It was in his silence that I had found the only voice that had ever mattered. My own. It was with this silence that I didn’t have anything else besides me, myself, and I. I realized exactly how I was treating myself. I finally was able to hear myself. And I wasn’t treating myself too kindly. I was stuck in my past, doomed to repeat it because in silence, what else did I have to go off of besides that past? And because of this mindset, my actions matched up seamlessly. Self-sabotage once again.
See, when we are left to ourselves, only us and our thoughts, when there is either little to no external “answers” – we end up creating those answers for ourselves. We even do this when we are getting answers straight from the source. Those answers could be right and they could be wrong, but the answers we come up are based on our past or other external circumstances and patterns. We jump to conclusions about a situation or judge based on this false reality and call it “truth”. In silence we realize how much [to put it bluntly] bullshit we actually end up telling ourselves about our current reality, and it is in this space where we can find truth.
When you start to notice a pattern in your relationships, look within. See what kinds of thought processes you have going on that contributed to your current or a past situation. There is that age-old saying about treating others the way that we wish to be treated, but what gets lost in that mix is treating ourselves the way that we want to be treated first and foremost. After all, if you’re not treating you very well, how would you end up treating other people? Ask yourself what evidence you have that support these thought processes. Where did this evidence come from? Was it your past? Has someone told you something and you dismissed it and say that what they told you was false because of some external situation you have faced before or something about yourself that you tell yourself about who you are? How does this thought process transfer into your actions?
You are your first responsibility. Take accountability for your circumstances so that you can change those circumstances. Don’t get it twisted though, this isn’t an excuse to be completely selfish (see more about this in this post here https://pursueyou.org/2020/04/20/the-difference-between-self-blame-and-self-accountability/), but when we point our finger to an external person or circumstance and tell ourselves that something in our lives is someone else’s fault we remove all the power that we have within to change that circumstance. If we don’t see our own options and if we don’t harness our own power, we are bound to the powers outside of ourselves.
Imagine blaming every single thing that happens to you in your life on an external circumstance. How likely would it be for you to change something within you to change things outside of you? Would you just sit back and wait for someone or something else to change? My guess would be as such. You are in the driver’s seat of your life. You have power within you. But one cannot harness that power unless one first recognizes that power and takes personal accountability.
The truth is found first from within.
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Pursue You 
This is well done. I like the 4th and 5th paragraphs which get to the crux of the matter. A friend who is a high school counselor would tell the kids “don’t give your power away.” She would add, “if you do not take offense, you are not offended.” Her point is we control our reaction to things. We need not let others try to make us do things that suit them. We must own the decisions. Again, well done. Keith
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Yes! We can’t control what happens to us, but we can control how we respond to it! Thank you for your kind words!
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