A friend of mine who I don’t get to see often but when I do she has ample stories and complaints to share with me. One thing I’ve picked up is she is forever complaining about her man.  ”You really don’t understand how it is living with that man…. he is this… that….not nearly this” is the common type of complaint I get from her at the very least once a month. Its pretty clear that my friend has high standards as to what kind of man she wants. I love that… she understands clearly what she wants in her man and what she absolutely cannot take, it shows she knows what she wants and has a clear understanding of that. I do however find myself often asking her; “what is your part in all this?”… and I think she either doesn’t hear me or she doesn’t quiet understand what exactly I’m asking her. I don’t quiet mind that she has high standards, its awesome to me, neither do I mind her complaints because complaints are a part of life (when we absolutely cant help it that is).. what I do mind is the very same complaints every single time, because to me it means she has chosen this man every.single.time. Over and over she has chosen this man, has it never occurred to her that it is her choices that are doing her in time and time again? So in this case, this man is not going to change…clearly. So she must either leave him with his faults and that means leaving leaving him alone too, or she should accept HER choice with regards to this man and that means changing her attitude towards her man’s faults. Or she could go on this way and chip away at this man and finally give herself an ulcer and a pulmonary embolism as well as live miserably for the rest of her life with this man. Because when I look at her, I also think “GOD knows how that man puts up with your faults too”- She’s not perfect, that man just has a better pain threshold I guess.  So in essence, her high standards only apply in her own mind because she has never thought to apply them in her actual life.

Then there’s another whose relationship ever since I met her has been dramatic. No…. you have no idea what I mean by ‘dramatic’, I’m talking fist-fights, screams, stalking, accidents, near suicides, abuses type of dramatic. We will settle with ‘dysfunctional’. And it seems every time there is drama in her relationships I am actually never surprised. And while analyzing why I have this reaction every time, It dawned on me that the only common denominator in all this is my beloved friend. She just hasn’t  figured it out yet but she chooses wrong over and over again. She chooses the same type of man with each new man she meets, this man just has a different face. She chooses the man who is a control freak, jealous, abusive, is bound to break her heart every time. She is generous and loving and just an overall awesome person, but she displays unhealthy amounts of neediness and she needs to make better relationship choices.

Everyone of us is a product of our environments and we are what we are as adults as a result of what has been instilled in us before we could make choices for ourselves. We are products of what we experienced and have been told in our younger years.  We all have our own forms of baggage. There comes a point when after all the baggage you carry from whatever  you might have gone through in your younger years you have to make choices of how you want to be for the remaining years of your life. Knowing that you are now an adult, whatever you experienced in your young life will never again happen to you because you are now able to control what you allow and let in your life. If you have noticed an unhealthy trend in yourself and need to seek help..seek it for your own sake so that you are able to control your environment henceforth. However once you know you have the choice, you have read enough times that you might need to change, you have been told often times and you continue on the same path… it becomes a choice. This is of course given that you have been empowered enough times in your adult life to know you are able to make choices.

While GOD gave us freewill, we need to understand that every single choice we make has a consequence. And with every man or woman we choose, with every friend, with every lifestyle, with every environment we choose to stay in, we must ask ourselves; ‘what is the consequence?’ and resolve to face the truth about your choices- know that the choice is just that…a choice, it is us who needs to change, get out or to live with it. That is the greatest amount of Empowerment anybody can have. To know that we have a choice.

And you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free. ~ John 8: 32

Love.Light.Peace.

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