Do you ignore red flags?

Do you feel like you give too much in your relationships?

Do you brush things under the carpet when someone violates your boundaries?

If so, this week’s video is specifically for you…

Are you the type of person who feels you give too much in your relationships? It doesn’t just have to be romantic relationships, it could be with friends, family. You feel that you’re a giver, and ultimately that gets taken advantage of, and maybe in the process your needs don’t get met. You give so much and then you somehow forget yourself in the process and you can end up feeling extremely resentful. It comes out in passive aggressive ways, or maybe one day you even explode, right?

And then, the person in front of you says, “Whoa, who is this? I don’t know this person.” Because we haven’t been giving them a true impression of what our needs are along the way, so now they don’t recognize us.

Now why do we do this? Whenever I talk to women about this, there’s often the logic that, “Well, it’s because I’m a giver. It’s because I’m a nurturer by nature, so I like doing those things for people. I like showing up for people. It’s just who I am. I’m a very loving person. I don’t want to cause pain to those people. I love those people. And anyway I can handle it. I’m a giving person and, yes, sometimes they do things that upset me, but I can live with it. It’s okay.” But of course they can’t, because it’s like this slow drip torture where eventually you suffer so much in your resentment that’s when that extreme reaction comes about.

Here’s what’s interesting to me. People give that logic of, “Well, it’s just because I’m a loving person, and I am a giving person, so I kind of forget about myself.” And it’s not that it’s not true that that type of person is giving. It’s not that it’s not true that they’re extremely loving and that they are nurturing by nature, but sometimes that becomes an excuse for something else that’s going on, which is that what’s really happening underneath all that is that the amount that they’re giving to someone else they don’t truly feel worthy of. They are worried that if they suddenly start asking for what they need, that this person will leave them. This person won’t like them as much. This person will decide that they’re not worth the trouble. And so they hold back these needs.

In doing so, they deprive both them and the other person of a deeper relationship because you can only form a depth of relationship out of honesty. And when you’re not communicating your needs, it’s actually a form of detachment. You’re creating a wedge between you and somebody else because they don’t really know you. They don’t know your mind. They don’t have a chance to connect with you more deeply because you’re not placing trust in them to be able to handle who you really are.

It’s also depriving somebody else of the opportunity to grow. Certain people may need to hear truths about themselves. There’s been so many times in my life where I’ve needed someone or multiple people to tell me, often multiple times, something about myself that I’m too close to see, or that my self awareness is lacking on that particular thing, and when I hear it from other people, I go, “Wow, I better pay attention to this because this is how I’m making other people feel.”

I’ve needed the honest people in my life to tell me that. And I haven’t been able to rely in those moments on the people pleasers in my life who don’t tell me the truth. I’ve had to rely on the people that tell me often very unwelcome things about myself, but things that ultimately allow me to grow. And although that may cause me pain in the short term, it does allow me to grow in the long term. And pain isn’t what deprives me from being happy. Lack of growth is.

So we could say that when we’re not honest with the people in our lives about things that are bothering us, we’re trying to avoid pain with them – maybe pain for ourselves that they may like us less in that moment, or they may not want to be around us, or they may even leave us, pain for them in hearing an unwelcome truth – but we’re actually depriving everyone of real happiness, because real happiness comes from true growth, and true growth can only come from a place of hearing honest truths about ourselves.

So are you the type of person that, when you see red flags in a relationship, ignores them? Are you someone who often brushes things under the carpet when someone does something that you don’t like, or you feel violates your boundaries, or fell beneath the standard you would like to have for yourself? I always think we have to convert our wishlist, the things that internally we – “I wish this person would do this, I wish this person would do that “– we have to convert our internal wishlist into an external standard. Wishlists have to become standards. But that can only come from a place of self-worth, of believing that we are worthy of that from other people. What we are willing to give, we are also worthy of receiving from those people.

And of course that doesn’t mean that every single person that we express our needs to will be capable of meeting those needs. We will lose people in life who aren’t capable of meeting our needs. But it’s better that we lose them sooner rather than later, because you don’t want to get three years into a relationship where you’ve been that entire time pretending to be someone you’re not. “I’m a giver. I’m a giver. I’m a giver. I’m a giver. I’m a giver.” But never receiving and then three years later, finally you start putting your foot down, and putting yourself first, and then you find out they leave because they’re not up to the task of being able to meet your needs as well. It only worked as long as it was a relationship completely out of balance, but when you asked for things, all of a sudden it didn’t work, and I know many of you out there will have experienced this.

Well, you don’t want the pain of finding that out late into the mature stages of a relationship. You want to find that out now, which is why it is imperative that, yes, be the giver you are. Don’t hold back. Give your love freely. Be that person who can show up for other people. Be nurturing. You don’t have to rein in all of the ways that you give, but you better be brave enough and honest enough at the same time as giving all of that to also ask for what you need, to point out where you don’t like something, and to explain to people what things would mean a lot to you if they did them.

If that terrifies you and you know underneath all of this, this sounds good, but you know you avoid these kinds of conversations all the time, it’s for two reasons. One, you need to learn to communicate with the people in your life and communicate from a place of strength. There’s a mechanics to the way to communicate in that way. And there’s an internal self-worth issue going on with you right now where you don’t feel worthy of having your needs met.

Both of these things I do in my Retreat. What the Retreat does is it changes our internal standard of what we believe we’re worth and then it shows us how to communicate that standard to other people. Not just in a romantic context, but in every context in life, because this is a universal language. Standards is something that applies everywhere in life.