Are you unknowingly acting like a creeper? What exactly is a creeper?

A creeper is someone that "hides" their intention from people. But the truth is everyone else can sense that the creeper is hiding something.

For some of us, we can unknowingly become one of these people. It's not because we're shady and have bad intentions. It happens because we overthink the social situation.

When we overthink about what we're going to say, what we're going to do, we are also trying to hide the fact that we're thinking about it. We are trying to find the best way to act normal. However, how we appear to others might be different.

The more direct and simple our thoughts are, the easier it is for people to understand us. We WANT people to understand us as easily as possible. Do things in a predictable, simple, open, and honest manner. The less time people have to spend on guessing what you're doing, the more time they can spend on getting to know you.

Question for You - What’s your biggest social barrier?

Why are other people’s reactions so important to you? Do you feel like if they don’t think well of you then you won’t have a community anymore?

If you are trying to please others so that they will accept you, I can see how you will be very sensitive to everyone’s mood and reactions. If someone gets mad at you, your whole day might flip.

But we all know that’s not good for our emotional health, and you want to change that. I applaud you for wanting to take steps!

First, let’s understand this situation. This is a process that all of us will eventually face when we’re growing up, so this is nothing to be ashamed of. Don’t be hard on yourself for asking this question, because we all struggle with this at some point.

People are communal creatures. As we are growing up, we learn who we are from our parents and our community. Gradually, we start to see them as the source for our standard as a human being. Am I good, smart, ugly? These things we subconsciously learn from the people around us.

At one point in your life, you probably adopted a mentality that if the people around you are not happy, then you aren’t a good person. This is obviously not true, because if someone doesn’t like the color of my car, I’m not gonna purchase another car just for him.

Part of growing in independence is increasing our ability to face conflicts. If someone doesn’t agree with us or doesn’t like us, we have to learn to be ok with it. It doesn’t mean we’re a jerk or a bad person. We just disagree.

To practice on not being so reactive to every single thing people do [which is extremely exhausting], learn to disagree with people calmly.

Next time if people are talking about chocolate and you don’t like chocolate, just say, “Actually, I am not a fan of chocolate.” And stand by it. Let be people disagree with you, because there is absolutely nothing wrong with you having an opinion. Do you.

These small motions train your muscle to stand up for yourself. Practice it often, but don’t disagree just to disagree. Of course, you might not be the “nice guy” anymore, but at least you will be yourself.

It will feel very weird at first, but power through the fear and stand up for yourself. Good luck! 

Question for You - How do you deal with people that don’t like you?

Getting judged makes me feel all anxious. Man, it's a bad feeling. However, you only get judged if you are standing up for something. When we are trying to be ourselves, there will always be people that just don't like us. We have to get used to that.

It's not that we're doing anything wrong, but if I like blue cars, trust me there will be people out there that hate blue cars. When we feel judged, own yourself as a person.

Not everyone is going to be your friend, but you have to find people that are on the same side as you. Embrace challenge. Embrace independence.

Don't be a rebel just to be a rebel like some grade schooler that is trying to get attention. Stand up for yourself and for your beliefs like Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr. 

There are always going to be oppositions. We have to learn to be ok with conflict and disagreements. Learn to be yourself in the midst of all those disagreements.

Question for You - What do you like to do for fun?

Relationships are always complicated. Nothing is simple because no two individuals are the same. However, we can still learn from the general social behaviors of people.

When we feel used by other people, it can mean two things. They are actually using you [This can only happen if you let them.] or you perceive others to be using you when they aren't. Here we are just going to talk about the former one.

The real problem here isn't other people, it's you not trusting your own intuition. Us as people, we are all very intelligent beings. We have thoughts, opinions, beliefs, and volitions; however, we don't always trust in them. When we distrust ourselves, it's a scary world. I doubt my decisions constantly and think of other people's opinions as superior. I don't think anyone wants to distrust themselves.

