This blog post originally appeared as a Facebook Live video with The Discovery House counselor, Tebei.
All relationships are hard but have you ever wondered about whether someone in your life was adding to your life or merely taking from it?
Let’s say you’re trudging up a hill and you have a carriage behind you and there’s a rope tied to your waist. This is called life because life is all about an uphill trudge. Now here’s the thing we need to be mindful of. You’ve got people in your carriage.
There are two kinds of people in this world
Some people are going to get out of the carriage and help you bear the weight of your life. They’re going to have an umbrella because life can bring a lot of heat at times. They might support you by moving all the rocks from the path. So you’re going to have that person helping you out. It could be one person and if you’re lucky you’ll have more.
So then, you’re going to have some people that are actually in this carriage. They’re going to have the door shut because they don’t want to feel the heat. They’re all eating grapes and all that just enjoying your trudge.
How fair is it to you that you have individuals soaking everything out of you and not caring about you at all?
4 Reasons People Come into Your Life
There are four reasons why people come into your life, and I want you to be mindful of this; add, subtract, multiply, or divide.
Let’s break it down.
First, someone’s going to come they’re going to add to your life they’re going to add happiness, substance, and all that grandiose stuff that’s going to improve your life.
You’ll have people who are going to subtract from your life take from, and they’re going to be almost like leeches, and your relationship with people like this is probably going to resemble a one-way street. They’re going to take everything they need from you.
Then you have people that are going to multiply. They’re going to multiply your happiness they’re going to multiply your finances. They’re going to multiply everything about your life.
Finally, you’ve got those people who are going to try to divide you away from everything divides you from your family divide you from your finances divide you from everything that you worked so hard to achieve.
How to Let Go of Toxic Relationships
Here’s the thing about relationships. There has to be an even distribution of effort and commitment. You can’t just be giving 80 percent or you can get 80 percent of your effort and that person only give 20 percent of their effort. It doesn’t work at all.
So what do you do when you find yourself in a toxic relationship that is subtracting or dividing instead of adding to or multiplying?
As the saying goes, breaking up is hard to do. This conversation won’t be easy but here’s something that might help.
Honesty without compassion equals hostility.
“I see that both me and you are essentially going in a different different directions. Now I’m going to be honest with you because I care enough about you to be totally honest with you. But you and I we’re not really going to work out right now.”
This can apply to any relationship – not just romantically involved ones. Often it’s going to go to a mom, a dad, a cousin, or a best friend.
Removing the dead weight in your life is crucial. You know that saying, you’re an architect of your misery? Well, you’re an architect of your happiness as well.
Why Should You Listen to Me?
Why do I know this? Because I’m speaking from personal experience. I had to remove toxic relationships in my life so I could get free and try to progress. What I did was I asked myself, do you know who you are?
Try to find out who you are. Because if you don’t know who you are somebody else will dictate that for you. So I strongly encourage you to try to find all that stuff about yourself. And when you invite somebody into your life make sure it’s beneficial because life is hard enough as it is.
Watch the original video with Tebei here: