My dear Jil, just as we self-diagnose basic ailments like headache, I believe we should diagnose ourselves emotionally. Oh yes, there’s such a thing as emotional ailment. We get emotionally ill for example from being jilted. We pay scant attention to emotional ailments. And yet it accounts for many of our physical ailments. Doctors have learnt to look for psychological diagnosis when physical symptoms lack known causalities. Many instances of debility and physical breakdown are caused by emotional problems, depression in particular. A woman in an abusive marriage may for example, suffer recursive instances of extreme debility – chronic fatigue syndrome. She WON’T be able to get up in the morning because of tiredness occasioned by emotional abuse.
Unresolved emotional issues, especially from the past can greatly impact on the quality of a new relationship. Those issues may end up breaking the relationship, make it impossible. Means the baggage from the past is excessive. Sometimes we’re not even aware of the baggage. It’s buried deep in the recesses of the mind, until something triggers it. Excessive fights in a relationship may be coming from unresolved challenges from a past relationship. And so even though we’re wonderful, marvellous and all that, the past keeps tripping us up. The law of emotional cost states that if the emotional cost of maintaining a relationship is too high, it will lose value. For reasons not very clear, men for example are very scared of temperamental women. Out of control. It’s like she can fly off the handle at any moment. No one wants to walk on eggshells around anybody in a relationship.
I want you to check out these emotional values and do self-diagnosis. (If you realise you have a problem in an area, humility demands you admit it in order to take a corrective course): Insensitivity, controlling nature, volatility, acute sensitivity, low self-esteem, temperament, vindictiveness, unforgiving nature, malicious disposition, emotional stinginess, accusatory nature, enviousness, selfishness, self-centredness, manipulativeness, uncare, lack of empathy, wilfulness, oppressiveness, irritability, emotional abusiveness, emotional viciousness, stubbornness, unteachability, drama, emotional baggage, issues… These are the ones I could readily come up with. Are you guilty of any? You’ve got to be honest with yourself.
Some of the issues you’re having in your relationship may be because of these emotional states. If you’re emotionally stingy for instance, it’s a matter of time before you drain the guy emotionally. And he’s soon going to start feeling cheated, or feel he’s in a one-sided relationship. A one-sided relationship is like playing Ping-Pong with yourself. A good relationship has emotional balance. Both parties are emotionally generous with each other. They pay each other compliments, don’t get into a quid pro quo situations, don’t measure who loves more. Emotional stinginess can be indicative of a controlling nature, which can be indicative of insecurity. And sometimes that is coming from an ideology or from a past experience – the belief a man must be subjected. It may be coming from your mum’s experience with your dad – your desire to take a corrective measure. Or it may be what your mum or aunt taught you. But it won’t get you what you really want. The best way to receive love is to give love. A generous love begets generous love. The man who won’t reciprocate generous affection soon loses it.
I’m just saying some of the stuff we do and the way we are many times is a reflection of things from our past. Acute sensitivity for example may be coming from a successiveness of bad treatment from the hands of men. And so ANYTHING that remotely RESEMBLES what a past boyfriend did is shut down, hard! The feeling of not being needed or valued can also provoke that reaction. Or a lack of self-esteem. If you gave 120% and still ended up being treated badly, it can lead to a lack of empathy in a new relationship. It will flow from a newly developed philosophy of no mercy. And yet the offender is not the current boyfriend! One has to be careful about developing a philosophy of life from one instance of experience. And one has to be careful about creating a generalization because of just one bad example. Life is in chapters. Learn to turn the chapter of your life from the pain of the past. There’s always another chapter.
There are things you shouldn’t try to sort out all by yourself. There are things you need help with. And there are scores you can’t settle. And you shouldn’t be settling scores. It makes no sense to destroy oneself emotionally by becoming bitter because of what someone else did. Vindictiveness is a very dangerous trait. It ultimately snatches the prize of a happy life from us. One of the most dangerous of the listed emotions is enviousness. The envious never come to terms with the cause of envy. They come up with excuses for envy though the reason is often another thing entirely. Envy is irrational thought malice. Fight the base lust of enviousness in you. Be happy with whatever you have, unconcerned with the gifting of another.
If we don’t emotionally diagnose ourselves, identify our problem; there’ll be fights in our relationship. We will chase good men away and subject our lives to the possibility of a life of regret. There’s only so much a good man can bear in a relationship. It’s not as if we don’t know these things are wrong, but we keep doing them because we feel we can get away with it. And we keep doing it because we have always gotten away with it. But we never know what we lose in the process. And we will never be aware of what we have lost. The bad thing about unhealthy emotions is that we’re trapped in ourselves, bloated by our estopped flatulence. And when we let it out the smell is odious, which then makes others run away, and exacerbates our feelings. You shouldn’t be accusative either. No one wants to be around a constant accuser. Consider all what I’ve written.
Your mentor, LA
© Leke Alder | talk2me@lekealder.com