In our formative years
our own life experience
can put us into a situation
or maybe even chronic situations
where a person or people
actually fail at finding a win-win
and as a result,
we find ourselves in an experience or chronic experiences
where they choose something else
over us and our best interests.
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Why The "Choose Me Dynamic" Can Be Toxic For Relationships
It's the child whose dad chooses to move to a different part of the country
to be with the new stepmom,
it's the child who felt replaced
by a younger sibling that was preferred,
it's the child whose dad chooses his needs, of his own career,
rather than to be there for the child
when he or she needs him,
it's the child who is put into the middle of a contentious divorce
and is expected to choose between mom and dad
and thus learns that being chosen is what love is.
This type of life experience causes a great deal of trauma
and not only does it cause trauma,
it actually forms a dysfunctional association or relationship
between being chosen, and love.
It makes perfect sense that these types of experiences
would give rise to a strong desire to be chosen.
Chosen because you were not chosen before,
chosen because in being chosen,
you feel a sense of your own importance,
significance, and therefore, value.
Chosen, because in being chosen
you feel wanted,
you feel cared for,
you feel loved.
If this association is one that you possess,
you've learned that anything less than being chosen
is not only emotionally tormenting,
but it's also a dangerous position to put yourself in.
But, there's a few shadows lurking in this desire.
And a few of these shadows have the capacity
to not only destroy relationships,
but also lives.
The shadows lurking in this particular pattern
have the potential
to keep the chain of suffering going, and going, and going.
The first shadow relative to this pattern
is that we have such a deep visceral need
to create resolution for what is unresolved,
that instead of actually gravitating
towards a situation where we can be, in essence, prioritized
and therefore chosen,
we gravitate towards an experience
that mirrors the initial situation that is unresolved,
which just so happens to be
a situation which is the least likely
for us to get that outcome that we're looking for,
i.e. being prioritized and chosen.
At the very least,
what we will find ourselves gravitating towards is a a situation
where we have stiff competition.
On a subconscious level,
we feel that getting someone in this situation to choose us
will resolve the pain of our childhood experience.
In other words,
we don't actually want to be chosen
by somebody who actually will prioritize us and chooses us
because their actual priority is romantic connection and a partnership.
We want the person who actually prioritizes career
to decide to flip
and be the one to choose us,
and to choose romantic partnership above everything else.
We don't want the available person to be available,
we want the unavailable person to be available.
because doing that,
we think, would solve our childhood experience.
It would resolve that wound.
You can see this shadow clearly
in a woman who goes for a married man,
hoping that he will one day leave his wife
and choose to be with her instead.
Because we don't go straight for our need where we can actually get it,
we enter into a situation that is incompatible with our need,
and then we force everything to change so as to meet our need anyway,
no matter the cost to anyone else involved.
And the reality is,
many people's loss, becomes our gain.
The second shadow
is that we actually have subconscious motive
to put the person we love at odds
with anything else they deeply care about.
Now, no matter what you're telling yourself,
you actually have emotional super glue for this.
No matter what you might be telling yourself, or them,
you get a sense of self-esteem and a sense of your own value
and feel loved when you put them in situations
where they have to choose between you
and your best interests,
and something or someone else that they deeply care about.
Because of this, if we have this pattern,
we're constantly putting the people we love in lose-lose scenarios
in order to find out where we stack up
relative to their other priorities in life,
relative to the other things they care about.
For example, a man plays up getting sick
in order to see whether his career-driven girlfriend
will drop everything to take care of him, or not.
Or a woman puts up a boundary
around her boyfriend spending time with his best friend
who happens to be another woman,
in order to see whether he will choose her or his best friend.
Doing this not only hurts everyone else involved,
it also sets us up, if we have this pattern,
to be resented in the long run.
So, ironically, even though there's a short-term gain,
it sets us up to ultimately sabotage our own relationships.
The third shadow is that we are actually perpetuating
the very suffering which we ourselves experienced.
If we have this pattern,
in order to feel valued, in order to feel loved,
in order to feel good, we have to be chosen.
Well, for you to be chosen
that means that somebody else has to be not chosen,
which means we're actually setting people up in our life experience
to feel the same way that we felt,
to experience the same thing we experienced
and that caused all this trauma to begin with.
This not only keeps this pain
going and going and going and going and going,
it also has serious karmic implications.
The fifth shadow is that instead of being an agent for cohesiveness,
for togetherness,
for closeness,
and for the strengthening of relationships around us,
especially between the people in our life,
we actually act as an agent for the opposite,
and on a subconscious level,
we act as an agent for division,
for separation,
for conflict.
We weaken and destroy the relationships
between the people in our life experience
so as to find a personal gain.
Usually we do this for the sake of our own well-being,
for the sake of our own self-esteem
and for the sake of our own personal needs.
For example,
a person could start dating someone with a child.
Instead of enabling the relationship between them and their child,
or leaving the relationship if they see that they just can't do that,
this person might start to be threatened by the relationship
and start to create conflicts between their own needs
and the needs of this child.
This puts their boyfriend or girlfriend in the position
to have to choose between them or their own child.
The sixth shadow is that
we aren't actually loving the other person in a relationship
when we are doing this.
In fact, what we are doing
is using them for the sake of our own self-estimation.
If we love someone,
we don't want to see them in pain.
If we really love someone,
we never want to put them in a situation
where they have to choose between us and something else
that they deeply care about.
We don't want them to sacrifice something they need or want
for our sake.
