Resisting Reality Part 1

We don't always choose the circumstances we find ourselves in, but in this episode we talk about how to avoid heaping suffering on top of bad situations. 

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Transcript

0:27

Hey my friends. Before I had even met my ex husband, I dated this guy, and I was, like, desperately in love with him. I wanted to marry him, but it turned out that he already had a girlfriend. I didn't know it at the time that we were dating. She was away for a couple of years on a Mormon mission, so he was just using me in that absence. But he never had any intention of being serious with me. So when I started to want to be serious and have more serious conversations with him, he broke it off with me. And then told me about this other girl, and that's who he is serious about, and this was supposed to be nothing. And, of course, it devastated me. And at one point I decided that, you know what, I'm not the type of person to just give up. I'm not gonna just, you know, give up on this. I'm gonna make him love me. And in the moment, it seemed so empowering. Like, yeah, I'm not a quitter. I don't give up. Our culture just loves people who don't give up and aren't quitters. We really, really idolize that. And in the moment, it did, it felt so empowering. It felt so much better than grieving what I had lost. But the truth was, it was just resisting reality, and it did not remove the grief. It only delayed it. In the end, it was not empowering at all, because it was not based in reality. The reality is we cannot control other people. We cannot make someone love us. We cannot make someone treat us a certain way. We cannot make someone abuse us or not abuse us. The truth is we don't actually have any control over what people think, say, do or feel. And I was trying to resist the reality of that. And I was resisting that reality because the reality was painful. In reality, that relationship was over, if you could even call it a relationship. And that was painful for me. Reality was painful. So I tried to avoid reality and resist reality and pretend like I could change it, like I could change things that I really couldn't. And this is the reason why people resist reality. Whenever there's something really painful that we don't want to face, we will resist that reality and try to pretend that we can control things that we really can't. Resisting reality is like being one of those hamsters running on a wheel. You spend a lot of energy and effort but get nowhere. And it doesn't get rid of the pain. It only delays it and brings exhaustion and frustration. The unfortunate thing about pain is that it demands to be felt. Grief isn't going anywhere until you go through it. There is no way around it. The only way is through. If you are feeling really frustrated or stressed out by people or circumstances, there's a chance that somewhere in there you are resisting a reality and trying to control something that you can't actually control. And anytime you feel out of control, it is a guarantee that you are trying to control something you can't actually control. We talk about this a lot on here, because this is a big one for people, me included. We think that if only someone behaved differently or behaved how you think they should, then you would feel better. And maybe that is true, but the rub is that you can't make anyone be how you want them to be. You can only accept people as they are at face value. And then once you accept them, then you can decide how you want to be. And that is where your power lies. We can't control other people, but we can control ourselves. You may hate how someone behaves towards you. You can't change how they behave towards you. You do get to decide how you are going to show up for it, though. You get decide what to say, think, and do about it. When we say, Don't let someone treat you badly, it's not that you can control how they behave. It's that you can control what you allow in your life. If someone doesn't treat you, right, you remove them, you avoid them, you control what you can control. And the same with circumstances. Sometimes we find ourselves in shit tastic circumstances that just really fucking suck, and we can't always control that. But we always get to control how we show up for it. We always get to say, All right, this happened, now, what am I going to do next? How am I going to handle it? Our thoughts and our behavior are the things that are always in our control. That is where our power lies. Accepting reality lets us access our power. It lets us take control of what is actually in our control and spend our focus and energy on things that will actually help us. And I know it isn't always easy. It means feeling the pain that we were trying so hard to avoid. It is what helps us move forward, and even though it hurts, there is less suffering involved than there is when you resist reality. I like to say, when you resist reality, you lose, but only 100% of the time. I would have been much better off in my situation letting myself grieve and asking myself what I was going to do next since this relationship didn't work out. Instead, I spent weeks trying to formulate plans of how I was going to get him back, and calling him way too much, and stalking his Facebook, and honestly, just torturing myself and delaying the inevitable grief, which came later when it became too ridiculous to deny the reality anymore. I prolonged my own suffering by resisting the reality. Sometimes it isn't giving up at all, but accepting what is. And we have to have the wisdom to know the difference between the two. And so I would invite you, my friends, to consider if there is anywhere that you might be resisting reality, and how can you work to accept that reality and step back into your own power? All right, my friends, until next time. Be well.