Relationship Crisis Care: How Your Heart and Soul are the Lifeline Right Now for You, Your Business, and Your Loved Ones
WHOSE PROBLEM IS IT ANYWAY?
When you take on problems that are not yours (or avoid the ones that are) your relationships, life, and business suffers. You eat away at your true power, progress, and even self-esteem.
Your heart wants to creatively solve problems for which that you are graced and gifted. Your heart will also let you know when you are solving problems that are taking you off track, ineffectively accommodating others, and losing your intended results in life, business, or love.
SOLVING PROBLEMS THAT ARE NOT YOURS:
Costs of solving problems that are not yours:
- Time
- Focus
- Traction/momentum
- Relationships feel one sided (resentment, entitlement, regret)
- Emotional mess and enmeshment
- You get good at things that are not what you need to get great at
- You don’t solve underlying problems
Secondary gains (reasons) we solve problems that are not yours:
- Prove goodness
- Crave cooperation or a sense of belonging
- Only feel valuable when solving someone else’s problems
- Avoid one’s own problems (especially ones that make someone feel incompetent)
- Reinforce a false sense of superiority and maintain another’s relationship dependency
- Compensated with resources to solve other’s problems
ASKING OTHERS TO SOLVE YOUR PROBLEMS:
Costs of asking others to solve problems that are yours:
- Loss of personal power
- Loss of personal clarity (uncertain of priorities)
- Childlike dependency on others
- Exterior versus internal awareness
- Unidentified anxiety
- Do not manifest your destiny
Secondary gains of asking others to solve problems that are yours:
- Avoid mistakes/blame/accusations/responsibilities
- Indulge on pet projects and cool ideas without validating others do not value significantly
- Skip the discomfort of wrestling with self-validation, failure, being misunderstood
- See yourself as morally superior for not getting into messes or difficult decisions
Exercise:
Identify (who), Distinguish (how), Deepen (why)
Presenting problem: Woman does not receive calls back from a friend she has always been supportive of.
Her problem:
She feels rejected.
She feels lonely.
She needs validation that she is wanted as a friend.
She resists making new friends in fear of this happening again.
Friends problem:
Too busy? (actually very difficult to determine!)
Our problem:
Friendship is dissolved (is that a problem to the other person? Is that a problem to you? – you would need to distinguish this further)
Deepening: why is feeling rejected such a problem? Possibly: She has already rejected herself and depends on others approval to validate her. She didn’t communicate her expectations of friendship. She took any friend she could instead of allowing a genuine friendship to blossom over time because of her insecurities.
These are her problems and some soul searching will help her understand her true problem.
If you are feeling: tired, frustrated, irritated, futile/depressed, superior, underlying anxiety, unappreciated, or hopeless you may be solving other people’s problems and/or avoiding your own.
3 steps to processing emotions
- receive and respect
- reintegrate and regulate
- resilient and resource
Recognizing the emotional signals that indicate we are entangled in other people’s problems, gives us access to
- returning to cultivating personal power
- respecting other people’s choices and competencies
- creating traction on personal intentions and owning them
- cultivating long term beneficial relationships for others.
Questions:
- Take three messy problems and disentangle them through the above exercise.
- Which problems are your problems, the other person’s problems, and which are our problems?
- Keep asking yourself is this really in the correct category?
- Then look beneath the problems in your category. What is the real underlying problem?
- Are you resist to solving this problem? Why?
- What are the top three benefits of solving your own problems?