Being Nice To People Who Don’t Deserve It Makes Them Disrespect You More Part: 1

The idea of being selfless has been a part of many of our cultures since the beginning of time. 

Many of us, especially women, have been infused with the idea that the less we take care of the self, the more selfless we are, the better we are. And that can create tremendous dissonance in the mind of someone trying to become happy, trying to figure out where the line is. How do I balance the need to feel seen? How do I balance my inner needs, that I have to express myself, with the needs of the family that I'm raising, or with my spouse or with people from church or the synagogue or in my religion? How do I balance what I feel on the inside with the pressures and the responsibilities and the obligations I feel on the outside? These are serious considerations.  

“When you're raised to believe that you are not good enough, it's tough to live your life through the heart space.”

Because what happens in the heart space is contraction. 

Now, if we could all live with open hearts, that would be amazing. And while I realize that this sounds very hippy-dippy, it's true. If we didn't have to walk around feeling hypervigilant, if we weren't raised by narcissistic mothers or fathers, if our parents didn't have alcohol addictions or some other type of addiction, and so on. If we had parents that were attuned to their own heart space, who had healed from their childhood trauma, then it would have been so much easier for us as children to have infused this idea within our subconscious mind that we were enough. 

Consequences of Not Feeling Good Enough:

Why is it so important to understand the consequences of feeling not good enough? 

Feeling not good enough causes a plethora of issues. When you don't feel good enough, you become co-dependent or even become narcissistic. You can develop depression; you can develop anxiety; all sorts of mental health issues can arise from not feeling good enough.

When you don't feel good enough, you're not striving to be your best. You don't even feel like you deserve to strive. 

“You don't know how to strive because you're stuck trying to survive.” 

When you’re stuck trying to survive, a lot of people get into behaviors that are counterproductive to striving, like getting into addictions. They play video games as a distraction all day long, or they're on the internet all day, for example. And so, if you look at it that way, we're talking about stuck energy. 

We're talking about energy that should be spiralling up, that is now staying stagnant. Think about water; water is energy, and what happens with water that stands still? It rots. So what happens in us when the energy that we are, becomes stagnant? It rots. 

How do we feel this? How does that get interpreted in our body? We feel anxious. We get sick. We have IBS. We have infertility issues. We feel hypervigilant. We might be super reactive. We don't trust people. We can isolate. All of these behaviors cause us to constrict and causes our world to become smaller and smaller. And yet, we were designed for socializing. 

“We were designed to feel connected to one another.” 

We were designed to feel connected to the earth and the sky. A lot of people say we're star seeds, and I get that. But if you think about a star, when the star explodes, all the elements in the star fall to the ground. It is from the ground that we come; that’s an amazing thing. So many people say, oh, I'm a star seed, or you're a star seed, but let's not forget that these stars burst, and all of the elements within the stars fell to the earth. We are children of the world. We come from the earth. So we are connected to the earth. 

And yet, so many of us feel separated from nature. We feel separated from the stars. We feel separate from the heavens. And is it any wonder that so many of our religions teach us that the God we should praise, look up to, or pray to is outside of us, rather than within us? If there is such a thing as God, doesn't it make sense that God is within us and not outside of us? To me, that speaks to separation. 

So how do I love myself? How do I get back to loving myself if when, throughout history, I've been taught that I'm not good enough, that I have to do something to prove that I am worthy? I come into the world feeling unworthy. 

I get what religions are trying to teach. They're trying to teach; these are the rules we need to be good human beings and find our way back to the God within. Even find our way back to the love that we are. And to do that, we have to face certain challenges. 

“But the goal really is to be able to return back to the self.”

So when I am selfless, I am not returning to the self. I didn't start with the self. I'm starting way at the end of outside left field, trying to get myself back to the pitcher's mound, if you will. And it's really difficult to do that when I have been taught from the beginning that I'm not good enough. 

If you want to break this pattern of being selfless and not loving yourself, I have a couple of things you can consider. The first is joining me for my next live 12-Week Breakthrough Coaching Program; this is an opportunity to work with my life coaches and me over three months. Find out more via the link www.lisaaromano.com/12wbcp

The second is you can check out my books on Amazon or Barnes and Noble: 

https://www.lisaaromano.com/lisas-books

 https://www.lisaaromano.com/