So we have to learn to be independent. We have to learn to trust and defend ourselves as a person, because you might be your only line of defense. When your defense is down, you can get ruined as a person by a simple virus. Protect yourself.

How do you do this? Learn to develop a trust in your intuition. [I also answered this in Quora]

Do you constantly doubt everything that you do? Do you doubt your performance? Do you doubt your judgment more than other people’s? You can feel and know what is right, but if you still go against your judgment, you are doubting your judgment by heart.

This exercise I call Stand Your Ground - This is a practice to help you mentally stand up to opposition and conflict.

1. Pick something small about yourself like your favorite color or food. [Notice how no one else can tell you want your favorite color or food is, so you can NEVER be wrong.]

1. Ask 1 or 2 people to question or doubt your statement constantly for 2 minutes. This can be anything to detract you from what you believe. [Some of the statements they might say: Your favorite food isn’t _______! If you don’t like this other food, you’re a moron.] 
2. Stand as firmly as you can on your preference. Calmly answer and respond to them “No. My preference is actually _______.” 

This helps you become comfortable in the face of conflict, which a lot of us try to avoid. But in order to protect yourself, you have to learn to reaffirm your boundaries and who you are as a person.

Fill in the Blank - I feel used by people when _______.

Your friends are wishing you to fail?! That's not cool. This is not just by a friends standard but by like a normal person standard.

If a person wishes me to fail, I won't like them. Unless it's for a good reason. Like if I am going to self-sabotage my job and the person wishes me to fail that sabotaging, I can understand that. But if a person wants me to fail because he or she can't tolerate my success, that's an issue.

You see... friends are the people you spend time investing in. You trust and depend on them. It doesn't make any sense for them to want to see you unsuccessful.

Yes. I understand that there are people that get jealous or envious of you when you become successful, but you really need to take a step back and ask yourself if they are REALLY your friends.

Friends build each other up. Friends encourage one another. Friends challenge each other to become better. 

Friends do not tear each other down.

Remember, bad company ruins good morals. The people you hold closest to you are the windows to your world. They can show you the most magnificent views or a concrete wall.

We can't choose our upbringing, but we can choose who we surround ourselves with.

True or False - I have at least 3 people in my life that want me to fail in life.

In order to have friends, it is simple but hard. You have to learn to give. Give good emotions, conversations, support, etc. People usually give to get. This doesn't really work, because your relationship becomes like a transaction. If you learn to give just to give, it will take you very far in the social realm.

Friendships are mutual. If you only want a friend to fulfill your own needs and not give that much back, you can count on it to fail. So you have to learn how to give.

You can think of relationships like bank accounts. You have to deposit something in order for the account to stay afloat. If you are like a needy person, you are like a person that only takes from relationships.

Practice being a giver. Ask your family to be honest with you if they feel like you are a needy person.

On a macro level, what you are learning to do is actually how to be an independent person. A person that is independent can take care of his or her own needs, so he or she doesn't have to ask others for resources constantly.

Aim to be a person that others can depend on.

Question for You - What’s frustrating you the most about not having a close friend?

Have you ever failed repeatedly and you just want to give up? It's tough, right? Nothing is more depressing than facing a challenge that you can't seem to win. Your will just seem to dissipate with every try. Then you give up.

I want to touch on one factor that might be the possible reason for this repeated failure, and it's not mainly inside of you. It's your community.

Why community? Community controls what we learn and the reach of our minds. A bad community will steer you towards a more negative self-image while a good community can do wonders to your success.

One of the reasons for repeated failure is having no community or a bad community.

First, our smallest form of community is with ourselves. A community of one. We talk and listen to ourselves more than anyone else. Your thoughts have more influence on you and than anyone else. So protect your mind.

A bad community maybe just as bad or worse. Think of a community as like a ship and you're the passenger on that ship. As long as you are on that ship, you can't control where you go, so you have to pick the right ship. A ship with a destination that you want to go to.

Look around yourself and see if you are surrounding yourself with great encouragement for your mind.

