If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part yourself. What isn’t part of ourselves doesn’t disturb us. – Hermann Hesse
Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves. – Carl Jung
You probably heard the sentence “We can only see things in other people that we see in ourselves.” This is likely one of the most difficult lessons each of us has to learn at some point in our lives.
We develop the deepest understanding of ourselves through the relationships we form with others.
Sometimes without consciously realizing it, we are triggered by the things we have experienced ourselves. We then go forward to condemn and criticize these characteristics.
When certain characteristics in another person prompt an angry reaction from you, there is something inside of you that comes to the surface because it is calling your attention towards healing it.
Normally, this can be a problem from your past that needs to be dealt with and made peace with in your mind. For instance, you may always be attracting disloyal people into your relationships because you have not come to terms with a parental abandonment issue from your childhood. What you are experiencing is a manifestation of your conviction that no one can be trusted with your feelings.
Consider another case: You are a person who is in constant need of others agreeing that you are “right”. You will likely be attracting people who vigorously disagree with you because they also have a need to convince others to see things from their point of view.
Furthermore, if you dislike controlling people, you probably dislike some bossy characteristics within yourself.
Each person we meet in our lives is showing up at the precise time to reflect something we need to repair within ourselves.
Those with whom you connect are holding a mirror to your face and are ultimately providing you with a chance to heal and love yourself.
Since our goal is to uncover the things we don’t love and learn to accept them, those who aggravate us the most are in fact our greatest teachers.
When you are angered by a person or situation, try asking yourself the following:
“What can I learn from this person about my own behavior in order to become more wholesome?”
“Am I currently behaving like this?”
“Did I act like this before?’
You must forgive yourself. It is the most effective way to stop engaging in conflicts with others. You can only love others as much as you love yourself.
When you start learning from your relationships, in time, you will find that you can observe these characteristics in other people without passing judgement and without getting caught in someone else’s drama.
If you find that you are in a relationship with a person who constantly takes advantage of you in some capacity, it is often healthy to avoid that person completely.
This will help you only after you have taken in the lessons that you have seen reflected on you through your relationship, followed by the necessary act of forgiving yourself and the other. The positive thing in all this is that the desirable behaviors we see in other people are also a reflection of ourselves.
When we put thoughts of love before all else, we live in a reality of love. Simply put, we focus on our inner light while bringing out the light in others.
We are on this planet in order to realize that we are ONE. And all the people who come to our life help us to remember this.
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