The Most Important Relationships You Have is with You

You meet someone. You fall in love. Sparks fly, constant high, there’s nothing quite like that all-consuming whirlwind of falling in love. You want to know everything about this person. Every little detail. Where they come from, where they’re going, what they like, what they don’t. Their favorite food, their favorite band, their favourite position, you’re on a mission. But why is it that we’re so keen to know the inner workings of another but so blase about our own? Is it really that scary?

We live with ourselves 24/7. We’ve know ourselves since birth, we’ve been through EVERYTHING so it’s easy to assume we know best. We think we know ourselves intimately but do we really? And how could we if we haven’t taken the time to figure it out just like those early days of romance. Humans are complex and it’s safe to assume nothing. Take a minute to reflect on you – how are you feeling right at this moment? What are some of the things that bring you real joy? Do you even know? Most of us don’t. Self-knowledge is one of the most powerful allies you will ever have. 

You become the authentically you

To know yourself is to know your needs, your wants, your limitations, and your interests. It’s to know the things that float your boat and those that don’t. How can you live a life that’s true to you if you don’t know who ‘you’ even is? When you start to get in touch with yourself, your intuition you can begin to engage your feelings. From here you figure out what they mean and what they’re trying to tell you and you can live more in line with who you really are. 

You can make better decisions

Understanding your own behavior and where it comes from helps you to make better decisions in all areas of your life. Let’s say you have a tendency to push people away and you know this is deep-rooted in a fear of abandonment because you never had the consistent care you needed as a kid. Off the back of this, you formed the belief that people can’t be trusted, that people leave when you need them the most. As a child, you may have built a protective layer around yourself (and rightly so) telling yourself that you don’t deserve the care or love that everyone needs. Underlying unconsciously is a whole host of emotive energy ready and waiting to protect when you encounter a threat. Let takes a new relationship for example. You enter in with the best will in the world but as time goes on and intimacy looms autopilot kicks in, those deep-seated beliefs that you don’t deserve love kick in and you push it away. This all happens unconsciously, it can take the form of nitpicking or act out in other ways like not texting back or flirting with that guy in the bar. The point is that knowing your patterns is to be aware of the behaviors that may be self-sabotaging so that you can stop them in their tracks and live a life that’s true to you today, and not based on fear from the past. 

Connection with Others 

Often times we go about our daily lives craving for that thing we never really go as a kid. If we never had loved – we seek that. If we never had our feelings heard – we seek that. If we were constantly controlled – we may take on the passive role in life. This all happens unconsciously. As a result, we go around expecting of others the things we need for ourselves. How can we expect others to give us the things we can’t give to ourselves? Once we figure out of patterns of behavior, our sabotage of sorts we can do the work to fill our own tank so we’re not relying on others to validate us. We can begin to connect with others from a place of curiosity and interest in them rather than in what they can give us. That’s when the true magic happens. 

You’re the Caption of your own ship

On top of all that knowing yourself gives you power. The power to understand, the power to heal and the power to begin steering your own ship. Your past is not you, and you are not defined by it. Once you realize that your behaviors are not you, they are in fact a reaction or programming from the past you begin to realize that you can be whoever the hell you want to be and there’s HUGE liberation in that. Disorganized by nature? Maybe you never learned the basic skills, maybe you never had consistent care so the closest thing to home has been chaos. Issues with authority? Maybe it’s not that you’re a jumped up so and so but that you grew up with very little room to grow, your every move controlled and so the natural reaction is to reject any voice of authority that dare try tell you what to do. It’s normal honey and in knowing that you can finally begin to make the changes you so wholly deserve.