Question for You - Where do you want to be socially?

I don't think enough of us understands the influence of friends around us. Friends can literally make or break you, because friends influences over the most important asset you have. Your mind.

Our mind is the source of all our thoughts, creativity, and innovation, but we don't take much time to give it the proper nutrients. We kind of just feed it whatever is there. The result is you will be undermining your potential.

Friends play a huge part in the cultivation of your mind, because they consciously and subconsciously inform your mind its limitations. Your friends are the windows to your world. You learn from what they see and vice versa.

So imagine if you had a friend that just doesn't learn anything in life or worse tries to drag you down along with them. By staying friends with these individuals will really hurt your future.

Choose the right people around you, especially friends that will bring you back up when you're down. If there is a quality you want to look for first, choose integrity.

No one is going to be perfect, but choose someone that keeps his or her promises. Trust is at the foundation of every relationship, so someone you can trust can actually start a quality relationship with you.

Don't underestimate who you choose to place around you.

Fill in the Blank - My ideal friend does __________.

I am pretty sure we are all no strangers to embarrassment. It's the feeling that none of us want to feel, and it really makes us want to hide. So much shame is attached to this emotion. Most of us just wished it never happened.

However, we are still in the real world. We can't avoid making mistakes sometimes. This means we have to learn how to deal with this feeling of embarrassment.

When we did something embarrassing, it is usually a mistake. We know we made the mistake, and everyone else knows we made the mistake. Now we really only have two choices. Deny it or own it.

Denying it is us trying to pretend that it never happened, hide, escape or shift the blame onto someone else. Unfortunately, this is the route people usually take when they feel embarrassed, but it actually makes the situation worse. Everyone else just saw what happened, and if we try to hide it, we become distrusting in their eyes.

The harder but better way to handle public embarrassment is to own up to it. If you own up to your mistake and taking the responsibility for it, people usually give you much more respect for it. It's a lot of pressure to take responsibility for your actions, which is something that grows us and people respect.

This also has a secondary effect, which is you become more congruence with yourself every time you own up to it. You start to trust yourself more, and your self-esteem escalates.

True or False - I feel embarrassed when someone talks about my appearance.

What exactly am I doing wrong? Maybe I’m just naturally bad at talking with people. I wanted to say something but I always mess up.

Those might be some of the thoughts we say to ourselves way too often. I want to talk about something that is a lot of fundamental and frequently overlooked, which is the way we are presenting ourselves to the society.

The mistakes that we usually make comes from not knowing we are making the mistakes in the first place. If we can recognize and correct these mistakes, we would improve so much.

Having more awareness of how our minds and bodies work allows us to understand what actions we need to take to gain control over ourselves. When we have full control over our emotions and minds, we can approach socially settings with confidence.

One of the points I want to talk about this time is openness.

When I say openness, I'm talking about intention. Why are you talking to someone? Are you trying to get someone to like you? You have to let the other person know why you are talking to them.

It sounds obvious and redundant, but trust me, it helps with getting a good start. Most of the people are constantly trying to figure out if you are a friend or foe. If you outrightly show your intent, they can at least trust that you're honest.

However, this might not be the problem for some of us. We might want to be friends with someone, but we are so self-conscious about ourselves that the words don't come out right. From the outside, we may appear to seem scared, standoff-ish, confusing, or awkward to other people.

Openness requires you to be in the present. Focus on just talking to the other person. Not on yourself. Not on what other people might think about what you might say. Focus on having a clear intent and an openness to your intent.

What happens when you are fully in the moment is that your body language starts to open up and you don't appear to seem like you are hiding anything. This sets the tone for a good conversation. It makes you seem approachable because people don't have to guess what your intentions are.

Question for you - What’s your biggest obstacle to becoming more socially approachable?

It’s one thing to be upset when you got a bad review at work. It’s another to have a complete meltdown over the same situation.

Here, we’re talking about the latter. The seemingly uncontrollable chaos that even left you questioning “What happened to me?”

