“I think the problem is that we depend on our loves to love us the way we should love ourselves.” Unknown
You blame your ex.
You believe your ex may have been the devil incarnate.
You believe your ex ruined your life and treated you worse than the worst person you’ve met today.
Why couldn’t they have loved you the way you wanted to be loved!?!
Isn’t that a partner’s job?
To love you unconditionally, without judgment and without hurting you?
Is that so much to ask?
Not really, except it wasn’t your ex who did you like this for you to blame your ex.
It wasn’t your ex who treated you badly first.
It wasn’t your ex who loved you badly first.
It’s easy to blame everything on your ex and consider him to be the bogeyman.
However, more likely than not, it wasn’t your ex who did you wrong.
Let’s go back in time.
When I was growing up, the people who mistreated me more than I could have imagined were my parents.
I doubt they did this maliciously or intentionally but without question, the way my parents spoke to me, punished me and disciplined me had a lot to do with how I turned out.
Now, before you jump ahead here, the point of this story isn’t to blame our parents, as much as we’d like to do that.
Our parents and families set the standard of what love looks like but…they royally screwed it up for many of us.
Your parents create the terrible soil for you to grow in:
Your parents likely spoke badly to you.
They criticized you unfairly and held you to impossible standards.
They likely insulted your intelligence
Made you feel unworthy
They must have sinned in a previous life to have given life to you (hey Indian parents!).
If it wasn’t your parents, it was your family.
If it wasn’t your family, other influences in your life made you treat yourself badly.
So, you inherited this problem that showed up later in your marriage and your spouse didn’t help with it.
How do we forgive the people who hurt us and forgive the people who didn’t love us like we were supposed to have been loved?
How do we then learn to love ourselves the way we want to be loved?
Blaming your ex and others for not loving us correctly is easy. Taking responsibility for our healing and our loving is hard.
Yet this is without question the hardest work that we have to do, especially coming back from a breakup or divorce.
The greatest factor in changing the way we look at ourselves, treat ourselves and deal with ourselves is how much we care for and love ourselves.
I’ve discovered that all our interpersonal successes, all our emotional and physical successes, all our achievements and worldly successes come down to this one thing.
So, let’s stop putting the responsibility squarely on our exes.
Don’t blame your ex. Let’s not blame your family either. They carried their own wounds and hurts from generations before.
“If you are irritated by every rub, how will your mirror be polished?” Rumi
It was the holidays.
It was the New Year.
It was just Valentine’s day.
When do we ever start the diet?
I think of myself as relatively healthy and swim a couple times a week.
Unfortunately it’s the carbs (&*$%#@@!* Indian food) and sweets (pies, cakes and candy bars) that are my downfall.
No matter how much I tried to avoid these things, I feel they are a constant and comfortable presence in my life. They constantly contribute to the additional 10 pounds of weight that I can do without.
Now, how many of us survive the holidays and stuff ourselves with all delicacies and then find ourselves in the new year resolving to eat less and be healthier?
How many times do you look at yourself in the mirror and ask yourself in a dramatic tone, “why ….why did you do this? Why did you indulge and wallop those savory gulab jamuns and sweet potato pies !!!”
How many times do you avoid looking at the mirror when you walk into the bathroom ?
How many times have you thought to yourself that you only want to look at yourself after you’re back to your ideal weight?
Maybe I’m oversharing here but the additional 10 pounds of weight – the “comfort pounds” as I’ll now start referring to them as are visibly more apparent when I look at myself in the mirror.
I wouldn’t usually notice this weight (trick here is to regularly buy oversized pants and shirts J so you’ll never notice when your weight creeps up by a few pounds here and there).
Anyway, where were we?
Oh yeah, looking at mirrors.
I wouldn’t notice this weight…except…
when looking at myself shaving or brushing my teeth, looking into the mirror.
I would notice my eating habits, my love for that cocaine like substance, sugar, and the additional comfort pounds that are now part of my life.
The Notorious B.I.G used to say “Mo money, mo problems” but let me venture to say…
More mirror, more problems.
Which now brings me to a topic that I touched on last week.
How to recognize our past blame at our ex’s and start shifting of responsibilities back to ourselves.
I talked about how to stop blaming our ex’s and taking responsibility for our lives if we wanted to move on.
While we do need to end the blame game, your ex was helpful in one way.
Your ex was the mirror to yourself.
Your ex helped show where the flaws and spider webs were.
Your ex helped show you what needed a fix-up, a touch-up or a complete make-over.
You likely hated every minute that you were shown these flaws because this space is uncomfortable and unpleasant.
Yet instead of looking at this as something to work on or improve, you likely got angry and frustrated with your ex.
You likely demonized them and wondered what was wrong with them.
You likely told all your friends and family that you were being tortured and couldn’t handle the nastiness of the relationship.
It was our flaws but we made the person in the mirror responsible, not realizing that we were ultimately the ones in the mirror.
No point beating up ourselves about this now.
You can’t change the past.
You can reflect on it.
You can inquire about what were the things you missed looking in the mirror.
You can take responsibility for it.
You can get to work on improving those things.
I’m going to share what one of the biggest shortcomings/flaws that our ex’s mirrored back to us next week.
In the meantime, what did your ex show you about yourself?
What did you need to work on?
What are your skeletons?
What did you see in the mirror?
Hit reply and let me know.
And of course, if you’re not on the V-team email list, get on it please 🙂
She was so difficult, challenging and uncompromising.
She couldn’t give in, not even an inch.
