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Our ability to enjoy our lives and relationships reflect our habits — habits that reflect our personal history, family and cultural traditions and our entanglements.
Family background plays a key role in shaping future family relationships, as typically, those who are easily entangled come from families that are chaotic and not skilled at emotional communications, so they tend to repeat the cycle.
Getting caught up in the tangle of emotions inherent in family relationships and trying to control outcomes can harm us and the people we love. Entanglements in the present rooted in resentment and anger over past events can trigger irrational emotions appropriate to another time, another place, another person. The person that was, not the person who is.
When we are in the midst of a family relationship drama, we replay the past; we fantasize about the future. In reality, problems do not exist outside the mind, and most of our emotional problems are nothing more than a failure to accept things as they are. Our family members have been in our past, are in our present, and will be in our future.
Some life lessons I have been learning are:
- I don’t have to live my life the way other people expect me to.
- I must decide what I want from life before others decide for me.
- I don’t have to like everyone and they don’t have to like me.
- Detachment is required to maintain healthy relationships.
- The one thing I can control is my attitude.
- I can use skillful means to heal myself and help others at the same time.
Healthy family relationships are characterized by a degree of detachment that allows us freedom to thrive and grow independently. Healthy detachment is keeping a safe, emotional distance from those you have previously given power to affect your emotional outlook on life. Healthy detachment and happiness are possible when we commit to self-love as a skilful means for conscious living.
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Since you where so kind to promptly awnser an issue I posted on forum I decided to come follow you am discovering this neat place of yours. Hope your health still picking up for good.
Just starting on my site for now and loving it !
I’ll be following some more, be back soon, take care.
Thank you so much for the visit and the comment too.
Entanglement and detachment, two sides of the human coin, beautifully described here. Keep on going.
Thank you. :)
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I can’t tell you how this post resonates with me. Perfect timing, as I work on healthy detachment. Thank you.
Hello there,
I had a difficult time expressing myself in this post. I’m pleased to hear some of my readers were able to read between the lines. Thanks so much for letting me know what I wrote resonates with you.
Extricating oneself from entanglement can take time and sometimes that process requires setting boundaries if the other person has a tendency to pull you in over and over in the same destructive pattern of relationship behaviour.
And to set boundaries in such a way that the other person clearly will respect those boundaries. However too much detachment, particularily if there is major deception to loved ones, can compound the cycle of isolation and misunderstanding with many different, sometimes tragic results.
Wisely said, Jean.
When you recognize the pattern of entanglement and accept your powerlessness over another person, situation, or thing — detachment is a conscious choice. You can let people you love accept personal responsibility for their lives and not caretake them or bail them out. Detachment leads to liberation and happiness — entanglements lead to unhappiness.
I had to read this twice to “get” it! So interesting and I agree with the premise. There is not much a person can control outside of their life, so I like the term, “healthy detachment,” as a way to be independent and grow in your own self-love.