How to Receive More Love, Appreciation and Respect

Image by Amber Avalona from Pixabay

He arrived home, like a great gust of forceful energy sweeping in the door. “Where is the charger?” he snaps. “You’ve packed the charger when I need it?”

We were going on holiday, I had been packing while my partner had gone to work for the morning, we were leaving in under an hour. I’ve left out some expletives, but suffice to say it was a tirade that was neither respectful nor even rational far less loving.

It’s the kind of thing that happens under stress and, in similar scenarios, in the past I’d have felt the sharp edges of it like a personal sting and lashed out in defence – particularly if I was also under stress. And let’s be honest, life can be stressful.

But I feel like I’ve awoken from a long sleep. Instead of being locked in a cycle of anger and resentment, I’m now able to be an observer more of the time. What I observe can sometimes makes me think “Really? I’ve been putting up with this?”, but on the other hand, I am no stranger to poor behaviour.

Being hyper attuned to others feelings, I have tended to suppress my own until they all spill over and unleash in more of a volcanic reaction. I can be loud; when I was growing up, a parent from a rival swim team once asked my mum if she fed me on raw meat, such was the strength of my voice in leading our team’s chant. When I open my mouth to refute something the indignance in my voice carries force.

The times I have reacted angrily have rarely been in proportion to what has actually happened. It is more like my reaction to the sum of every similar experience I’ve ever had, remembered in mind and body. And it’s fair to say I had never moved far past my teenage rebellion towards the things in my upbringing that constrained me, I just became more refined in how I expressed it.

The term nature versus nurture is commonly used to describe who we were born as (our essential nature) versus who we become (the reaction to the sum of our experiences). Personally I suggest that developmental trauma is probably a more accurate description than nurture.

I certainly come from a time in society where children were to be moulded rather than nurtured to blossom into our full potential. Little was understood about subjects such as secure attachment and attunement, only now am I seeing more discussion about this in the psychology fields. It seems like the general approach to parenting is slowly changing, but there is lack of good education and role modelling.

I heard a description by, I think, the internationally renound family therapist Terry Real, that states the journey of our psyche from the wounded child to adaptive adult (the ‘grown’ rebellious teen also known, in my view, as most adults on the planet today) to the integrated adult, one who learns to take all prior experiences and integrates them in a healthy way.

That has really been the foundation of the journey to me. To give an example I’ll turn again to my favourite document by Claire Zammit and Katherine Woodward Thomas on the self limiting thought patterns people tend to have and the associated gifts those are pointing to.

As a child I felt pretty powerless. I had to do what mum and dad said, let’s face it, they held all the cards. In reaction to that powerlessness I’d aspire to be the leader rather than the follower in life, and I had a hard time being vulnerable, rarely letting people know what I needed.

I’d present myself to others as though I had it all together and didn’t need them for anything, put up an invisible shield against hearing the whole truth, covertly letting others know I only wanted to hear positive feedback, and usually failed to have other powerful people in my life with permission to coach me.

This meant others would not perceive me as having problems or needs, they may have experienced me as unteachable at times and may have had a hard time contributing to me because I already seemed to know everything.

So I’ve had to find the kind of role models I aspired to, and learned to listen deeply to the wisdom of others. I’ve had learn to hold power alongside equally powerful peers, to simply say “I don’t know” and stay open to new possibilities,  and am learning to tolerate uncertainly as one of the most powerful places to be standing.

According to Zammit and Thomas, one of the gifts of having believed I was powerless, and having acted so independently in order to gain a sense of power, is the potential to hold a tremendous amount of power in the field and have the ability to lead others to unprecedented levels of their own empowerment.

The deeper truths, that I recognise, are that I love to learn and everyone has something valuable to teach me, and I am here to serve the full empowerment of others.

So when it comes to hearing something these days from a loved one that is less than loving, less than respectful, and devoid of appreciation, I am able to observe rather than react angrily. I can do this because I have done the work to both become aware of the self defeating beliefs that were invisibly shaping my life and have reshaped these beliefs based on the reality of my life today.

That does not mean I should allow someone to treat me in a demeaning manner, I teach people how to treat me by what I do and don’t accept. But because I can observe what is going on in a more objective way, I am now generally able to talk to my partner – or whoever happens to be the perpetrator - about these little outbursts in a way he can hear me, and he tends then to adjust his approach.

He is not deliberately acting that way to demean me; he is acting that way to gain power because of his own invisible and unhelpful belief patterns. We each have our own work to do.

While my work is not done, I feel well on my way and – more importantly – I have uncovered many ways and methods to help me and others. Instead of lapsing into an angry or depressive state I have learned to welcome these blots on the landscape of my day as they are there to show me the way home to a more expanded version of myself.

​Is it possible you harbour learned but invisible beliefs about yourself and your life that could be holding you back? Are you willing to look at them in order to receive the love, appreciation and respect you deserve? I hope so, because that expanded version of you is the one you’ve been waiting for, and the one our world needs.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy I Am a Recovering Approval Seeker and Control Freak, What I Love About Being With Narcissistic People, What to Do if You Feel Trapped By Your Circumstances, How to Break Free of Addictive Relationship Patterns and You Don’t Need to Be Perfect to Make a Breakthrough. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.