Health

Is it True “Your Mess Has a Message”? Part 3: Why do our relationships break down?

Aug 23, 2021Health

I hope you’ll agree with me that relationships highlight the pinnacle of any challenge we face. They cause us to sometimes face our fears and at other times experience our blessings. Relationships can expose us to vulnerabilities and distract us. They cause pain but also bring immense joy. We are nothing without the relationships we cherish.

Regardless of the name that we give to any relationship, what lies at its core is our innate hunger to be understood. Few needs of the human heart are greater than the need to be understood, to have a voice that is heard, respected and valued, to eventually have some form of influence.

If connection is all it takes for us to be humans, then the bigger question was: Is this an uplifting connection or one that is draining you consistently?

Maya Angelou put it well when she said:

“I have learned that people will forget what you said,
people will forget what you did,
but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

The key words here are ‘made them feel’.

What Maya refers to here is the dynamic or a feeling that binds or repels two or more people who have a connection (relationship).

“The answers are in this book.
I loved it.
You will too.”

Dr Joe Vitale

Star of the super hit movie “The Secret”,
Best-selling author of “Zero Limits”.

Filling the ‘Emptiness’ of Life

“By our mid-30s or -40s, our personality development is usually complete, since we have experienced much of what life has to offer. We form opinions and beliefs and pretty much anticipate the outcome of most experiences, as we already know how they are going to play out before we engage in them.

This makes us believe that we know the outcome of an event even before it occurs, leading to a closed mind that is not open to possibilities. That is when we judge, become defensive and assign labels to the external world based on our experiences.

That is when we lose our relationship with ourselves, which is what triggers a midlife crisis. All that is left then is a feeling of emptiness.

Turning to fancy cars, more expensive toys, drugs or alcohol prove to be temporary but futile “attempts to fill this void”. It rarely makes this feeling go away. How we really feel on the inside cannot be fixed by changing how we appear on the outside.