Balancing Acts: Navigating Life's Extremes

Hello and welcome to another episode of Words With Myself.

When people go through traumatic experiences in life, especially early on in the start of their life, they tend to veer towards two different paths.

They're either going to feel angry and resentful and want to punish the world for how they were treated, or they will want to safeguard the world and protect other people to make sure that other people don't go through the pain that they went through and just because you start off on one path that doesn't mean that you won't change to the other one somebody who has been consistently showing up for people and trying to protect them and constantly suffering might grow to

become resentful and bitter later on and somebody who started out being angry and resentful might process that anger and realize that they've been hurting other people and then want to make serious change and go to the other path and protect other people instead. But what you will see commonly happen is that those people who are angry and resentful, they often have quite visceral and obvious consequences of what they're doing.

It's quite clear how detrimental of an impact that anger and resentment is having on their life. It will push away people that they care about, it might get them into trouble with the law, it might cause them to be self-destructive and ruin the good things in their life and sooner or later they're going to be driven to isolation or surrounded by other angry people. People that see themselves as victims of life.

But the people who go the other route, the people who turn inwards, end up with something that is a lot harder to identify because they believe that they have justice and righteousness and goodness on their side. They believe that what they are doing is the right thing to do, so they have a much stronger motivation to stay where they are, to keep repeating the patterns that they're repeating, especially because they hold this idea in their mind that it's either this or that.

They're comparing the two extremes. It's either I'm a nice person who's good and I try to do everything for everyone or i am someone who is horrible and malicious and evil and i'm doing everything to hurt everyone and i don't care about other people. And those are the two extremes, but those are not the only options. You do not have to pick between being evil or being a nice person. Because as we know, any time that you sit on an extreme, you're going to be out of harmony.

If you are too soft, the world will take advantage of you. And if you are too harsh, you will become cruel and start taking advantage of other people. If you are too cautious you will end up missing opportunities and if you take too bigger risks you're going to end up in danger. The key is to realise that no extreme should be the goal. I shouldn't want to be too far left nor too far right, too far up or too far down. I want to be balanced.

That should be the goal. You can only really start to make a truly informed decision about who you want to be and what you want to do and what you want to accomplish when you have a big picture idea if you're cutting off whole parts of yourself those parts of yourself that are experiencing anger or resentment or those parts of yourself that want to nurture and love people you're going to end up separating yourself from a really important aspect of

yourself the anger is there because you feel like you are mistreated and in order to not get mistreated again that anger serves its purpose of affirming those boundaries. Oftentimes, this comes in less than ideal ways. It becomes violent or aggressive. That's when anger has taken over and you're no longer in harmony. But that doesn't mean that anger is wrong or horrible or you shouldn't be angry.

The anger is there to show and to signal to you how you feel, to point out the injustice that you feel like you're experiencing. It's not something that is terrible or should be avoided, it's something that should be listened to, heard and understood. And the same goes for every emotion. They're not there because they're terrible. There is no bad emotion. There's nothing that you shouldn't be feeling. It's just how you act on that and how you process that emotion.

That's where the problems arise. Because we feel like because we feel this, we're justified for doing something that we know is out of alignment with who we are. But at the same time, we can't do nothing. We can't ignore it and pretend like that's not how we feel or those feelings don't exist.

And that's how most people convince themselves you know they say well i'm a nice person and they try to do nice good things but they end up letting people trample all over them they have no boundaries they're not sticking up for themselves and a lot of people end up feeling like this is justified because they just want to be good they just want to be nice people and good they don't want to do any harm to anyone else and they don't want anyone

to do harm to them and i imagine this fits the description for a lot of us listening. We want to be good people. We want to do good.

But there is this big distinction that is important to make between being good and being nice. Being nice is changing every one of our actions or considering all of our actions through the lens of how other people feel. And being good is doing what we know in our heart is right and true.

Sticking with our intuition and that's why when you're nice you're anxious because you have to constantly contend with everyone else's feelings and we have to predict and analyze and try to understand how someone's going to react to what we say or what we do or someone might take something that we do in the wrong way and someone might take it in the right way someone might agree with us someone might disagree with us so it's better

to kind of do nothing at all in those instances you're kind of damned if you do, damned if you don't. So what a lot of nice people end up doing is not a lot at all. They avoid. Because to do, to act, you have to risk being offensive. To say the right thing to stick up for someone, you have to risk being offensive or upsetting someone else. If somebody might be unintentionally hurting somebody else and you say, actually, don't say that.

That's not right. You're being cruel or what you're saying is hurting somebody else. Well, that person is then going to feel like, oh, I'm the bad person.

So you've upset the person, even though they were doing something wrong, whether that was to their knowledge or not you're then upsetting that person so a nice person will do nothing because that's the only way they get out of this situation without hurting anyone but the person who is good will say that's not right I need to speak up here because I know in my gut and in my heart that what's going on is not right and I need to speak up for what is good and a lot

of you are probably thinking well I would do that I would do something if I saw someone was being horrible to someone else I would step in and say something but would you do that for yourself.

