FREEDOM MONTH: DAY 11: “If you want to be a slave in life, then continue going around asking others to do for you. They will oblige, but you will find the price is your choices, your freedom, your life itself. They will do for you, and as a result you will be in bondage to them forever, having given your identity away for a paltry price. Then, and only then, you will be a nobody, a slave, because you yourself and nobody else made it so.”― Terry Goodkind
When we are indebted to others because we need something from them, we are going to form resentment. There is no way to allow others to do what we need to do for ourselves without this happening.
We may believe we will always be grateful to those people, but the truth is that we owe them something and it eats at us until we are free of the debt. Whether it is money, or if we just need them to do something for us, we are, in essence, using that person for that.
We begin to resent our need of them and begin to resent them. This is the formation of the problems in a relationship. If we are only in it for the benefit that the other person brings to us, we are not going to be happy in that relationship.
Traditionally, women were dependent on men in relationships to support them, for many generations. This is unhealthy dependence, and there is no way resentments do not come into it.
If we can remain independent of the other person, we are free to be in the relationship or not, and we will be free of resentment, because that person cannot control or manipulate us due to our dependence on them. This is one of the oldest dynamics in the world.
Keeping someone around, no matter what the relationship with them is, just because they satisfy a need we don’t know how to fill for ourselves, is going to be a problem, and we will never be free until we let it go and become independent of that person and/or need.