That doesn't feel good.
This is one reason why when it comes to relationships,
compatibility is so critical.
I mean, so critical, because genuine compatibility
is what makes it so that you don't wind up in these
"choose me or that" type experiences.
To learn more about this, watch my video titled:
"Incompatibility (A Harsh Reality in Relationships)".
The reality is,
when we are fixed into this pattern,
we're being totally unloving to the other person in the relationship.
While on the flip side,
seeing their willingness to suffer,
or be in pain for our sake,
as love.
This means, there is an association
between suffering and love
inherent in this dynamic.
For example, we may feel loved
if we put a friend or family member in the position
to choose something that's in our best interests
or something that's in the best interests of their life purpose or career,
and they choose whatever is in our best interests.
To understand more about this, watch my video titled:
the "Suffer so I can feel loved relationship dynamic".
Your life experience
may have led you to believe that you're never enough,
that you need to prove that you have value
and therefore, deserve to be someone's #1
through being wanted, needed, desired,
seen as special, and thus, chosen.
If you have this desire
you need to do two things:
The first is to go back
and to resolve that unresolved pain
of having not been chosen all those years ago.
You can do this by using the completion process.
If you want to learn more about how to do this process,
I actually have a book that I wrote quite literally titled:
"The Completion Process"
You can read that book and get a handle on what this process is
and start to use it.
Alternatively, you can visit www.completionprocess.com
and find a practitioner to guide you through it.
Specifically using the trigger of that pain of not being chosen,
of being insignificant,
of not being the priority,
whatever the case may be.
The second thing you need to do
is to consciously go directly for being prioritized,
for being consciously chosen,
but in a situation that's actually compatible to that.
This means, you have to consciously choose against
that urge to enter into a situation
which totally mirrors that past experience
so as to try to get that past experience to change.
Don't repeat the past in order to try to get a different outcome.
Instead, enter into a totally different scenario.
Enter into a genuinely compatible scenario.
This means, enter into relationship
with somebody who can actually, and will actually prioritize you.
In other words, your best chance
at actually having availability,
is to actually find someone who is available,
and is demonstrating that.
Of course, everyone in this position
is gonna have to reckon with this choice.
Do you actually want to find somebody who is,
in this example,
genuinely available?
Or is it more important to get somebody who's unavailable
to become available?
If you're sick of trying to get unavailable people to become available,
you have to actually just simply go straight for what is available.
Something you're gonna have to do here
is to notice all the red flags
that indicate that somebody is not available.
All the red flags that somebody actually has other priorities,
all the red flags that say
it's gonna be difficult for them to choose you.
For people who are in this pattern,
that deep need to be chosen,
especially by people who are unlikely to choose them,
it causes them to ignore all of these red flags.
I mean, you'll have an explanation for all of them, right?
But you really need to recognize these
and say "no" to a situation where you're getting all those red flags,
and instead,
choose consciously into a situation
where it's pretty obvious that a person
will and can actually prioritize, and therefore choose you.
The next thing:
You've got to notice when you are in this pattern
and catch it in the act.
This is difficult to do,
especially when you've got high degrees of shame,
because it doesn't cause you to feel real great about yourself,
if you're constantly setting up scenarios in order to be chosen
that are causing pain to everyone around you, right?
Hard to own that.
But, you need to recognize when you are actually inside this pattern.
And when you're in the middle of that pattern
you have to recognize that you are the one that actually has the power,
you're the one in the power position.
You're probably telling yourself the opposite, right?
You're probably telling yourself
that it's the person who has the power to choose you or something else
that actually has the power.
No, it's you.
You're the one that has the power
to put them in the situation to have to choose in the first place.
Notice the emotional payoff
underneath any of that surface guilt that you feel.
So many of the people who have this pattern
have an estimation of what is right and what is good,
so you'll hear them say things like:
"I just really don't want him to choose"
or "I just really don't want her to choose".
The thing is... is that that's not really the complete truth,
because down deep you actually are getting something
out of them choosing.
So you kind of do want them to choose.
Once you're conscious of being in this dynamic,
from that position, you're in a choice point:
"Do I want to go through with this or not?
What do I want to do about the fact that I'm in this pattern?"
And it's important to play out all of these different scenarios
that could happen as a result
of you putting the person in your life in this "choose me" situation,
in order to make a conscious decision
about what consequence you're actually willing to meet with.
In other words, become conscious of all of the consequences
which will be faced by all people involved in the situation you're in,
and make a choice, a conscious choice,
based off of seeing those consequences.
This "choose me" dynamic
is to blame for so much relationship pain
that we experience as people.
Becoming aware of it,
stopping it in action,
is the way to end this pain.
If you really love someone,
then you don't put them in a position to choose
between two things they deeply care about.
The best way to ensure that we won't do this,
is to put ourselves into relationship arrangements
that are truly compatible to our needs.
And at the end of the day,
if you recognize this pattern within yourself,
you're gonna have to ask yourself a question:
"What price am I willing to pay
or to make other people pay,
for the sake of having a sense of my own value,
my own self-esteem
and my own need to feel wanted, loved and prioritized?"
Have a good week.
If you like this video,
be sure to share it, like it and also subscribe to my channel,
so you can see more content like this.
But I wanna personally thank you for taking the initiative
and having the bravery to step into the space of awareness.
Not only for yourself, but for the benefit of those around you.
Subtitles by: Tanya Duarte www.tanyaduarte.com