What We All Need to Thrive

There’s a word that keeps coming up.

On my calls. In my inbox. In the heartbreaking comments I read from you here on the blog and on social media.

I hear it when you tell me things like:

No one sees like you.

No one hears like you.

No one thinks like you.

No one feels like you.

You see what everyone else says to just ignore. Because you can’t ignore it!

You hear what everyone says is just you picking up on something that isn’t there. It doesn’t go away.

You think and you think and you think. No matter what anyone says, you can’t not think! About everything.

And when it comes to how you feel, well, you feel even more. You feel everything!

There’s a reason why you're feeling like this, and it all comes down to this single word.

Support.

You don't feel supported.

Not at all. No one understands. No one’s walked in your shoes before. No one gets you.

A woman I'm working with brought this up again. All because of a lack of support in her life - unsupportive boyfriends, unsupportive friends and family and an unsupportive work environment, she had reached the conclusion there must be something wrong with her.

What she was missing was that this wasn’t at all about her; it was about the kind of support she had in her life. Or more precisely, the lack of support she felt.

The problem with most of our culturally acceptable narratives is that they don’t allow for this idea of support to be the issue. In our hyper-independent manner of responding to all things with the only part of our lives that doesn’t feel out of control, we blame ourselves. Not our lack of a supportive environment filled with supportive people who have the ability to see us and genuinely want the best for us. No, this one is on us. We make ourselves the problem.

We blame ourselves.

We feel there must be something wrong with us for even feeling this way in light of all the things we’ve been told we should be grateful for instead. Even the word “wrong” is subjective because your experience of what's right or wrong for you is going to be different from someone else's experience.

But the reason why we feel so strongly that there must be something wrong with us, is precisely because we don’t feel supported.

Or, another way of saying this is we’re with the wrong people, in the wrong environments and doing all the wrong things for who we actually are.

Just months before I met the man who would become my husband, I asked one of my colleagues to drive me to Hoag Hospital because I was at my peak "there must be something wrong with me" phase. It had gone from an emotional feeling to a physical one. Hours later, after going through all kinds of tests, the doctor confirmed for me that there was "absolutely nothing" wrong with me.

Those of you who've been reading my blog for awhile will recall a similar theme when I wrote about going to a therapist with the same concern. "There must be something wrong with me." That session concluded with his determination that once again, there was "absolutely nothing" wrong with me, I just needed to find myself a cheerleader.

Essentially, someone who I could count on to support me.

What WAS wrong, was my environment, who I was choosing to let into my life, the amount of power I was giving to people I didn't even know, to dictate how I should live my life.

What WAS wrong was working for a company where everyone sold their souls to become yes men and yes women to the powerful man who paid them richly in dollars in return, but robbed them of their dignity in the process.

What WAS wrong was me acquiescing to everyone else at the expense of myself.

Are you seeing this?

We make it about us, we place blame on ourselves, when what’s really happening is we’re not experiencing a good fit. There’s a huge divide between what we need and what we’re getting and there’s no way to reconcile the two.

Something has to give and you’ve already given so much - this time it can’t be you!

So how do you change this?

You change it by creating the most supportive environment possible for yourself with what you have to work with in front of you right now. You limit (or eliminate entirely) your interactions with unsupportive people in your life.

If you have to be around family members or exes because of children or whatever other reasons, you change your perspective to one of you feeling empowered by the choice you’re making to still honor yourself in these circumstances. And then you make sure you have enough support for yourself to do exactly that.

And then you protect your heart.

You stop trying to get water from a stone. You lower your expectations of what anyone is capable of becoming simply because you believe you can love them enough to heal their demons or take away their pain.

Because the truth is you can’t. They can do that for themselves if they want to badly enough, but you can't do it for them.

You take steps to change your work environment if possible and if not, due to financial constraints or whatever other reasons, you change your perspective so that you can become more than a victim of your circumstances.

And in every other area, you change what you can. You accept with dignity what you can't and you bring in a new perspective to make that happen.

You look at your friends, your pastimes, your hobbies, your medical practitioners, your therapists, all the professional people you employ in your life who we so often forget we pay to be there for us.

If they’re not supporting you in the ways you need them to, don’t keep them around. You matter!

Then come on back and join us here.

This is a place for everyone who's ever felt this way, whoever you are, whatever you've been through, and wherever in the world you find yourself now. One thing I know for sure, you'll never ever find yourself alone in feeling the way that you do!

Love,

Jane

How about you, do you feel supported? If not, what can you do right now, beginning today, to change that? It may not be easy, but tell me one thing in the comments below that you can do to increase the level of support you experience right now. I see you!