For Kindness to Thrive

Being a constant pleaser, giver, supporter or doormat without a limit is a recipe for disaster. It seems prosocial and if only surrounded by other giving people this tendency might not be such a problem, however for whatever reason these personality types are like magnets for people who contain no boundaries for taking. You will spend every drop trying to kill them with kindness, but you will only find they will kill you with taking it. You might sit hoping for a reflection of appreciation or some validation of your worth, but it will never arrive. The rule is that you can only ever control yourself and your tendencies. If you crush yourself with a smile on your face, no one will ever know how difficult it actually is. Assumptions are made, truths of emotions are hidden in an effort to keep the comfort of others and it is a vicious cycle. I am an unfortunate witness to the devastating effects of this style of coping in my own life. Kindness without self-kindness kills in this inverted system. Some feel entitled to spend your currency based on old antiquated constructs of who is seen as more valuable within society. They will never voluntarily stop because they see no problem. Why would they, nobody ever says no to a free lunch. In your life you can work to stop this unbalanced cycle by participating in restorative tasks. The solution within these relationships is going gray rock for awhile, while you reestablish boundaries for yourself. Its a practice to stop your complete addiction to comforting others and to shield yourself from the constant pull of their emotional needs. To investigate what it is about you that feels so driven to please a person who can never be pleased and lives life based on a complete addiction to a continual stream of problems and discord. These people are not you, they do not lay awake at night searching for solutions to help others have more ease, they lay awake searching for problems to your solutions. Make people stop assuming you are an endless well of energy that they can have an all access pass to and consume you at their will. Don’t set aside time for you, set aside time for them. A clear demarcation line or boundary of when you are available. To overcome this imbalance, first calm the body from the constant anxious high wire act. Listen deeply to your own emotions, if something is constantly pulling you forward to interject comforting words, advice, gifts, or service, stop, breath, stay silent and still. Go for a walk, leave the room, bite your tongue and mind your own business. It will take a great deal of cognitive override not to jump right up and save the day, as you have done this your entire life and people are use to you doing so. If you don’t, the people you constantly assist never learn to find solutions and stand on their own and you won’t have a second to come up for air and take time to find solutions to you own needs. Another benefit is that these individuals may begin to have a reflection of the energy you were giving and gain a reference point of how much they should have appreciated the weight you carried. In a larger scale, the massive pressures of the pandemic and difficult political cycle have ripped the mask of this nonsensical order within our country. Now the people you support have larger problems and in turn you have to carry the pressure of their larger problems, not to mention how you have personally been affected without time prioritized for your own restoration. Now we can see very clearly that some people don’t contain the ability to care about others. This just is and it is propagated down to the next generation through maintaining compliant and attachment controlling styles of relationships within homes. Love is true relationship, not compliance. You are not an object to be controlled, owned, manipulated, disregarded, unappreciated, undervalued, or assumed. Whatever is fed survives, what ever is starved dies. Feed kindness, cut off cruelty. How do you imaging kindness will ever thrive if it is being drained into an insatiable useless black hole. This pattern of relationship continually steals self esteem, self worth and the sensation of deserved basic decency to maintain control and compliance. Ask yourself, how do you ever expect to be happy and autonomous if your happiness hinges on not only carrying someone who does not support you, has zero interest in assisting you and quite possibly may actually function from an interest of keeping you submitted. Continual propping up of a value system with absolutely no true meaningful value what so ever will not end well. Its a system of devalue, its an insatiable drain and I believe that these personality styles are the reason for our inverted and unequal society as well. At it’s base are individuals who produce and at the top are the people who consume others to maintain power and control. They keep you down with a knee on your back with fear and manipulation that robs self worth and value. You do have the power to invert this structure and are not destined to remain burdened. To do so, I believe you should give where your appreciated, listen to your inner voice of emotion, teach children that kindness is a high value commodity to be used wisely. That is how this system works. Self-kindness needs to be held up on a pedestal as the ultimate prize. Seen as desirable, meaningful and satisfying, so that some will move towards adopting giving instead of taking and society will follow suit. Kindness must be cultivated, the practice of planting the seeds so that everyone has enough love to thrive in a joyful, equal, restorative and hopeful world, will require each individual to prioritize it within the moments of their everyday lives. The way I see it, being kind is a strength that gives everything away and manages to somehow keep walking and taking is a weakness that never truly ever takes a step on it’s own.