Ep 17.1

The Partnership Vision Podcast discusses having a fulfilling relationship. The hosts share their own experiences of loneliness and the struggles they faced before finding each other. They emphasize the importance of understanding God's will and timing in pursuing a partner. They also address the different responses to loneliness, such as sadness and resignation, and emphasize the need to avoid negative thoughts and beliefs about oneself. We came, we saw, we loved. Welcome to the Partnership Vision Podcast, where we discuss how to have a relationship full of unity, trust, fun, and fulfillment. We'll be sharing the rewards of preparing yourself for your best partner and being your best for them. Hello everyone and welcome to our inaugural episode of this new awesome series we're excited about. Am I always going to be alone? Finding Your Fairytale. This episode is This Pain is Killing Me, Finding Your Fairytale Part One about sadness and resignation. And we are super excited because this really hits an issue that's very close to both of our hearts. It's what Brandi and I suffered a lot in our lives before we found each other, before we came to the happy state we are now married together. We really suffered a lot from just the loneliness of being single and not having the person that we were meant to have in our life and not really having the closeness and connection and friendship. And, you know, in a lot of ways we've been outliers and really different from the people that are around us. So we felt that I think even more keenly than other people might, you know, where we didn't have a really tight-knit circle of friends that could kind of distract you from the pain of singleness, the pain of not having your lifelong partner. And also just we were really highly called to marriage, highly called to be together and share life together and walk in partnership and minister in this area to other people. So it was a very intense area of calling and destiny. And so it was a deep need, a very strong need and a very strong desire that God placed within us. And the unfortunate thing is because we had such a strong connectedness, such a very prevalent sense of how we needed somebody in our life and we needed a partner, we needed a best friend, we needed a lover, it left us open to where we had to struggle with that and we had to struggle with that desire and that need. And without the right understanding, without the right, you know, just knowledge of God's will for our life and how He saw us and what He had in store for us, we had all sorts of temptations and all sorts of, you know, different things that took advantage of our insecurities and took advantage of the pain that we were feeling and where we were at and terrible things happened to us as a result. And even just not knowing what's possible, because you see different posts on social media saying that, well, if this guy or this girl really truly exists, that'd be great. You know, that it's all fairytale and it's all nonsense. And it's just you can dream all you want about it, but you can't have it or all the good ones are taken. All the ones that are left are cheats and liars, like we'll talk about later. It's not the truth. It's like you can have your fairytale and enjoy it and live it to its truest form. It's just you need to know that one, it does exist to understand what it truly means. And three, how and when to pursue it. Because when we go after things in our own timing, it may not be the right timing unless it's an inspired idea and it's God's idea originally. We may be rushing things or delaying things because of our own insecurities. When we really either need to pull the reins back or go full force forward. But the only way to truly know is to consult with God first and not go gallivanting on our own and make all these different mistakes because we don't know things or understand things and just settle for what we know to be true or think to be true. But in reality, there is so much more out there to know and experience. Yeah, and so we've found that basically the categories that we've come across of kinds of responses that people have were really birthed out of a lot of the responses we ourselves found that came from our minds trying to rationalize and understand this experience that we were having, feeling the pain, the ache of loneliness, and also from failed relationships and from things that fell apart and also abusive relationships where we were very badly treated or we got really burned from the direction that things happened. And so that compounds the desperation, that compounds and makes it that much worse. Like so many of us, I think there's a lot more people that are heartbroken than are not. And those of us in this generation, the millennials and Gen Z, we've all had a lot of experiences of really just wanting to find the right person, really wanting to find someone that will just be our soulmate and be our match and just be in love with each other and just enjoy life, enjoy romance. And way more often than not, it crashes and burns. It doesn't work out at all for a variety of reasons. And many times we get horribly taken advantage of, you know, when we're the innocent one that doesn't realize that someone can feel this way and still betray you and still hurt you. Or maybe they're not even feeling this way at all. Maybe they're just taking advantage of you because they're actually cynical and they actually don't feel the same way. It's not their first time like it is yours. And they're just taking you for a ride and enjoying what they're getting out of you and then going to leave you high and dry. Like there's just all sorts of different layers of how bitterness and pain and cynicism and people hurt people. And the reality is it's wounded people. It is hurt people who hurt other people. It's not a natural act or instinct to just want to hurt somebody. It's because you've been hurt yourself and then either out just your own brokenness or out of your brokenness and anger, you lash out and hurt other people because you hurt. And maybe you just want them to be miserable, too, because you're miserable. Yeah, we