So many of these thoughts swirled through my mind as I squarely placed the blame for my divorce on my ex.
When the marriage ended, my blame meter was supercharged.
If she had just changed, everything would have been ok.
If she had been just a little more forgiving or a little more respectful or a little more accommodating, we could have made it work.
I was angry with her not only for the marriage’s end but for the way she showed up in the marriage.
I felt she had so many problems and I simply couldn’t fix them.
What a difference 7 years makes!
My journey to coming to terms with my divorce and moving on came down to one very basic and profound lesson about love, relationships and life.
Ready?
It has nothing to do with anyone else.
Let me repeat: Your journey and your growth and your happiness have little to do with other people.
Your partners and spouses are simply mirrors of whom you really are.
All the issues you find in your ex have more to do with you than with them.
I know.
You don’t agree.
I don’t want to agree.
I want to fight this notion and I did fight it for years.
Until the epiphany one day: What if it was me?
What???
How sacrilegious of me to say this!
How disrespectful to myself!
Yet, that’s what I can ultimately share with you about my most profound experience from divorce.
It really had nothing, or very little, to do with the other person.
(I understand that in some situations, the other person is violent or abusive, or has serious underlying issues. In such cases, that person is responsible.)
Those of us who get divorced are on the high-speed train to inner growth, spiritual growth and wisdom. But ….
only if we let that happen.
This can start only when we take the blame off the other person and focus on ourselves.
Let’s say you don’t quite agree and are intent on convincing me that the other person was the one at fault.
Your ex cheated on you, was mentally or emotionally abusive towards you, left you…
Even in these cases, I’m suggesting that those are things you have very little control over.
You CANNOT change, correct or fix your ex or anyone else in your future.
You CAN make wiser and smarter decisions about whom you choose to be with.
And…you can try to figure out what issues you brought to the table, how you dealt with your ex and what you can do differently.
This was my biggest lesson. It doesn’t have to be yours.
If you strongly blame your ex and believe your ex is at fault, fine.
You can let it be but you may be robbing yourself of the opportunity to take responsibility, do your own inner work and improve your own life.
If you’re ready to move past the blame game and holding your ex responsible for everything that happened in the past, it’s time to get honest about some of the questions you’re asking yourself.
How could you have shown up differently in the relationship?
How did you make things worse for you or your ex in your relationship?
How could you have handled things differently in your past relationship?
What are your triggers and shortcomings when it comes to relationships?
What kind of help or tools do you need going forward?
What are the lessons and insights your former guru, your ex, was able to leave you with?
What are you still angry about?
What are you still resenting?
What are the things you need to forgive and let go of?
Who are you becoming with this self-awareness, knowledge and insight about yourself?
The longer you hold onto the blame, the longer it’ll take for you to move on.
This doesn’t happen overnight or immediately.
It took me several years to go from blaming my ex to slapping myself in the face and realizing that I was the one who had the issues!
Again, she may have had issues too but it wasn’t my job to fix them. I don’t have the tools to help her solve her issues, triggers and shortcomings.
All I could have done was point them out to her and all she could have done was the same.
If you’re resisting what I’m saying, I get it.
It took me the better part of a decade to get here.
It’s so much easier to blame and shift responsibility.
It’s convenient and comfortable to feel like nothing is wrong with you and that you brought no issues to the table.
It doesn’t require us to do any work or take any action yet we are losing the self-growth and insight that accepting responsibility fosters.
Have you taken responsibility for your past relationship? Did you play a role in the deterioration of your marriage or relationship?
I’m curious to hear what you have to say. Drop me a line and reply to my email.
If you’re not getting emails, sign up for my weekly messages so we can communicate.
Kajal Pandey, Transformational life coach and truth teacher
I hope you enjoy this video above and the important questions Kajal asks us to ask ourselves in order to improve the relationship we have with ourselves.
I had also asked Kajal share the Dear Beloved: Love Letters to Yourself project she’s created below.
Here she is:
Three years ago in meditation an idea struck me, which was to write a love letter to myself.
Intrigued and willing, I decide to take it on as a 30 day challenge of writing daily love letters to myself.
Writing love letters to myself daily served as a practice of loving myself, but also greatly changed my perception of myself as it allowed me to know what was really going on in my inner world and how I felt about myself.
Inspired by that initial idea this workbook was born!
The workbook includes:
31 love letter prompts to help you understand your relationship with yourself, and actually improve it at the same time.
The tools of self-love that make loving yourself tangible and easy-to-do with complimentary exercises.
What self-love habits are and how to create your own self-love habits.
Affirmations as a tool to train your mind to focus on positive, life-giving thoughts about yourself.
A mini relationship with yourself quiz to help you get clear on where you are with yourself right now.
Plus bonus videos (10) on self-love topics and access to the a private facebook group to ask questions and support!
Kajal Pandey is a transformational life coach and truth teacher. She is passionate about guiding people into their inner world so they can create a life they love. She does this by teaching people how to embrace their darkness, unlearn who they think they are to remember who they really are in truth. You can learn more about here work here: http://www.kajalpandey.com
Regardless of who loves you and validates you, you can’t invite romance into your life until this happens first.
Don’t believe the Hollywood hype and pop song lyrics You are not complete and whole simply because someone else loves you. Click on the above video to watch.
For more on this topic, check out my books at the Amazon store here:
I help people overcome their devastating breakups and divorces and find love again. Instead of visiting the Himalayas, sign up below and join me. I am taking a writing break but will be back soon.
This guide is free. A ticket to the Himalayas is $2000. Your move.
