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Nurturing Your Relationship with Yourself

Reclaiming the Freedom to Be Yourself

By welcoming all your feelings, positive and negative, you reach out to yourself and feel more whole and less alone.

Appreciate people who show empathy to you, don’t withdraw from them.

Don’t kill off your true feelings. It’s not right for you to feel fear and shame about feeling too much. You can reverse these self-betrayals by accepting your feelings just the way they want to be felt. The next time you feel excited, just let the feeling go through you uninterrupted. As an adult, you can let yourself experience your feelings in their unvarnished intensity. It’s the best way to get to know yourself.

Instead of scolding yourself with, I shouldn’t feel this way, you could think, I’m having this feeling. I wonder why? Every time you accept your feelings and feel curiosity instead of self-rejection or shame, you are defending the idea that your inner world makes sense and should be listened to.

Real intimacy is a shared understanding of each other’s inner experiences.

Emotional self-awareness allows you to share emotionally intimate relationships with others. The better you know yourself, the more compassionately you will feel toward other people.

It also gives you confidence that your feelings have meaning and that your instinctual guidance can be trusted.

There are five crucial gifts that come from your inner world.
1. Your inner stability and resilience
2. Your sense of wholeness and self-confidence
3. Your capacity for intimate relationships with others
4. Your ability to self-protect
5. Your awareness of your life’s purpose

Being active in an interaction where the EIP tries to dominate you into a passive role is inherently self-affirming.

1. Step out of your rescuer role.
2. Be slippery and sidestep.
3. Lead the interaction.
4. Create space for yourself.
5. Stop them.

once their distorted self-importance no longer mesmerizes you, you will realize that, in the big scheme of things, they don’t have the right to take you over, nor do they matter more than you. There are two human lives to be considered, not just one. It’s not true that their needs make them more important or entitled than other human beings.

setting a limit doesn’t mean you don’t love somebody. It just means you are claiming the right to think of yourself too.

Their coping mechanisms are flexible, and instead of trying to rigidly control everything, they look for the most adaptive, least stressful solution that takes all factors into account. To get through tough times, they might use humor, creativity, deliberate suppression of unhelpful thoughts, and altruism.

Adaptive, emotionally mature people have balanced lives and emotionally satisfying relationships. They can comfortably relate to the inner experiences of themselves and others. They accept reality on its own terms, adapting to it and mostly not fighting it.