Often we experience these episodes, but we have no idea what the cause is or even where to look for the solutions. Here, I’ll mention one of the possibilities for this meltdown.

One of the reasons is this -

You are using the excellence of your work performance to control your anxiety.

For some of us, because of the hardships we had in the past, we try to use other avenues to give to us “control” over those vulnerabilities. One of ways might be “If I have total control over my work, I won’t have to ever be in a vulnerable again.”

I know this statement might even be seemingly illogical, because your work now has absolutely no impact on protecting your vulnerabilities. However, this is how the brain protects itself.

The brain, after the trauma, fabricates a story for the person to believe, so the person can protect himself or herself after the event. For the person, the actual trauma is not dealt with, which causes more and more episodes of breakdown due to the false sense of control.

What To Do Now?

For this kind of situation to happen, I highly recommend seeing a therapist due to the severity of the case. Trying to do anything yourself might worsen the condition.

I bet you have a lot of time right now if you are thinking about how awful you are as a person. Why don’t we change that?

It is pretty much a tough love post, because we need it.

It doesn’t matter if we are anxious, have social problems or can’t make friends. If we are not taking steps to improve, nothing is going to happen. No change is going to happen. I know we don’t want to stay in pain for the rest of our lives, so let’s move forward as much as it is hard.

I know you might not think this is true, but you are a valuable person. Why? Because just by being created as a person, I believe you should have the value and respect as a person. Just like how an orange has the value of an orange. You can’t make an orange less of an orange.

Hopefully…you got my point!

Every moment we have a choice. We can decide to give up or keep going. I’d say keep going, because you are worth it. Because as long as you are living, you have potential. You are not gonna doubt me again right?

Let’s Move Forward

List out your insecurities. Every single one of them. The more we are aware of our fears, the more we can address it. To overcome our fears, we have to understand it first.

Now for every one of your insecurities, write a counterpoint on why you shouldn’t be insecure about it. This is to help you mentally break the cycle of looking to the negatives all the time.

One step at a time. Tripping counts.

Have you heard about the hedgehog’s dilemma?

It’s a analogy describing how hedgehogs want to be close to one another, but because of their sharp spines, they hurt each other in the process.

Personally, I feel like this analogy fits social anxiety like a glove. How the heck can we make friends without hurting ourselves in the process? We most definitely want friends. It’s just painful to get close.

But let’s look at how an individual that suffers from social anxiety is preventing himself or herself from having intimate relationships.

The foundation for why someone with social anxiety can’t form intimate relationships is the incredibly low sense of self worth. This isn’t to say there aren’t other emotional problems that are stopping this person from making friends, but just by this factor alone is enough to make this person a relationship repellent.

How does low self worth affect relationships?

If you are trying to make friends, your mind is constantly occupied with negative thoughts about yourself (I’m so useless. No one cares about me.). Just the mere action of getting yourself in front of a person takes like SOOO much effort. Then not to mention, because you are so negative about yourself or awkward when talking to someone, the relationship doesn’t work out as well as it should.

In any case where you do make friend, you either become so attached to them that they need more space or you subconsciously push them away because you don’t want them to find out how “worthless" you actually are.

This is not a fun cycle to go through. =(

Because of this cycle, the you go through countless rejections and start to doubt the goodness of humanity.

Then to make things even more difficult, good friends are hard to find.

Let’s Not Get Too Hopeless Yet!

The first step to change is always education, and now that you have understood how low self worth has majorly affected our ability to make friends, we can change!

The first step we take here is to eliminate your negative self talk. Every time you speak negatively about yourself, you reinforce your negative self image.

That is not good for you or your future friends or actually anyone that comes in contact with you.

How about start right now? Do a 7 day challenge of no negative self talk. I promise you after that you will see change in how you see yourself.

How many times have we had a failed friendship or relationship? And…especially in this generation where people are becoming increasingly flaky.

