What Makes You Think You’re Right That Other People Should Change?

As you proceed to go right on judging the loved one in your life, and labeling them, you forget you did attract them in and many of them by agreement, for a higher purpose.

Maybe them being exactly as they are, and you being who you are in this moment of time, is your gift to yourself and their tacit gift to you. Maybe the arrangement stops allowing you to be the “less then” real self you are. They could be there to offer you the reward of change by triggering you to stop and think about who you’re being and what you’re doing. And you are doing the same for them of course.

On a deeper level of reality….you hired them just for their particular aspects that could help you in this way. You had matching and/or oppositional bags of garbage and in today’s world, we call that “love, being made for each other.” They are your best teacher and when you finally get the set up, and make the program changes necessary to stop resonating in this type personality, you will begin to take control of your life for the first time.

The more you try and change someone, the more they resist changing. The more insulted they are, and hurt they are, and angry they are that you are disappointed in them.

They can’t wrap their mind around the fact that you cannot accept them for who they are when you committed to loving them exactly as they are. Even though you were pretending to yourself not to notice parts of them that you now don’t approve of and can’t live with, the intimate bond of love, psychic resonance, and chemistry that brought you together was there enough to dazzle you into committing. 1

For most people who are involved in relationship, a lot of it is about the effects of being in love on the human psyche.

The first eighteen months you won’t notice anything about them except how happy they make you. The love chemicals, the endorphins, the body’s opiates, keep you insanely fixated on their best traits and blind to their faults and you never felt better.

Everyone wakes up with a stranger after they move in together or get married. Dating is an entirely different environment than living with someone twenty-four seven. And everyone is different when dating than they are when they are living in the same space. When we’re tired, we relax and often revert back to old patterns. When we’re stressed we get triggered into familiar coping mechanisms automatically. You may never have seen this side of your partner before and it can be shocking and a bit scary.

But it is not your job to criticize these traits you’ve suddenly become aware of. If you love and respect them, you have to take the time to learn communication tools, learn how to come to a meeting of the minds, learn the give and take of successful relationships, and the art of compromise without surrendering appropriate boundaries.

What you don’t have to do is to continue that part of you that has learned to be critical. You have to learn to stop analyzing everything they do with an eye to change it.

If anything will bring up your more destructive personality traits, obsessions, fears, and triggers, it is marriage or living together. So both people have to be willing to change those parts of self that don’t serve them or those around them.

What’s not your job is to make them over, demean them, blame them, or fix them no matter how much you can’t believe this stranger is the person you married.

You thought you loved them… hopefully not with the idea, “You’re defective but I love you anyway because I know I can mold you into what I want and need.” This fallacy of self deception projected on to loved ones is a primary cause of divorce and relationship issues.

People seldom change for others in truth. They may watch themselves and try to comply but they are not being themselves and are not fulfilled while they are pretending so they can please you. If you’ve married a People Pleaser just for this subliminal purpose, you’ve done them and yourself a disservice.

This is not love and not realistic. When we love, we want the best for our loved one because we love and accept them warts and all, and often we come to love the warts too because they are part of them. Obviously I don’t mean raging dysfunction when I say warts.

The more you push them to be what you want, the more rejected they feel by you, the more they push back. People want to be right at least about themselves. And if you’re always right about how defective they are, then they’re always wrong and no one wants to be around a person who makes them feel bad about themselves.

Walking on eggs waiting for the next criticism and judgment keeps a person on edge expecting to be attacked all the time. It is a special kind of let down in marriage since we all believe we are getting our best friend who loves us unconditionally.

Being critical is a mental habit, an identity, we develop from being criticized and held to perfectionist standards in our childhood. It slants our perspective on life, ourself, and others in an unrealistic and impossible to attain way that sets up us for failure personally and in relationships.

No one is ever going to be perfect. No one is ever going to be everything you want them to be, nor should they be.

We’re not here to fix each other. We’re here to support each other as we learn our lessons and process our issues as we put forth our best efforts to fix ourselves.

When we judge others usually it is more about us than it is about them.

Often we have zero tolerance for people who have the same traits we are challenged with. The ones we are pretending not to have as in denying I have control issues but have projected on to you that you have control issues. Frequently couples come in for counseling and they have exactly the same complaints about each other because they have the same unresolved issues
and get triggered into their defense mechanisms based on these same issues.

When we judge others as not ok as they are, we are saying no to what we have attracted into our life. By pushing them away we are not allowing in what higher good is already on the way from the times when we were in vibrational alignment with our higher self. We know that the art of allowing is the third step in receiving the good that’s coming to us. We can block our receiving by our own mental and emotional predispositions and most of us do throughout life. The only way to become open and receptive to the gifts of our own source energy selves is to start changing our precepts about ourselves and how life “should” be lived.

Remember we all want to be around people who always see the best in us and tell us about it. It is from praise we grow, not reprimands or criticism. When we tell our partners we know they have everything they need in life to succeed, that we know they want to live a high quality life, have integrity, etc. then they are inspired to try to fulfill those expectations because they have to same goals for themselves. When we criticize and label them, sometimes they deliberately do the opposite of what is for their best interest and even worse, they stop trying to do better and grow into the negative labels we put on them loosing themselves in the process. Over time this can happen when people come to believe things like …There’s no way I will ever make them happy so why try. I’m always wrong. I can never do anything right.

Many of us do this because we were judged and criticized while our parents tried to force us into the mold they wanted us to be. We learned this conditional love and its partner, emotional manipulation, early in life and we continue to play this game until we learn it backfires on us.

And….it's all based on false premises.

You are them and they are you and you’re both trying to remember that you are not only human beings but are made in the image of Creator, connected in spirit as part of All That Is.

When our human selves are disproved of, it makes it harder to remember who we are as authentic aspects of God: source energy in human bodies.

We forget we are not trapped in any human identity unless we believe we are. And beliefs are subject to source being, which is you, deleting them and creating better ones throughout your entire lifetime. In other words, there’s nothing you can’t change about yourself and no belief you can’t alter in order to create a more perfect and blessed life.

Knowing this is the truth about each of us, we give up any effort or intention to change anyone other than ourselves.

1 The only caveat to this is when you partner with a sociopath, emotional manipulator, or a pathological liar who are all professionals at hiding who they are.