|
When it comes to the people that you love in your platonic relationships - your friends, maybe certain colleagues, and anyone else you care about and spend time with, how much of your true essence is being shared? How much of your desire to be accepted, validated and feel worthy is causing you to adapt who you are to portray an image that other people will find acceptable, valid or worthy? How do you show up in each of your relationships and interactions?
The answers to these questions is key in not only understanding our relationship with ourselves, but also with others. And platonic-love, not unlike romantic love, can eventually erode if we fall into unhealthy “traps”. Here are five of these “traps” that we would all greatly benefit by being conscious of:
1. Codependency or enmeshed relationships
Basically, these types of relationships grow when there’s a lack of boundaries (especially emotional boundaries) in our choices and interactions. Though there’s often much more going on.
Examples:
• We make their life about our life, or vice versa.
• They need/want something, and we feel we must help them get it, or vice versa.
• They have a difficult emotion or problem and we take it on as our own, OR we try to change their emotional state.
• We routinely give up our plans/self-care routines to help them.
• They “make a mess” (literally or metaphorically), and we clean it up.
• We hear their story/problem and then make it (in some way) about ourselves or about how their problem impacts our lives.
• We want them to do/think/believe what we do/think/believe.
• They “hurt” us or cross lines and we rarely or never speak up/hold them accountable.
And there are countless other examples that illustrate just how pervasive these behaviours and relationship dynamics are. Codependent and enmeshed behaviours are probably the biggest category of “love-challengers”, and sadly, many have been led to believe that these behaviours are ways we love others. But that's not love.
2. “Boxed friendships”
Example: You found relief (and a friend) in someone you can finally talk to about the challenges you’ve endured in a toxic relationship, a problem you have or a hardship you’ve endured. This is someone you feel you can talk to about it, that really gets it. And then a year (or more) later, you’re still ruminating, complaining and are still upset about this “difficult relationship or thing” that was the catalyst for this “friendship”, yet you have made no changes or movement towards changing or improving your life. It turns out your friendship appears to have been based pretty much on the fact that you can relate to one another about your "hurt", but you’re not taking the next step to better your life, you haven’t moved on. You’ve stayed in the box you’ve co-created in this relationship, and therefore have likely limited your healing and growth. Healing takes time (and it’s different for everyone), but part of the healing process is about moving through our feelings and letting go of the hurt, the stories and the related feelings around that hurt.
3. “Labelled” relationships
Some people get "stuck" in relationship dynamics that they can’t seem to find their way out of.
Examples: You’re known as “that person” - the Comedian, the Organizer, the Networker, the Story-teller, the Solution-finder, the Helper, the Peacemaker, the person people always lean on, the one who always ____...and the list goes on.
It's important to be reliable when it comes to our responsibilities, but it's equally important to be clear about what exactly our responsibilities versus another's are. It's also a beautiful thing when we have natural gifts that benefit others that we are also energized by sharing regularly. And there's no doubt these examples listed above are great qualities that can enrich any relationship, but the thing that we sometimes forget is that people change, circumstances change, people have bad days, bad years, or difficult circumstances that might completely take them out of being able to carry out their “labelled role” in the relationship. And sometimes people can fall into the people-pleasing trap by continuing to do that thing that they are known for, even when they really don’t have it in them to do it sometimes. This attachment to labels runs the risk of creating entitlement with loved ones, or becoming a draining relationship, fast. Ensuring that we see and value people for more than just that label, is one way to ensure a lasting relationship, partly because it helps us transcend the transactional part of the relationship, and partly because honouring people for more than what they do for us (honouring them for the human being that they are), is in fact a sign of love. That said, there’s good reason for the saying: “A reason, a season, or a lifetime” when it comes to relationships. So being trapped in “labels” in a relationship may be the Universe’s way of offering a temporary relationship to provide us with a much-needed life lesson. Regardless, we all deserve the freedom to be who we are without being pigeon-holed into a persona or label that defines us or our value/sense of worthiness.
