Offering Another Serving Won't Help

I have a complicated relationship with the word deserve.
It can carry a whiff of entitlement or victimhood. Like 'I don't have it and I am powerless to get it'.

And yet—here’s the truth we often try to outrun: we all need love, care, and emotional safety.
Where things go sideways is where we go looking for it.

The pattern we can fall into unwittingly is asking for that love from those who do not have the capacity to give it to us. You try to get someone who isn't emotionally fit to meet you, to meet you.

I've done it. I kept giving more.  I kept trying more. I kept fixing it again and again. I kept doing more, stayed longer than felt healthy for me.  But trying to get love from somebody else by abandoning yourself will never bring what you are really reaching for – connection to yourself.

Over-functioning in the hope that someone will love you for it—especially when they’re operating in their own survival mode—often creates the very distance you’re trying to avoid and attracts people who can’t meet you emotionally.

Pretending you don't have needs or feelings in an attempt to get love & to be valued by those who have limited capacity to give us this – is like voluntarily giving away your cake and then being mad at them for you doing it.

Making people “wrong”, cutting them out of your life, won't get you what you seek either. It will only deny you of your own capacity to love fully.
This isn’t about tolerating harm or staying where you’re diminished.
It’s about not outsourcing your self-worth to either their approval or their rejection.

I can love you and I have to tend to what I need. I can't tolerate over compensating and not being met as a means of my surviving emotionally.

When you stop over-functioning, those who benefitted from you doing so will show you their actual capacity for relationship and connection. Some will leave, and this will break. your. heart. Let their disappointing behavior remind you of who you are and how you’ve grown—of what you would never do to someone else. 

For me I've had to become aware of my over-giving  over-functioning and putting myself and my needs on the line to try and earn love from those who can't meet me emotionally and then be confused and resentful when they, of course, can't or won't.

That's asking someone who's not emotionally fit to give you what you're not giving yourself.

When I stopped trying to earn love from those who couldn’t meet me, I had to finally meet myself.

XOXOXOXO
Sandy