Yes, the reason can also be the super flaky person that always bails on you at the last minute. But right now, we are going to talk about how we can potentially be the ones contributing to the loss of our relationship.

Let’s be perfectly clear here. No one wants a failed relationship. Rarely do we go into any relationship saying to ourselves “I don’t want this to work.”

However, what does mess us up is our understanding of relationships.

All of us came from different background that taught us what a relationship is suppose to look like. Most of the time, these lessons about relationship are subconsciously taught also.

If we saw our parents fighting all the time, we might start to think relationship are painful. If we are abandoned by our parents at a young age, we could spend the rest of our lives trying to prove others our self worth through relationships.

These experiences are endless. The way we perceive relationships will ultimately influence how we form our future relationships. So if we don’t take time to sort out our emotional baggages from our past, those baggages will carry over and ruin your future too.

What Can We Do Right Now?

Lean into your emotional baggages. You know all those secrets you had in the past? It’s time to dig them up and face them. As long as we are avoiding relational problems in our life, we can’t come clean.

The general steps are: Face the conflict, accept the entirety of the truth and forgive what you hold bitter.

These steps are hard, but you have to go through them by yourself or with a therapist in order to be free from the baggage.

I don’t think anyone likes anxiety.

No one ever walked down the street and thought to himself or herself, “Man, I wish I was more anxious today.” Yet this is something we experience readily frequently.

Anxiety can be overwhelming sometimes. Can’t eat. Can’t sleep. Can’t even think straight. This can seem like the ultimate roadblock to our social lives.

This can be having a serious talk with your boss at work, talking to someone new, or walking into a supermarket. Anxiety gives no notices. It just strikes hard and fast.

The root of anxiety comes from uncertainty. Not really sure what is going to happen. Usually only when negative consequences, because we don’t get anxious over free pizza. [Unless we have to talk to the pizza guy.]

On a surface level we are afraid of rejection; however, this actually goes much deeper into our past if our anxiety seems erratic. Why? Because an almost reflexive anxiety tells us that it is deep rooted in our subconscious.

From our childhood growing up, we learn all about our relationships and emotions from our parents through their actions. A good amount of our uncontrollable anxiety can usually be pointed back to a moment in our childhood where we experienced uncertainty.

How Can We Cure Our Anxiety?

The most effective way would be finding a good therapist to walk you through your emotional past. Having a proper guide through your anxiety can accelerate your improvement by leaps.

In any case where you are unable to get a therapist, you might have to work to face the fears yourself. I encourage you to take small steps towards facing your past, because anxiety is a vicious pit.

Try this exercise -

Try to remember back to your childhood as early as you can. Find the memory that caused you to feel anxious.

Write down the reason why you felt anxious at that moment.

Write down what that younger you would have wanted to hear in order to calm down his/her anxiety.

Tell that comment to yourself five times.

“I just want someone to care about me.” “I wish I had someone to talk to.” 

I feel for you.

It’s never easy going at things alone. It’s not easy to break out of loneliness after being in it for so long. Day after day, you see the happy couples. Inside us, bitterness, jealousy, hopelessness.

When you talk to the normal people, they don’t understand what you’re going through. It’s a struggle to talk to people, so maybe it’s better that you just don’t try anymore. Things don’t work for you anyways.

But...You do want to break this cycle right?

You don’t want to stay in this pain of loneliness forever right?

You wish that you had a better life where you can be more confident right?

Then DON’T give up now! Try with me.

While we want to move towards having relationship with other people, there are also emotional work that we can be doing ourselves.

One of the most common mistakes that people with social anxiety does is jumping into any relationship TOO intensely. It pushes people away, because they feel overwhelmed.

Good thing we can work on emotional management by ourselves. The better we can learn to work through our emotions, the more we can remove this emotional barrier of being too clingy.

Here We Need to Learn How to Comfort Ourselves Emotionally.

In general, no one likes to feel the negative emotions. Anger, sadness, jealousy, anxiety, and more. So when these emotions arise in us, we do things to avoid it. Video games, shopping, music. We would do anything to distract us from feeling the pain of emotions.

