I have realized that I am totally responsible for my past. I can no longer blame anyone except myself. And even there, I don't blame myself critically, but instead accept that I did the best I could given what I knew. I know more now and can no longer be expected to live as I did in the past.
I realize that I was blaming my father for all my problems, or many of them anyways. What I had done was place an expectation on him that he was not willing to accept. I wanted him to think in such and such a way and would become angry when he thought otherwise. I wanted him to act in such and such a way and would become angry when he acted otherwise. This created frustration and caused an emotional spiral. Not only was my perception way off but also I was allowing my emotions to consume me.
I now realize, I have absolutely no right to expect him to behave or think in any way I desire. That is up to him to decide. But, I also do not have to accept any judgements from him either. All judgements about myself, come from myself. I do not give up that space to anyone. It is very simple. Just put up a wall where you have the outside world and inside is yourself. From this point onwards, I judge only myself. Your thoughts are just food that I digest, but when the ultimate metric comes, it is myself.
How can we do this? Think of the space of your self-esteem. Every element of that space that you give up to others, is an area that you no longer possess. For some of your actions, you may society decide, or religion, or family, or anyone else. You give up that space to them. And even worse, you put a higher emphasis on the negative evaluations. No wonder you feel shitty, because given this paradigm, our happiness is perhaps a negative sum game in the aggregate. But it is not, because you reserve some of that space for yourself. There, you see no issue. You are totally accepting and entirely loving. All you have to do to feel better is try to spend more time in those areas where you accept yourself.
That is one strategy, but I would rather open up the entire space to myself. So, I accept no judgements from you or anyone else. You may judge all you please, and if it suits my purpose I may even acknowledge you just to simply quieten you down. But ultimately, I know that you will not penetrate my space. I will not allow it. I alone decide my worth.
That said, I am more to blame about my past than I had originally believed. I had allowed myself to be swallowed up by all that garbage. I let the emotional residue linger. And this is the second trap. The fact that you carry around emotional garbage from your past, you allow it to poison not only your future actions, but also your feelings. It plays in to any relationship when we come to an interaction carrying all our past luggage. Just leave that luggage where it belongs, in the past, and now approach each interaction with a clean slate. You no longer need that emotional luggage, which you used only for protection, but this you needed only because you allowed others to judge you. When you no longer allow others to judge you, you don't need the past emotional garbage for protection. It just doesn't matter, so there is nothing to protect. It all belongs to you.
So, move in the future with a clear mind and let no one judge you. As you interact with others, just let the relationship flow. When you feel yourself being pulled away, either by emotion or judgement, just get a hold of yourself and let those emotions go and let all that judgement go right along with it.
So stop giving up yourself to others. They may have judgements, but so do you. They may think that their judgements apply to you, but so do you. They allow others to influence their self esteem, you do not. They believe that they influence your self esteem, you assume that they may believe that you can influence them and thus you do influence them.
We can easily get trapped in our emotions and let them overpower us. But we can also turn them off and get a hold of ourselves when we need to. Sometimes we want to let our emotions flow, as when we are in the arms of our lover, but other times, we just need to dispense of them and move on to the next thing.
So today, I have buried my emotions of the past. They serve me no longer. They are a useless tool that I have no need to maintain. They belong where they come from, and that is in the past. I will not poison my future with my past.
Steve
