Have you always been wondering if you did the right thing in letting a relationship fizzle? Or maybe you've been googling how to know if someone should stay in your life or not.
Well..."Do the people in your circle drain life from you or give it?”
Someone asked me this recently during a bible study session and the question literally almost knocked me over.
I’m sure we’ve all been asked some variation of the question at some point in our lives; but this time, the lightbulb I needed finally went off.
Why didn't I ever use this as an indicator for every single relationship I've fostered over the years?
This simple yet practical question and answer could have solved so many problems for myself and others, if we just took the time to say
...If the people in my life aren’t adding to it, they really shouldn’t be there forever.
The conclusion is SOOO simple, and yet so profound.
For most of our lives, we hold onto relationships that subtly take life from us and on the flip side, we make a case to hang on to relationships even when we aren't given room to contribute.
Whether we realize it or not, we make excuses for how much of our peace, love, and energy we lose.
We often dismiss toxic behaviour as someone having a bad day or feel like we need to OVER-adjust ourselves to fix the problem; but in the end, we're the only ones left feeling hurt, neglected, unworthy, invaluable and finally the big G... taken for Granted.
So how do we rationalize spending countless hours continuing relationships that aren't feeding goodness to our souls? (Not FEELING our souls, because sometimes, (as a result of chemical reactions released in our brains from certain trigger behaviours), we mix up feeling for feeding... but thats a blog for another day).
The simple answer?
We don’t.
People are meant to enrich our daily lives, as are we for others. If this isn't happening on both sides of the relationship, whether it be friends, family, or romantic affiliations, the bottom line is, that person shouldn’t be holding a permanent space in your life (and vice versa because, sometimes we're the problem). Just so we throw in some facts, according to ny.gov,"Healthy relationships involve honesty, trust, respect and open communication between partners and they take effort and compromise from both people. There is no imbalance of power." Sure, at some point, we all will have draining moments and times when someone doesn't float our our boat - we're human. But if you’re drained beyond wit's end and aren’t getting those things mentioned above along with the other things needed in any HEALTHY relationship, you should begin to ask yourself
"Is this person draining life or adding to it? "
You should also complete your answer with these follow up steps:
1) look internally to assess what you can do to better yourself 2) make the other person aware of the issue at hand
3) once you’ve done your part to fix/ voice the problems in the relationship, if the person is not trying... then be okay with letting the relationship go Navigating all of our relationships with the notion of life being added to us and therefore bringing life to others/being a light in someone else's life, naturally allows our relationships to take on a healthier journey. So if you're looking for a good way to evaluate who should be in your life and how you may be impacting others forever... remember to ask yourself - is this relationship giving life or taking life?
The answer may surprise you and then, the rest is up to you :)
-Cheers
xoxo