Because being nice is about disregarding the self it's not about disregarding other people even if you would step in for somebody else would you step in for yourself that's where the nice versus good comes into effect when you will do things for other people but you won't do it for yourself you'll stand up and affirm other people's boundaries but you won't affirm your own you become this self-sacrificial lamb to the world where you're saying well if the only way to

not cause pain is to absorb it then i'll absorb it i'll take it all i'm strong i can handle it you know be horrible to me do whatever you want to me but just leave other people alone you end up becoming some sort of martyr for the cause you know that you want to be a good person but the only way that you know how to act on this without causing more suffering is to sort of take it on the chin to accept that it's your fate to suffer in the hopes that that

means that if you can absorb or take on some of that suffering that it will take it away from somebody else instead of standing up to the suffering and stopping it from the source you accept it as your own but even these Are incomplete examples Because it involves Somebody doing something bad. Whereas there is also the case where it's just about putting yourself first. Doing something good for you versus doing something good for someone else. People call it selfishness.

Many of us are convinced that the definition of being selfish is putting ourselves before others. But that makes no sense. Because to put others before yourself means that you can't really help others.

You're not in a position to help others. you can't help others if you're weak and you're tired and you're exhausted and you've got no resources you can help people like really help people if you are charged up if you are energized feeling good healthy happy and have the resources to help and if you are constantly putting others before yourself if you are constantly giving away everything that you have how can you possibly help other people you might help people on a micro scale

but on the macro scale you're not really doing anything and oftentimes in the in the micro scale helping people isn't actually helping people if i do something for someone because i want to help them in the micro scale that help is well intentioned and they might be like yeah you help me in that instance but if you zoom out and view that help in the macro you can see that you constantly stepping in to help them has actually taken away from their ability to be self-sufficient and independent and

learn for themselves it's like when you help someone at work and you give them a bit of advice or help and then they keep coming to you for help and advice but what's happening is that you are doing their work for them so they're never going through that difficult process of learning and getting.

It wrong and making the mistakes and instead we're trying to make sure that they avoid the mistakes but the mistakes are how you learn and the same goes for life we want to help people so they don't suffer in the ways that we have suffered. By taking away and removing that suffering, we are robbing them of the opportunity to become stronger individuals, to learn from their mistakes, to make the mistakes in the first place.

And thus, you don't really know whether you're actually helping or not. You could be doing something to the detriment of somebody else and calling it help. That only really serves to polish your ego. It doesn't actually provide some meaningful and tangible help to somebody. And of course then the difficulty becomes, well, how do I know whether I'm doing good? How do I know whether I'm helping somebody or whether I'm falling into the same traps of just trying to be nice?

And the truth is, you can't. You can't see the future. You can't know the impact that you have on the world. All you can know is your intention. All you can do is stay true to who you are and what you know to be true.

And if you're truly honest with yourself you probably know when you're doing something against your beliefs or against what you want to do if you don't want to do it don't do it if you feel like you've accepted or you helped somebody and now you can't stop helping them stop if you feel like somebody is taking advantage of you or they keep asking for something and not really giving much in return stop if you've started

helping somebody but you've noticed that you're really getting drained and exhausted or it's making you irritable or angry or you're resenting doing it, stop. But the problem is we don't stop. We don't listen to ourselves. We don't honour how we feel or honour ourselves. In the pursuit of being nice, we stuff down how we feel and we say, well, we need to do this. We need to do this for somebody else under the guise of morality. Under the guise that we're doing the right thing.

But it's not the right thing because we're not honoring ourselves. We're not staying true to ourselves. And a lot of this is all underpinned by trust. But you can only build that trust with yourself by proving that you're going to listen to yourself, that you're going to listen to your gut and your intuition, that you're going to honor and respect your feelings.

Because otherwise, why would you trust yourself? You can only build that trust by doing something different. So that if you have a tendency to not put in good boundaries and people take advantage of you, when you start putting boundaries in place, you can then trust yourself more. And that way, you don't have to worry about helping somebody. Because you will only help somebody when you want to help somebody and it won't feel like a prison.

For a lot of people, when they start doing something for someone, they feel imprisoned by that. Trapped by this responsibility to the other person. that you've agreed to something that somehow you can't back out of. And rather than saying something like, well, I've helped you to the best of my ability, but now I have other things that I need to attend to or focus on. If you keep pushing on and helping people, even though you know you're past the point, that trust is going to be eroded.

If you put in a boundary, then that trust is going to be restored. Your decisions, your actions are what dictate how much you trust yourself. So if you start making decisions that are aligned with how you actually feel, what you actually believe, that trust is going to start to grow and that anxiety is going to start to reduce. You're going to be able to trust that you will do the right thing when it comes. That anxiety comes from knowing that you won't.

From knowing that when the time comes, you're going to cave under pressure rather than stick up for yourself and honour yourself.

So next time you feel like you're getting into one of these situations be aware pay attention to how you feel if you notice yourself starting to get irritated or angry or tired take that opportunity to rebuild some trust in yourself and put that boundary in place because the more that you can trust yourself the better relationship that you have with yourself the better your life will be.

The only goal in your life should be building the very best relationship you can with yourself. Thank you for listening.