A Friend’s Perspective

I’m paraphrasing something that my best friend once wrote for me.

Many of us have someone (or people) in our life that challenges our ability to trust and care for ourselves...
When we hear their voice or are in their presence, we may forget all we know about what is real, about how to own our power, about how to be direct, about what we know and believe to be true, about how important we are...
We give up our power to those people. The child in us gets hooked with a mixture of powerful feelings - love, fear, or anger. We may feel trapped, helpless, or so desperate that we can't think straight. There may be a powerful tug of war going between feelings of anger and our need to be loved and accepted, or between our head and our heart...
We may be so enamored or intimidated that we revert to our belief that we can't react or respond to these people any differently...
We are in pain...
We start by becoming aware of the people who cause us pain, and then accepting that...
We can force ourselves through the motions of reacting differently to those people, even if that new reaction is awkward and uncomfortable...
We cannot change the other people, but we can stop playing our part of the game...
The next step is learning to own our power to take care of ourselves, to be who we are free from their influence. We can learn to own our power with difficult people, even those we love. We can own our power over the hurt and pain.  It may not happen overnight, but we can begin, today, to change our self-defeating reactions to the people who once loved us...