Debbie Gail Zane

Are you allowing your friends to dictate your relationship?  I know you value your friendships and your friends mean well, yet if you want a chance for a lasting relationship based on authenticity, taking relationship advice from your friends may not be serving you.  Here’s why-

Every relationship is unique, as every person is unique.  If your friend is not a relationship expert and has not studied relationships, what your friend thinks works for her or didn’t work for her may not be best for you.   Her well meaning advice may be based on her own triggers, past hurts, and limiting beliefs.

Instead of showing up with just your own past, you bring everyone else’s past to your relationship.

When you start to listen to what everyone else thinks is best for you, you lose touch with your own intuition, your own uniqueness, your own truth, your own desire and your own spontaneity.  You no longer show up in an authentic way in your relationship.  You respond in a manner that your friend feels is best.  You withhold speaking up because another friend advises against it because of her own experience in the past.  You do/don’t do something because of what your friends tell you.

Pretty soon you lose trust in your own ability to be in the relationship and you rely on what your friends think.

You don’t have a discussion in the moment because you wonder what your friends would say.

You question how you really feel because it may not be how your friends would feel in this situation.

So you don’t show up in the relationship as you.  You show up as who you think you’re supposed to be.  You project a different image of yourself that is not the real you.

Your partner feels your inauthenticity and starts to wonder who you really are.  How you really feel.  What you really think.

He wonders if your conversation or your text is coming from your true desire or your friend’s advice.

So now your relationship is not just between you and your partner as a couple.  And a romantic relationship is supposed to be intimate, between two people, not three, four, five…you get the picture.  You are supposed to be the one in your relationship, the one showing up.

You don’t feel happy and neither does your partner.  His needs and your needs are not being met in the relationship.

Inauthenticity doesn’t feel good, puts distance in the relationship, and pushes people away.  It prevents true emotional intimacy.

True emotional intimacy can only happen when both partners are being their true selves.

Do you ever feel like if you could just do something perfectly, you would be happier or more successful or more popular?

This need to do things perfectly can be doing you more harm than good.

While you may feel like it makes you more productive or accomplished, it is actually damaging your love for yourself.

You create an image of yourself that is what you feel you need to do or be.  But this image is based on other people.

As a child and throughout your life you made subconscious decisions  about the way you needed to be, the image you needed to project to others, based on how other people interacted with you.

If they got angry or teased you, you changed your behavior to avoid pain, sadness or other difficult emotions.

Instead of being you, and true to yourself, you learned to mold your behavior into being the person who you thought other people wanted you to be.

In this way, you could sometimes promote positive responses from others rather than the negative ones that didn’t feel good.

The further the images you projected to others became from your truth, the less love you had for yourself.   You eventually started relying on everything and everyone outside yourself for this love you no longer received from within you.

As you practiced these new images…they became what others expected of you and what you came to expect of yourself.

If you are someone who places a tremendous amount of pressure on yourself to be perfect, the first step is to become aware that this is a sign that your own love for yourself has diminished.

The unhappiness with yourself is based on the images you have been projecting to yourself and to others, and these images are very different from your truth.  The more you try to be perfect the more you are seeking love in the wrong place…outside yourself, and the more unhappy you will be with yourself.

The first step to loving yourself is to connect with your inner truth.   Not the person that others want you to be.  Not the perfect image you feel will control others responses and interactions with you.  Not the perfect image that is so different from who you truly are that even if you attain this image you will never be truly loving of yourself.