have to learn to hurt others. It's really not a thing that God made us for. It's not how we're designed to be. Babies don't want to hurt their parents. They don't want to hurt others. They might not necessarily understand that some things they do can be hurtful, but they're never just of this desire of I want to make you suffer. That's something that comes in from a lot of damage and trauma to a person's psyche. And even just being, you know, kind of complacent and not really caring a whole lot about how you affect others is again, that's something you learn. That's not something that that just comes naturally. So there is a such a wide range of emotions and feelings and ways that we react and ways that we respond to loneliness, desperation, heartbreak, all the feelings and struggles of being single and really wanting to find that person that we're meant to have and just having that that feeling inside of ourselves that there's a hole there and there's somebody that's supposed to fill it up. There's something that you know you're supposed to have in your life, a connection with someone that would make a difference. And, you know, sometimes we might think, well, if I just had a best friend, if I just had somebody who could be close to me and I could share everything with or, you know, sometimes we might read it as I just need more people. I just need more friends. I need I need a circle of friends. Or, you know, maybe you are like, I need my I need the woman. I need the man. I need the person in my life that I was made for. No matter where your awareness is of this issue, it's something that we all deal with to one extent or another, unless you're one of those few people that truly are just fine with being single. And that's a very small likelihood. So that can be a state of denial. If you think that you're fine by yourself, you might just be running away from the pain of truly feeling the need or the desire for your significant other in your life. And so we're covering all of these from our experiences and trying to take as many of the main kinds of angles and perspectives and things that we struggle through. We fought through hard and had to come out of so that we would be ready. We would be whole to be able to have each other. And there's kind of these arguments and there's kind of these these assertions and these beliefs that come with these different ways of looking at things, these different ways of thinking. There's seven primary ones that we're addressing here that are sort of archetypes. They're sort of a kind of person, a kind of emotional phase of reaction to these feelings. And it comes from a whole spectrum of them. So we're going to be covering each one. And the first one is sadness and resignation. So sadness and resignation is a very typical response to feeling alone and feeling that you're lacking the person you really meant to have in your life. And it asks questions like, why do people always leave me? I've messed up every relationship I've ever been in. I always choose the wrong ones. I probably better just get used to being alone forever. I'm just a loser that no one wants. I'm not attractive enough to get anyone's attention. I'm just a sucker for love when I truly just don't belong. I have nothing worth offering. And if these sound like anything that's going through your head right now or has lately, if it sounds like anything that, you know, you're kind of being drawn down into, we want to tell you right now that those feelings and those thoughts, they're not grounded in reality. They're not grounded in what really is the best for you. And, you know, there's nothing wrong with you just because you experience a feeling like that. And maybe you let a thought like that pass through your mind. But it's very damaging to let it go through your mind repetitively and to accept it as like truth about yourself and truth about your life. You know, we all experience sadness, but there's a difference between experiencing sadness and camping there and staying there and just kind of taking your own wound and your own pain and just squeezing it and just, you know, getting like all the the pain and bitterness and blood out of it that you can with just indulging sort of in your own torment in a way. And, you know, that can become self-pity. That can be very crippling. So it's something that, you know, it totally makes sense to feel that way when you're feeling that way. It just hits you. And it's not something you can just wish away. And it's not something you're not going to be realistic if you just try to run from it. You know, it's there. But the answer is that you want to try to get through it and you want to try to get past it. You don't want to be overcome by it. You don't want it to become your reality, your experience of life as a whole. You want to get healed from it, honestly, because, yeah, stuff happens to us and, yeah, we're not going to be happy about everything that happens to us. And so just like Sean was saying, it's very understandable. We've all been through sadness over one thing or another and a lot of different things, but to not dwell there, to get healing from it and not to cope. There's a difference between coping and running away from it and actually being healed and being free from it. And coping could go to a lot of different things when you're sad. It could be overeating and gaining lots of weight, which makes you feel that much worse. Alcohol, which is a depressant, which is not good for you, it adds to the problem and adds to your weight. And it could even look like isolation, which is even worse for your mental health, because we are supposed to be social. I mean, yeah, there's a lot of different personality types and some people need quiet more than others and some need more interaction with people than others. And there's a balance. There's a real balance in all of that. Isolating yourself makes you pray to so many other things that will add to your sadness and will deepen into a deep depression. Yeah, that's it. Exactly. You know, sadness is a feeling is an emotion. We can't avoid sadness in life. There will be different things that