Stop Letting Other People Live Your Life For You

Most people search for direction, for someone to tell them how to get “there”. But ”there“ is an elusive place. It’s usually not a clear cut well defined place or goal that you had. But you will find no shortage of people who “have the answer“, who have the path to get “there“. Because you never took the time to clarify your own goals in life, you leave yourself open to anything that comes your way…and then you get addicted. You get addicted to somebody telling you what you need in your life and how to get there. Because then, you don’t have to have faith in your own decisions. You don’t have to sit down and craft out your own life. You can just lazily go along and let someone else do it for you. There’s plenty of frustration that comes along with that, though. But you get addicted to that too. You get addicted to the adrenaline of “I'm right, they’re wrong“. You get addicted to arguments as well. It’s all adrenaline. It becomes second nature to pass the blame when your life's been directed by others. Because it was never your decision in the first place…going all the way back. It’s what you were brought up on. The gaslighting was constant when you were a kid and then later, in all the relationships you had, it made you trust yourself less. It made you search others out who would tell you what to do. That’s how you were raised. You were raised to not trust any of your own insights or decisions, but to have others make them for you. You were raised to not believe in yourself. You were raised to do what you were told and then suffer the frustration of it in silence. You were raised to believe that your emotional outbursts signified that there was something wrong with you, not that they were normal reactions to what was being done to you. Take everything back. From other people, from AI, from corporations, and from groups. You know how to make decisions. You’ve made them all your life. Most of your decisions were to follow someone else’s “advice”. But there were times when you followed your own advice. When you did, most of the time it worked out great. Sometimes it didn’t because you were still lost in the shuffle of confusion, pain and self-doubt. Some of those decisions you made because you thought everyone else would think it was the right decision, not because you thought it was. Letting others make your decisions, really takes away your self-confidence and your common sense. Because, yes, even your common sense was overrided by the gaslighters, those narcissists that had populated different times in your life. They overrided every little decision you made, broke it down, and showed you their warped reasoning as to why it was wrong and what it really should be. They wanted you dependent. They wanted that control. But the great news is that you can decide to learn something different at any time. You can decide to put down the phone, stop asking other people, stop going outside yourself and start practicing your own decision-making instead. You know how to do it. You know what steps to take. Let other people‘s advice guide their own lives, not yours.

~Janice M. Burke

Image by Kyle Head