4. Undisclosed agendas (ie. not having an honest connection with someone, or not having transparency about the nature of our connection and our intentions).
If someone is in our life purely because of a secret plan they have, a hope they have, or perhaps a social ladder they’re climbing through us to achieve a certain “status”, this is not likely a sustainable relationship unless you also resonate with these types of behaviours and interactions. But for sure, it’s a destabilizing type of relationship if it’s lacking any kind of transparency and lacking an honest, mutual, human connection. It’s more of a covert, transactional style of interacting, and sadly it’s more common than some may realize. I don’t believe in being an entirely open book with all platonic relationships, but knowing what connects us to one another (and being transparent about that with each other) is a must if we hope for it to last.
5. Certain patterns indicative of a lack of mindfulness that might not allow platonic love to even launch in our relationships are:
• If we tend to be preoccupied or self-conscious.
• If we are chronically judgmental, or
• If we are always weary of getting too close to anyone.
Sometimes if we’ve had a history of being neglected, overly criticized, or been hurt deeply or too many times and haven’t healed, we may unconsciously limit ourselves from being available to love another.
Love is about honouring who we each are and where we are each at, and not about making another’s situation about us or about what we can do for them (though "acts of service" and offers to help are often a part of any healthy platonic relationship, but that's not what we're talking about here). We can care and love someone A LOT, but love is not about self-sacrificing (ie. “reducing ourselves” in some way to build another up), but rather it may include supporting, serving or helping. Self-sacrifice can become a way people unconsciously (though sometimes consciously) try to control another’s life-outcome. But guess what? In relationships (at least those in a free society), we don’t actually have that level of control over another person’s life. We might have some influence or even an ability to temporarily control an outcome, but we’re kidding ourselves if we think we can predict with 100% certainty that “if we do _____, then their life will be like ______ (in any lasting way)”. Generally speaking (though there are rare exceptions), people’s outcomes and life-trajectories ultimately depend on what they choose to do for themselves, not about what we do for them or what we think should happen for them.
Healthy, sustainable, platonic love has a few key elements, with the main one being acceptance of a person AS THEY ARE (not as we see them or want to see them), though at the same time, we may want better for them. This is at the crux of what some refer to as Universal Love. When we love someone in this way, in an emotionally healthy way, we are not trying to change or control them. Rather, we are seeing them “on their own path”, and we love them regardless of how their path fits into or compares with ours.
In platonic relationships (and any relationship for that matter), we may have completely different opinions, values, beliefs and lifestyle preferences, but when it’s a healthy relationship, the love remains despite these differences, along with a couple of other key components: Trust and Respect. Trust and Respect, in that they are living their lives as best as they can or know how to, and tending to your relationship as best as they can or know how to.
Having trust and respect doesn’t mean there isn’t a risk of being hurt by them or of us hurting them. What it can mean though is:
• We have a certain level of generosity in our thoughts about them when they've done something questionable or even upsetting. (ie. We will give them the benefit of the doubt about their intentions, unless of course we know that it’s not appropriate to do so, as being realistic and accepting difficult truths about the people we love is also a way we love them.)
• We have the ability to forgive them, when they have crossed a line with us. And that doesn’t mean that we allow it again, because (as we will be talking about in the next and final newsletter of the Love series about Self-love), we apply boundaries when we see they are needed. This is a nuanced and crucial part of love of self and of others.
• We have a certain level of compassion, but also apply boundaries when they do or say something hurtful or "make a mistake".
And depending on the level of connection we have with another in a platonic-love relationship, we typically have some of the same components that we have in our romantic-love relationships (as mentioned in the last newsletter), such as mutually understood agreements, healthy & somewhat predictable communication, and a certain degree of emotional intimacy.
Our humanness, like love, is free-flowing. It’s always there, but we might suppress it if we are in an unhealthy, unstable or controlling relationship. May we all choose our relationships and interactions in consciousness and flow.
|
