relationships with people, so if we don’t cultivate the skills of how to navigate through the difficult aspects of interacting with others, we will often feel very unhappy.
This is why we can have so much going for us yet feel so angry or frustrated most of the time. We can have an amazing career we know we’re lucky to have, yet go to work in a bad mood because we can’t get along with a colleague or with our boss. We can have a steady relationship we value, yet still feel resentful of our partner and what he or she isn’t contributing to the relationship. We can have a beautiful family we love, yet spend most of our time at home, impatient and short-tempered.
Life is strange in the way that we can see how much we have yet still not feel content. If this isn’t addressed, we will go through life chalking up many regrets along the way. Many of us are aware of this already, but we don’t know how to resolve the feelings of discontentment within us.
This is why I find it so important to learn how to build positive relationships with others, because it is the people around us who impact our happiness the most. Much of our dissatisfaction with life comes from dissatisfying interactions and relationships.
When it comes to relationships with people, it isn’t about making people happy or blaming and accusing those who make you unhappy—it’s about understanding your relationship with yourself.
It isn’t until we examine what our needs and fears are that we understand why we have an aversion to certain behaviors, or why we gravitate toward certain relationships, or why we put up a wall to protect ourselves.
It isn’t until we know what our ideals and expectations are that we understand why some people affect us more deeply than others, or why we might have a really strong negative reaction when people disagree with us.
We can be incredibly good with the day-to-day things of living, from feeding ourselves and our families to managing teams of people and putting out fires at work. This is partly because we spend years in school preparing ourselves for our careers, so as adults, a huge part of our brain space is dedicated to thinking about how to do or fix something. However, to be truly happy, we also need to learn to be aware of why we think the thoughts we do, why we want the things we want, and why we get upset over certain things. It is when we understand ourselves that we can stop outsourcing our happiness away so easily to other people.
Problems and challenges are inevitable in our relationships—pain and hurt are part of human interaction—but it is how we respond to them that determines how happy we are. To resolve problems in our relationships with people, we have to learn how to communicate. The hardest part about communicating with people is learning not to react negatively when we disagree—it’s hard to not feel defensive, judged,