bring sadness. And as long as we go through that and handle it in a healthy way and come up out of sadness on the other side, you know, process our emotion, then it's fine. But it is when it doesn't get processed through and it becomes a deep depression, that is really the danger. Like Brandy said, isolation is very dangerous for anybody that has tendencies to go into deep depression. It's a it's a very dark place where all kinds of things can start happening and you become prey to your own mind. You become prey to your thoughts going through and you just see a darker and darker and darker picture and even spiritual warfare. Demons like for you to be isolated. That's that's their happy place because you have no other form of resistance to what they have to bring you because you're not hearing truth from anybody else because you don't have anybody else around you. It's just you. So it's your mind fighting against your own devices as well as theirs. And on the opposite side of things, instead of isolating, you might just try to share your pain. You might just try to find other people that will listen to your sad story and listen to how hard things are for you and how terrible it is. And, you know, you can just basically, you know, I don't want to sound mean, but you're you're just you're complaining and you're just trying to vent out your sorrow. And, you know, like misery loves company. So you're looking for somebody to have sympathy on you as you feel miserable. And that's not going to fix your feelings. That's not going to help you get through it. You know, somebody saying you poor thing, you poor dear, that's that's really not fixing the issue. Again, there's a difference here between leaning on someone for comfort when you're experiencing sadness and, you know, letting them be there for you and hold you and support you, being smart enough to to actually access friendships, access family that are there to help you through things. But then the unhealthy side of it is when you're just wanting them to enable you to continue to feel sorry for yourself, to continue to feel bad. And just, you know, how ruined your life is and how sad and miserable and terrible it all is. And you're just you're resigned to just this bad thing that happened in your life or this bad feeling that is going on in your life. And you just live like in a black hole and you want to bring people into that black hole with you. And that's not a healthy thing at all. That is very unhealthy. It's very destructive. You know, people will call that a pity party. You know, that sounds really mean. That sounds really harsh. I don't want to put that on any of you that you're throwing a pity party because that's rough, you know, very rough language. And when you're having just a really hard time with your emotions, you're having a hard time digging yourself out of the pit of depression and out of sadness before depression. It's, you know, it's not very helpful to hear people say things that are just going to tear you down. So I'm not calling it that. But for yourself, you need to step out of yourself and assess the situation. Am I really processing through my sorrow? Am I really getting through this in a healthy manner and letting other people help me? Or am I just staying in this cycle and just continuing on in a repetitive sadness and just feeding the sorrow because I'm caught up on it because you can get kind of addicted to sadness. There can be like a seeming logic about it that I'm supposed to be sad and miserable because this and this happened in my life because this and this has been deprived from me or whatever. And it becomes like a norm. You don't know how to function when you're not sad. So that's something to, you know, keep keeping mindfulness of. And remember that it's not sadness is not a place to camp. It's not a place to stay. You want to, you know, not try to avoid it at all costs necessarily, because when it comes, it comes. But you want to get through it, navigate through that valley. Exactly. That's the difference between empathy and sympathy. Sympathy is where somebody just feels sorry for you. And that's the pity party. Nothing's going to be done about it. It's just going to you're going to vent. They're going to listen. You might feel like you feel better, at least for the time being. At least you got it out in the air and out of your system. But you let it go past that. That's pity party. And empathy is where somebody can actually relate to where you're coming from and actually help you in some degree. And it's not complaining to them. It's not by continuously going on and on about it. It's not about dwelling in it. It's about, OK, this is my problem. I'm sad. I don't want to be sad. What do I need to do so I'm not sad? And that's another thing, too. He was talking about, well, logic says, you know, all this has happened to me and I should be sad. So therefore I am sad and whatnot. That actually also ties into a manipulation in relationships and different abuses, because when you're manipulated and something is always made to be your fault, whether it is or is not, and you're used to everything being your fault, your wrongdoing, and you just didn't do good enough or they want you to be sad. So they they come up with different ways to make you sad. And so you're you're used to being sad. That's just the current version of you that you need to get out of. Yeah, it can be very deceptive that you you may have come to the point, you just think that that's just you, it's your fault. And the reality is there might be things in your life that are consistently pushing you towards sadness or consistently pushing you towards sorrow, you know, like depression. It might not necessarily be that, you know, you're just somebody that doesn't want to get over your sadness. It can be a sign that there are things very wrong in your life. There is someone or something or some unhealthy pattern to how you're living that is just constantly sucking the life out of you. And, you know, in your mind, you might be convinced that you should be perfectly happy and there's something wrong with you. But the reality might