Avoid The Yabuts of Denial And Life A Happier Life
Allow others to be themselves
How can you bring more allowance to your relationships?
Do you approach your partner with acceptance for what you can’t change in them? Or do you control, manipulate, and dishonor them, trying to shame them into behaving the way you think they should?
Allowance is letting other people be, do, and choose whatever they want to be, do, and choose, whether you like it or not.
If they want to be dicks. That’s on them.
It has nothing to do with you.
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You don’t have to stick around if you can’t accept who your partner wants to be in their lives. It will be better for both of you to let the relationship go.
Now, I’m not saying that you don’t try to make things work. I think it’s important to work on relationships. Talk to someone, on your own, or together. Try to work out the problems you have and communicate. That’s key.
But stop trying to make them change.
Avoiding judgment can make it easier for you to lead a happier life. If you’re not always trying to change people, it won’t be a continuing problem for you.
I can hear the Yabuts.
Yabut, what if they are choosing a behavior I don’t like? What if they are doing something I know is not good for them? What if they are being a real ass-hat?
The Yabuts Of Denial
Here’s the thing. You aren’t in charge of your partner. Can you really know what is good or bad for another person? And who made you the boss of them anyhow?
Being in allowance doesn’t mean letting them walk all over you. It also doesn’t mean you have no choice. In fact, you have your Superpower of Choice.
The Superpower of Choice
The first step into building more allowance is curiosity. Be curious about the situation. Sit and wonder why the person is choosing whatever it is that’s bothering you or causing the problem.
Don’t try to figure them out or be right or wrong about it, just ask yourself; “I wonder what this wants to be?” What you discover may surprise you.
You can’t really know what is going on in someone else’s relationship
The same thing goes for other people’s relationships. It’s one thing to work on your own problems, but some people tend to be busy bodies. They look at other people’s relationships and wonder why they behave that way.
It’s important to have allowance for others to be themselves and make their own choices. Sure, you can stand up for a friend and give them advice. You can give them help if they need to get to safety. But there’s no room for three people in the relationship unless the third one is a family counselor. Or a priest, if that’s their thing.
Here’s a real-life example to consider
Last year, my brother-in-law’s partner decided they no longer wanted to be married. She told him it had been coming for a long time. He was blindsided.
The other members of the family were vilifying her, blaming her for breaking up their marriage. It was turning into a series of uncomfortable conversations.
It seemed like she had manipulated him. There were lots of reasons to think she was the villain in the situation.
She had never indicated there was a problem before. She renovated the entire house just before she broke up with him, and he was the one footing the bill. People were taking sides and it was affecting the whole family.
Then I remembered something my grandmother had told me.
“You can’t really know what is going on in someone else’s relationship.”
Unless you are ‘in’ the relationship, you can’t know how they behave toward one another. You don’t know if there is yelling or blaming or if someone is controlling. Unless there are signs of physical abuse, it’s hard to determine what is really going on.
I decided to step into allowance and be neutral about their breakup.
When someone tried to engage me in a ‘he said, she said’ conversation, I simply repeated my grandmother’s advice. ‘You can’t really know what’s going on.”
The first time I said it, my husband was floored. Then he realized that was true. He hadn’t been around them enough to know what was going on. And both of them could be contributing to the problem.
It was a needed shift in perspective that the entire family needed to hear.
Making a change in how you look at things doesn’t mean you have no choice. You always have your Superpower of Choice.
Often, the things you judge about someone else reveal something about you.
If you notice you’re judging something or wanting to control it, you’re not in allowance. If you feel the need to be right or to label something as wrong, you are not in allowance. If you want to turn it into acceptance or tolerance, that’s also not ‘allowance’.
Allowance can be powerful in other ways too.
If you allow someone to behave badly, you can observe a lot about how they are operating in a relationship. If you can be there and witness them without judgment, it is amazing what they reveal.
The person may pour out their fears, their love, their appreciation, and their emotion because you have made a space to do it. They become more aware.
They might be able to notice their behavior and then they might decide to shift gears. That’s a powerful way to affect change.
Allowance is a powerful tool for change.
Paid subscribers can access the entire archive of my stories from the beginning, along with my poetry and every article I’ve ever written here. If you aren’t a paid subscriber, you can access the archive for free with a 7-day trial.
Thanks for this great restack!!