Perhaps the most difficult trait to recognize within ourselves are our insecurities. Recognition of insecurities implies recognizing our weaknesses. It means we have to come face to face with those parts of our personality that we don't like but yet won't or either can't change, but perhaps more salient, accept and admit first to ourselves and then to others.
The inability then to admit those weaknesses to others closest to us results in relationships built on dishonesty.
Those insecurities; those reasons that we, rightly or wrongly, feel we don't measure up become the tool to push those away from us who recognize those insecurities in us, yet continue to want to be close to us.
Perhaps the reasoning goes something like this, at some level.
"We were close back then, and I got hurt. But it wasn't even the hurt, it was the naked exposure of those things that only I know about myself. And he was OK with it! Well, I am not. I don't share that part of me with anyone. How dare he want to get that close and see that part of me. I need those "prying eyes" out of my life. I WILL BE MUCH HAPPIER NOT BEING REMINDED OF MY INSECURITIES.
When the "dance" of these relationships has played themselves out in the now all too familiar script of:
- "uninvited" reaching out to us
- our finding (or creating) fault in that effort. How dare they as we lash back.
- then (and oh doesn't this drive us nuts) their total ignoring of our lashing out with their responses of kindness and understanding
- to which they finally give us what we want, their going away once and for all, recognizing that they can not allow their happiness to be held hostage any longer and they move on (and wishing us well when they do it. Damn, don't we hate it when they do that.)
- to which we usually send one more flaming arrow into the dead corpse of the relationship by accusing them of wishing us well, just to make us feel guilty; to which after time we feel sadness but we put that away because we are now "safe" without the prying eyes.
And the cycle starts up again with another of these so-called "friends" who wants to remind me of why I don't want anyone looking.
We aren't motivated to change now because that "thorn" in our side who has the audacity to see us as we are has gone away.
We are now back in our "safe", unthreatened world of our delusional self-absorption.
What we fail to understand is the utter destruction that we cause in others when we do this. We don't see this because we are so self-absorbed in our view of the world and of ourselves. What we don't recognize is first, the grace of forgiveness that a returning friend had to offer that we have now missed out on and then the carving out of our influence on their spirits and souls. (Which is met by us with, eventually, "They are better off without me" as our guilt; the only real, true element of ourselves that we are willing to admit, finally closes the solitary dance.