be that this sadness is being caused because you feel alone in a relationship. The sadness is being caused because someone is constantly hurting your feelings. You know, it might be caused because you have too much weight and pressure that you put on yourself all the time and thinking that you got to take care of everybody. You got to make everybody else happy. That will depress you. That will make you sad. You know, you might feel high. You might feel really great when you're really getting props from people and you're putting smiles on their faces. But when you fail or when you've just given too much and nobody's pouring back into you, you'll have these slumps, you know, you'll have sadness and depression. You might be like, what the heck is wrong with me? But what's wrong with you is that you need to be loved, too. It's not enough just to pour into other people. You also have to have people pour into you. And you also have to pour into yourself and take care of your own needs. Because there's some things that you need that only you can do for yourself, only you can get for yourself. And other people cannot do that for you. You can't outsource your need for self-esteem to other people having a good opinion of you. You can't give them. In other words, you can't give them the job for you to have a good self-image. You have to be the one to choose to see yourself rightly and have a good opinion of yourself. And if you honestly feel like you're not a person that you can have a good opinion about, then maybe you need to make some changes and maybe you need some help. You know, so pray, reach out to God because he can help you. No one is too far gone. No one is just lost and endless sorrow that can never be fixed and problems that can never be, you know, never be remedied. He can help you. If even if there is something just that you think is just terrible about your personality, it's just terrible about who you are and you think there's nothing you can do to change it. God loves you and he knows exactly how to take all of that away and how to help you become the person that you can respect and that you can love. He already sees that person in you. He already respects and loves you because he's not stuck on where you're at right now. He sees the potential. He sees the person he originally created you to be. And you don't even have to have hope for yourself. You just cling to God and he will give you his hope. You don't even need to have faith in yourself. You just have faith in God and he puts his faith in you and he will raise you up out of that pit. Exactly that that in itself, God is the answer, because that's another mistake that you don't want to make it like far as coping is don't try to fix your sadness with a new relationship when you're feeling alone and desperate. You don't need another person to tie into your sadness and misery. You need to be made whole first. Seek God's timing and ask him who's meant for you and you may not answer everything right away. He has to he has to basically build you up to the point to where where you're ready just because you think you're ready doesn't mean you're ready. And we've learned that from vast experiences over time. But it's important not to try to fill the void that only God can fill with with either material things or substances or another person in a relationship that needs to come after your healing and when God says that it is the right time. And through the questions and statements that we read at the beginning, being so negative and so down and just tearing yourself down, replace that with positive self-talk. Replace that with positive self-talk. All right. So try this exercise when whenever one of those thoughts like I'm just a loser that no one wants. OK, but that comes to your mind. Just stop right there. If you're alone, say something to this extent out loud. I am unique and specially made and I will find my significant other when it's time. And any time like it, it doesn't have to be that wordy. It's like if you're feeling like, oh, I'm a loser, we'll say I am uniquely and specially made. Despite it, it doesn't have to be wordy. It can be very shortened to the point. But the fact of the matter is fight off negative self-talk as it's happening. Cut it off at the bud. Don't allow things like that to fester, because if you let it fester, if things are just going to get worse and there's going to be more healing and more things involved and why spend extra time on something that's not going to go in the right direction when you can actually find the right direction to begin with and actually walk it. God redeems time and whatever happens, it can be used for your good. But why go down an unnecessary path when you could have already been so much farther down the right one? Yeah, and you will probably have to fight imposter syndrome feeling like, you know, you're you're not really equipped to change your own perspective and change your own way of feeling things. You might feel like you're being fake, you're being a liar, you know, like, no, I do feel like I'm a loser. Well, the thing is, you feel that way, but that doesn't make it objective. Truth is that the reality. No, that's just how you're feeling right now. And the way you're feeling is not defining truth is not defining reality. So what you need to do is come into agreement with what is the truth, come into agreement with what actually is going to help your life. If you agree with these bad things about yourself that you're thinking and that you're feeling, then that's all you're ever going to be. And you're going to become more and more entrenched in that belief. And, you know, soon it goes from just being a belief to being a whole belief system. You know, your whole life revolves around this feeling that you're not worth anything, this this sadness that you're just a loser and that's all you'll ever be. And you're you're resigned to that. You're resigned to being a loser that nobody wants. And that's not really who you have to be, but because it's your belief and because it's something that you continue to practice and rehearse to yourself in your mind and with your