If you have spent time reading my articles, you’ll notice I write quite a few posts on the subjects of love and self-love.

This morning I found another quote, clearly written by someone who was in a lot of pain. There is so much on the internet and the media about us suffering emotionally at the hands of another, intentionally or unintentionally.

We can end this type of pain. It all comes back to what we feel we deserve for ourselves.

“Whatever happens around you, don’t take it personally… Nothing other people do is because of you. It is because of themselves.” ~Don Miguel Ruiz

What we do is because of ourselves, not because of others. We’re trying to fulfill a need, a belief or something we feel has to be given to us by another, so we take them personally.

It’s our need.

It’s our belief.

It’s our emptiness.

We get what we believe we deserve, every single time.

If we believe someone else is going to provide us with the love we can’t give ourselves, we’re mistaken.

There’s no way for another person to fill us up in the long run. Yes, we meet someone and we’re excited, but how that excitement dissipates when they disappoint us is a clue. It’s a clue as to the expectations we’ve already placed on this individual to give us what we can’t give ourselves.

We expect them to disappoint us.

Our belief says they must, so we can prove we don’t deserve love. I spent a lot of my life proving I didn’t deserve love. I found relationships, which mirrored back to me how undeserving I was, because I chose someone equally undeserving.

It took me awhile to get that the men I chose felt undeserving, so they acted in undeserving ways. They fulfilled the destiny I had laid out for them.

Until, I realized it was an inside job. The less I loved me, beat me up, focused my unloving feelings on the other person… the more it showed up in my life. No one was going to rescue me. No one would say I’ve arrived and here was all the love I was missing.

Nope.

I had to do what I had avoided. I had to stop compartmentalizing; I had to stop comparing; I had to stop intellectualizing; I had to stop blaming; I had to stop believing I was unworthy; I had to stop personalizing (except when it worked as a mirror toward my own clarity)…I just had to stop.

I would be in the middle of a thought or a sentence and I would stop myself and ask “What is the truth?” “Why am I feeling this way?” and I’d dig deep…the real answer had nothing to do with him, it had to do with my own limiting beliefs about myself and what I deserved; he was just a manifestation of how I felt about me.

I slowed my thinking down.

I stopped jumping to conclusions. I stopped looking at what he did and started understanding why I allowed it, and I stopped beating myself up for why I couldn’t let go too.

When he’d fall off the face of the earth, I didn’t take it personally. In fact, one day it struck me…he disappeared, because of events around him that he personalized, which fed his belief that he wasn’t worthy of love. It had nothing to do with us. I asked him; he told me how it was true, he didn’t feel he deserved love and he was so sad that he felt this way on top of it!

He actually saw the vicious circle he was stuck in and at the same time, it helped me even more to understand that it comes back to what we believe we deserve.

You want happiness?

Start feeling you deserve it, by doing things that make you happy.

You want love?

Start feeling you deserve it, don’t withhold it from yourself…find ways that express love for you and then love everyone else, if they deserve it or not.

You want a healthy relationship?

Start feeling you deserve it, promote a healthy relationship with you—in other words, communicate honestly with yourself—communicate the truth. Be your own best friend. If you label things as good and bad, don’t go against yourself by doing bad. And if you do, forgive yourself.

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Ed: Sara Crolick