This is where we start to lose the ability to care for ourselves emotionally. When we are frustrated with someone, we don’t know how to comfort ourselves. Shopping and video games only help us temporarily.

But there is still hope! Emotional skills can always be developed.

Do this exercise with me - [Please stop at any time if you feel uncomfortable]

I want you to remember a painful memory that you had in the past. The more vividly the better. Feel through the entire emotion. If you feel like crying, then cry. Don’t act on anything, just feel and accept the emotion. Take as long as  you need. 30 mins or 3 hours. However long it takes.

Good job. Going through painful memories are never easy.

Now think about an action you can do to comfort yourself when you feel negative emotions. i.e. Playing catch, journaling, etc.

What these two combination does is helping you being able to adjust yourself when you feel bad while accepting your emotions and having a safe outlet afterwards.

So this prepares us for if other people rejects us in some way and allows us to not depend on others to for our own happiness.

Once I saw these three little girls playing together, and for some reason, one of the girls started to get left out. I could see the little girl tearing up over losing her playmates. She tried to play by herself, but she quickly loses interest. She wanted to belong to the group.

That’s the feeling of loneliness.

Some of us are pretty familiar with this feeling. Short term loneliness is ok, but prolonged isolation could alter the human psyche.

On a more surface level, isolation takes away our ability to talk with others in context. We might know the language, but we don’t get the culture of how to use the language in that particular context.

Our social etiquette is another aspect that starts to become out of synch. Saying and doing things at the wrong time. Remember how awkward it is when someone laughed at something that wasn’t supposed to be funny?

However, this is only the tip of the iceberg. The real deviation of the isolated person comes from the lack of emotional health.

As human being, we need affections from one another. Hugs, care, or sharing burdens. This is the emotional dimension of people.

Now just imagine with me. You are only allow to eat one piece of bread a week for 3 months! [I might faint after a month.] What would you do at the first sight of an all-you-can-eat seafood restaurant?

I know I’d be like, "DANG. Give me EVERYTHING.” That is how an isolated person will respond to the first sign of community. On top of that, due to the fact that the person has been isolated for so long, he or she will continuously crave for affection even though they had enough.

Another significant difference is the drop in self esteem. Being rejected by society for so long, you start to doubt who you are as a person altogether.

Any type of emotional damage are not easy to heal. It takes time and persistence. It will not change overnight.

Where Do We Go From Here?

Start with discovering your identity if you are the isolated person. I know the craving for friendship is strong, but focus on yourself first. Focus on gratitude for yourself as a person. Gratitude combats the negative self view of yourself. To establish and maintain any kind of healthy relationship, a healthy view of yourself is required.

How do you establish a strong identity though?

Spending time getting to know yourself. You have to ask yourself tough questions. Here are some of you can ask yourself:

What is your purpose in life?

What defines you as a person?

What makes you valuable as a person?

What are your strengths and weaknesses?

What are your fears?

Use this exercise to define who you are as a person. For every answer you give, you are showing who you really are a little more.

Feeling like you need someone to turn to? Where did all the good friends go to? I just need that one person for support. If I only had someone to share my burdens with.

I know community is important for our emotional well being, but we should still be able to stand by ourselves. Interacting with people is good. Feeling like you are worthless without people is bad. Our relationships with others are the frosting on the cake. We still need to make the cake ourselves.

What about all the distress and devastating feelings that comes up when I am ALONE by myself?

I know the desires for somebody to care about you can be extremely overwhelming sometimes. Then there is also the constant voice telling you that “You’re just a complete mess.” It’s hard to feel like you want to care for yourself when no one else cares about you.

However in this lonely time of silence….

This is the time where we need to learn to stand up by ourselves the most.

Relationships works in moderation. You give some. They give some. However, when we feel like we NEED someone, we invest EVERYTHING into the few relationships that we have. The result? People feel like they need space, and they end the relationship with you altogether.

