Having an awareness of how we truly want to feel and the path we want to walk, is crucial for ensuring that we don’t be and do things that inadvertently take us away from those very things. Too often, we focus on what we want to avoid and we neglect to realise that the actions and thinking that go into avoidance are not the same as what would go into being and doing the things that reflect our needs, expectations and desires.

For instance, wanting to be happy within a mutually fulfilling relationship that allows us to be our authentic self, is not the same as having the desire for a relationship based on fear of being alone or fear of having to step up.

Can we honestly say that we would use the same thinking and actions for a healthy relationship as we would to avoid being alone? Would we make the same choices?

One is about love, care, trust, respect, shared values, interdependence, and personal security, and the other… is about codependency (excessive emotional reliance on others), and this only compromises all of the things that go into making a healthy relationship as well as leaving us with a very fragile self-esteem.

Likewise, a focus on healthy, mutual friendships brings about a whole different set of thinking and behaviour to a focus on not p*ssing anyone off or inviting disapproval. The habits that go with each foster entirely different types of friendship as well as anxiety levels.

Let’s think about this: does avoiding conflict, criticism, disappointment, and rejection, reduce or eliminate these, or does this avoidance reduce or even eliminate our sense of self and actually magnify our fear of these?

The avoidance focus ensures that we’ll spend most of our time worrying about how much we’re liked by others, whether we’ve done ‘enough’, whether we’ve done something wrong, and living our lives according to rules that aren’t rules while wondering why we feel so miserable.

Happiness and people-pleasing are mutually exclusive.

If we were in a relationship that had brought us a great deal of pain and we’d come to the gradual realisation that No Contact needed to happen, a focus on being happy and healthy will lead to more supportive contributing actions on our part, than a focus on avoiding pain.

Does, for instance, being afraid of breaking up, endings, and change, mean that staying and trying to work at things is about achieving happiness?

When we distinguish between desiring personal happiness within a copiloted relationship, and wanting to avoid certain things or basing our happiness on trying to influence and control others, we have a hell of a lot more clarity about what we need to be focusing ourselves on. The awareness about what takes us away from who we are or towards it, lines up with our knowledge of our values and how they stack up with our needs etc.

We’ll still hurt, we’ll still battle with the grief feelings and having to move forward, and we’ll have moments where we’ll be tempted to reach out, but awareness of how we want to feel and what we ultimately want, will minimise the pain that comes from short-circuiting our decisions by chasing temporary relief. Knowing what we want and what it actually involves means that we can remember what happened when we tried to make this person be the solution to avoiding an aspect ourselves, or we can recall the reality of the relationship and recognise that it doesn’t have the components to give us what we want.

Make sure that you’re not mistaking what you want to avoid with your desires and needs – they’re not one and the same thing.

Your thoughts?