Something I have always struggled with my entire life is telling people how I feel, or talking about my feelings. I’ve realized that my whole life I’ve trained myself to keep bad feelings and emotions to myself. I’ve done this out of fear that people will react badly to my feelings, and be unwilling to listen to why I’m upset over something.
Looking back I can see that I’ve always been afraid to confront anyone when something was wrong or bothering me in fear that they would get extremely defensive, and not be willing to hear my side of things.
So I can see why I always just trained myself to shove my feelings down and ignored them until they went away. It was easier to do then risk losing people I thought were friends. But eventually, you get to a point where you cannot keep ignoring all of the things that are upsetting you. You get to a breaking point.
Before that breaking point, not risking confrontation and continually pushing away your feelings seems easier and better than dealing with them head on. But by doing that, you’ll just keep getting hurt by the same people that put you in the same situations over and over again.
And you’ll probably have this idea in your head that you’re just giving people the benefit of the doubt. You’ll think that the person who's hurting you isn’t realizing that they’re hurting you. Or maybe you’ll think that the person hurting you has something going on in their life that would cause them to be acting different, or be acting in a certain way.
And the thing is- we never really know the things that might be going on in the lives of the people we love until we actually reach out and ask them.
Communication is the key to almost every situation. It was the key to me being able to stop denying what I felt like and start sharing with people. A Lot of times we assume that people know when they are hurting us, and we expect them to fix things without us ever telling them what is wrong. That’s a bad assumption to make! And it’s one that’s caused me to get hurt a lot.
People need you to communicate how you feel to them. People need you to tell them how you feel.
Something I’ve learned over the years is that anyone who truly loves you and cares about you will be willing to listen to your side of things, and do so without getting defensive.
You might fear that the person you’re talking to will make you feel invalided, or that they’ll get so defensive that they won’t be willing to hear your side of things. In actuality, this might happen sometimes. But you’re better off without those people in your life. The people you want in your life are the ones who will listen and communicate with you.
So you can find out a lot about the people you surround yourself with by simply telling them how you feel and seeing how they respond to you. That’s why communication is the key to building strong and healthy relationships, and the key to understanding exactly who your friends are.