We all know this result all too well. Sadly.

So, how can we change our clinginess? Yup, you guessed it. Standing up by ourselves first.

When we come from a place where we are ok with having or not having the relationship, we give other people the freedom to connect with us. Our self esteem doesn’t fluctuate with every word they say. (That is extremely painful.)

Standing up for ourselves relieves others of the responsibility to provide for our happiness. Because after all, happiness is an inside job.

So How Do We Become Independent?

First is allowing yourself to express yourself.

Our minds might be thinking “Why doesn’t anyone like me?” or “I am such a failure.” that we don’t any time finding out who we are as a person.

Take 10 minutes right now to just be alone and sooth your emotions. Slow down your breathing. Count 1 to 5 as you inhale and same for exhale.

Then ask yourself “What do I want to do for myself right now?”

You ask yourself this question, because you want to practice bringing your thoughts and perspective into the present. You want to focus on expressing your own preference on a consistent basis.

Rather than focusing on what you want others to fulfill in your life,  let your real self come forward.

Some examples might be: I want to take a walk. I want ice cream. I want to learn more about music.

Take your time to nurture yourself using this simple exercise. Take care!

• Do you feel nothing? No emotions when you are supposed to have them. Feeling like a shell of yourself. This is part of what happens when we choose not to feel anything. Sometimes after a traumatic event, we would rather choose to feel nothing, because facing it is too painful. However, if we avoid the feelings, the problem will always be there. Avoidance has its place, but it’s not the solution.
• Cutting out emotions deadens your heart.
  • Emotions are part of what it means to be human. So when we chose to lock away our emotions, it seals away part of our humanity. Cutting out your emotions is to suppress what we naturally feel. You are basically denying yourself to be human. Feelings are there for a reason. We experience feelings, because it’s how we are designed as people. We’re not robots. It is normal to experience happiness, pain, anger. We just have to learn to process the emotions and not avoid trying to be a human altogether.
• Cutting out emotions can lead to depression.
  • Because the past is so painful and we choose to cut out emotions, when emotions do arise, they come in extreme forms. Lashing out in anger & sadness when we didn’t mean to. This disruption of unhealthy handling of emotions makes us fragmented as a person. Choosing not to feel anger or pain also means not being able to feel love and happiness. We become a shell of ourselves. Living but not really living.
• The conflicting emotions are telling you messages.
  • Anger hides your pain. Happiness communicates what you value. Each emotions has it’s reason for being there. It tells us what we really want. Trying to force yourself to not feel anger is you denying yourself as a person. But instead we should try to understand what made us feel angry and resolve the internal conflict inside us. Ignoring your emotions is choosing to be ignorant of how your body is really doing. Try to really understand the emotions you are having to take care of yourself.

• How many times have we talked with someone that isn’t listening? Or the person just isn’t trying anymore? You are doing all the heavy lifting. If you don’t try, nothing happens. But you keep on going, because this relationship is important to you. When does change happen? Will this person or the relationship ever change?
• Relationship is mutual, so something is off.
  • All relationships have to be maintained. All relationships take work. Over time emotions will die down and sometimes other thing start to interfere. The bottom line is always it’s a mutual relationship. When one side stops trying, it stops being a relationship. We don’t have control over the other person, so we have to know if they are on the same page as us.
• Try to understand the reason behind it.
  • This doesn’t mean being pushy or trying to interrogate the person. It means take your time to empathize with how he/she is feeling. Does the person feel lost? drained? tired? frustrated? When the other person feels like you connect with them emotionally, the person will be more willing to share the real reason. It might not be the reason we want to hear. It may not even be a good reason. But we have to remember it’s his/her reason. Not ours. We have to understand why to find a solution for it.
• Only actions make changes.
  • If you want movement, you have to act. The more we drag things out the less time we have to do everything else and the shorter our future becomes. Be decisive and followthrough with your decisions. Most of the time we don’t want to face the decisions because it’s hard. Indecision hurts everyone.