(cy twombly)

How you feel is how you feel.

It was very freeing to realize that I am in charge on my own happiness.  It isn’t what anyone gives you or brings you.  Some people make you happier and make you feel more powerfully one with the world.  Some people drag you down. The dragging is usually, in my experience, a fuction of a person who doesn’t know how to find happiness from within themselves.

When I started to see that I don’t need to pull on people to have happiness, but, rather, I need to generate it within myself, I had a lot of people start to pull on me.

Bright shiny objects capure lots of attention.

The funny thing is, the same people who pull on me for happiness are the people who, when I have had a problem, can’t hear it.  In fact, they have made me feel very wrong and actually punished me for feeling the way that I felt.

You are never wrong for having feelings, and you are never wrong for sharing them.

You might just have some emotionally tyranny in your life, and when you see it for what it is you can free yourself from it’s grips. 

Emotional Tyranny.

Usually, I think of this as a fear-based business term. Emotional tyrrany is the way that people sort of badger and bully and force other people to go along with their ideas.

Here’s a great definition from Emotional Competency:

“Whether it’s a pushy person, a control freak, a bully, or an outright tyrant, the problem is the same: their goals are always more important than yours. A difficult, pushy person has gone too far again. They are bossing you around, acting selfish and self-important, threatening you, making demands, barking orders, and abusing their power. Control freaks, imperative people, and tyrants exercise power in a harsh, cruel, or destructive manner. They are oppressive, harsh, arbitrary people who make life difficult for too many of us. They are annoying, inconsiderate, and demeaning.”

It sucks.

But when this power struggle gets into your personal life it sucks way more.

I grew up with an emotional tyrant. My mother’s boyfriend.

He found a perfect victim in my mother.

Everything he heard that he didn’t like resulted in him walking out.

It was his way… or no way.

Every time she tried to do things to better her life and he disapproved, he screamed, he tried to pull her away from us and then, ultimately, once she was decimated, he left.

Emotional Tyrants…

• are surrounded by anger, confusion and drama
• have very sad and beaten-up puppets around them, not whole, healthy people
• they can’t handle high-caliber thought, emotion or other perspectives of truth because it shatters their worldview that they are right.
• they are self-destructive people who tend to push people away because on some level they know that they can and will hurt them.
• operate on anger.
• don’t want to hear about how you feel, so if you stick around them long enough, you will go numb and blank

When my mother died, I allowed her now ex (for perhaps the 40th time in 20 years) boyfriend to sit privately with her because I had a feeling that he needed a chance to apologize even though it was seemingly too late. No one wanted to see him, and he knew it, so he went on his own.

In the church later, I spotted him hiding in the back row flushed red and hysterical. I thought he might die right there, as his soul had completely left his body. And that’s his life from now on, in total hell of pain. She died of a broken heart but he gets to live with the way he behaved for so long.

If you ever find yourself in a place where you feel like your emotions don’t matter, please leave. Nothing good comes of this.

You can have compassion from a distance.  You are worth it.

xoxo Dana

 

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