My daily reflections: Push and Pull we Experience in Relationships

I had this thought today about how there is a push and pull effect we experience with relationships that are less than wholesome. 

First off there is this feeling of being used / manipulated controlled where a certain person usually someone we care for deeply and whom we wish cared for us. They know us well enough that they can easily “push our buttons” to arouse certain feelings in us. Maybe they are the ones who installed those buttons, those precipitators of  “not good enough” in the first place through comparisons and judgment and statements of insufficiency or lack. 

Or maybe they are people who watched our buttons being pushed by others and learned to emulate those pushing actions. Sadly those buttons are most often used to push and trigger our feelings of inadequacy.  And anytime we feel inadequate there is that subconscious play that unfolds as a result that always leads us to the same conclusion that we are somehow defective. 

And then when our emotions are heightened, when we are struggling when we are trying to understand, to work through, to find answers these same people have a fear response. They fear we will see the truth of their actions, that something will be revealed that is unflattering to them so they try to pull us away from our own healing. 

A common way of doing this is by implying that we are “too sensitive."  But a more harmful one is implying that "all you need is therapy, you are broken and therapy will fix you!" 

I have found that such people use the “you need therapy” line to deflect away from the fact that they are the cause of us needing therapy!  They don’t want us to realize that the way they treated us, judged us, complained about us, belittled us, condemned us has  anything to do with the way we feel.  They want us to jump to the conclusion that we feel the way we feel because we are intrinsically defective rather than explore that we are hurting because of what we have experienced / what has been done to us or said against us.

Another example is when you start to heal, start to create boundaries, start to say “NO”, start to care for yourself and show yourself self-compassion, start to go after your dreams, they try to pull you away from healing by calling you names like selfish or narcissistic.  They want to imply that the way you are healing toward knowledge and awareness is bad because knowledge and awareness exposes disturbed character patterns, reveals and exposes the truth about the  evil and or ugliness with which you have been treated 

So first they push us through their words and their actions into feeling insufficient, ineffective, not good enough, and then when we start to do authentic healing, they attempt pull us away from really exploring our innermost workings by implying that superficial talk therapy will expose our shortcomings, and that we need help exploring what is wrong with US rather than what is wrong with our relationship with them.

I sometimes get the feeling that those people in my life; who want me to put a bandage on my hurt emotions, who want me to stuff my feelings away in a dark corner, do so because they don’t want me to truly learn and expose that the problem I have is that I have for so long accepted their version of our reality.  Now that I am exposing my own reality, and see how they have tried to control my perception of my reality, they are afraid. They attempt to pull me away from healing, and too often they do so by trying to imply that my better, healthier more self-compassionate me is actually not healthy.  Of course if I comply they can then once again push my “buttons” of inadequacy! 

And so they attempt to push and pull again.

They push me away by calling me names or ignoring me, or excluding me.  And then as I distance myself in response to their pushing, they then resort to trying to pull me back in by implying that if I don’t forgive them and accept them the way they are (so they don’t have to change) that I am not being a loving caring person.   They try to pull me back in by implying I am defective if I don’t.  They imply that I am the problem for wanting to distance myself from their hurtful words and actions.

And so the circle could continue, if I let it. 

In stepping out of that circle, in creating a new path through my own discoveries, in learning that I don’t need to simply “talk about WHAT happened to me” but what I need to do is change the core beliefs programmed by what was DONE TO me;  I have become a threat.  I have become a threat to those who don’t want to see what I have exposed.  My discoveries lead me to the power of knowledge and they fear that my knowledge power will override their power of manipulative control. 

I have decided to take charge of the push pull in my life. I push myself to heal and I pull away from all situations that try to undermine my healing.

Renate Dundys Marrello

2018 – 06 – 05

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