“The people who are meant to be in your life will follow you and the people who are not meant to be in your life will slip away. This will just happen naturally as a byproduct of you choosing to live your life through self-love.
The same way that if you were an alcoholic and you stop drinking, then a bunch of your alcoholic friends will probably slip out of your life because you don’t want to be in the same places or do the same things any
more. If you force yourself to keep hanging around them, it will also be much harder for you to not drink. You can’t hang around people who are negating the positive changes you are making within yourself.
more. If you force yourself to keep hanging around them, it will also be much harder for you to not drink. You can’t hang around people who are negating the positive changes you are making within yourself.It will often be the case that people who used to resonate with you won’t anymore, because you are making positive changes that they are not. If they can’t follow you into this new better version of yourself, you will need to let them go.
Many of your former friends will (usually unknowingly and unintentionally) hold you down at their level because they don’t want to lose you. They will encourage your bad behaviors that match their bad behaviors because they want you around. You are trauma bonded over this bad behavior and the negative emotions that fueled them.
Your alcoholic friends, for example, will make excuses for you to drink. Don’t fall for it. Rise anyway. Love them anyway… but walk away until they are ready to join you because you love yourself too much to stay stuck in those old patterns any longer. They’ll join you in this new higher life if and when they are ready.
This goes for unrequited love or one-sided relationships also. I’ve been there… You eventually need to realize that if a person isn’t treating you in a way that makes you happy, then what sense at all does it even make for you to want to be in that relationship? You don’t get to take a person as a concept, in complete isolation from how they treat you. How they treat you is who they currently are, and you are going to need to let go of the idea of ‘who they could be’. Recognize what they are and recognize that actively chasing and fawning over someone who mistreats you is in fact a form of self harm.”———-
Excerpt from Feelings First Shadow Work: A Simple Approach to Self Love and Emotional Mastery, Benjy Sherer