words, you cement yourself into becoming that person living that life. And the reality is that you need what God says about you. You need to find out the truth because he made you. He created you. It says that his thoughts towards you are more vast. There's more more thoughts that he has towards you. There are thoughts of kindness. There are thoughts of love. There are endearing thoughts like the thoughts of a lover. He has more thoughts about you than there are grains of sand on the entire planet. And there are all kinds of wonderful things that the Bible says about how he feels about you, how he feels about each one of us. And it is personal. It is because he made you personally. He made your spirit before your body was ever on this planet. And he made you to be loved. So you need that love and you need that sense of wonder at what God thinks of you so that you can think rightly about yourself. And so you need to know these things and you need to take them and you need to apply them against what you're feeling, because there's a weird kind of sense almost of almost pleasure in agreeing with a sentence like that. I'm just a loser. And you just feel it and you bring the tears to your eyes and you feel bad and you feel it until your eyes are puffy. It's like you feel good about feeling bad. It's a weird, you know, sick kind of thing that we do to ourselves and we all do it. That's the reality. You might think you're the only one, but no, lots of people do it to themselves. So don't don't feel like this is something to be ashamed of that you're the one person. No, a lot of us do this in different ways. A lot of us like to feel really bad about ourselves and indulge in that for some reason. And the thing is, like, you got to resist that impulse. You got to resist that. That's a bad desire. That's not a good desire. And you're feeling that it might be logical at the time that it might make sense or that it is something you want to be feeling right now. You need to go against that and choose your higher will choose a higher place in your being, a deeper place in your being that says, no, it's not right for me to tear myself down. It's not right for me to be self-destructing. You know, the same kind of sense of justice that you might have if somebody you cared about was torn down by someone else. You need to have that sense of justice towards yourself that is not right for me to tear down myself. And it's not right for others to tear me down. And it's not right for me to agree with others tearing me down. I need to think rightly and I need to speak rightly over my own life. And you do it even if it feels weird. You do it even if it feels like, you know, I'm being stupid. I don't really believe this. I don't really feel this. I feel so silly. Here's a big a big secret for you. What you believe doesn't necessarily correlate with what you feel just because you feel like it's not true doesn't mean it's not true. And you can choose to believe the truth even when you're not feeling it. And when you are speaking and when you're choosing your thoughts, you're agreeing with either the truth or with whatever lie it is that you're coming into alignment with. And that's what you're establishing by your belief. That's what you're establishing. That becomes the operating spirit of your life and of your mind and heart. So you want you need to choose the right spirit that's operating in you so that you get the right results and you get the kind of life you want to live. You know, misery begets more misery. Being in sadness and sorrow, feeding on more sadness and sorrow, feeding on bad things about yourself just gets more of the same. And you just watch everything outside of you spin out of control deeper and deeper into the darkness as you're lost in this. And that's another reason why manipulation is so dangerous, because if you're repeatedly told that, hey, you have nothing worth to offer, you're I'm no one's going to love you as much as I do. You're just a loser to everybody else. But I've stuck with you. And basically, if you hear that enough, just like if somebody says, you're so stupid, why can't you do anything right? If you hear that enough, you start to believe it. And especially if the person is around you enough toxic people, whether it be in a relationship in which if it's an abuser, it's not a real relationship. Even outside of that, if it's a friend or a family member that's doing it to you, it doesn't matter who it is. It doesn't make it right. And if it's someone that's close to you, it's going to make it that much louder in your head. And so if you hear it enough, you will start believing it if you didn't already believe it in the first place. And that doesn't just end up being confirmation for you. It's false counterfeit confirmation. And before you know it, if you just allow it to continue, it will overtake you. And before you know it, you're just living out this lie that was never true in the first place. And you get that much more broken on the inside, your mind, your soul and even your body, because everything will range outward to your physical self, whether it be weight gain or stress and pre-aging and Addictive tendencies. Addictive tendencies, bad circulation, loss of hair, I mean, whatever, pick your poison, really. It can go to so many different things and cut your life short, quite literally. So the important thing is to get rid of toxic people in your life. And if it is family, well, OK, make peace with them as you can say, like, hey, this is what's going on. I need you to stop. And if they don't try to stop, they're not sincerely sorry for what they've done and be like, well, I need positive people in my life. And right now you're tearing me down, so I will talk to you when you become a positive person in my life. And that's setting boundaries. Definitely. Boundaries are so important and something that we've both had to learn. And it's life changing. You're not doing wrong by setting boundaries. I mean, yeah, you can set boundaries that may not be reasonable in some cases. And you have to learn how to set boundaries in the first place. So you might stumble a little bit. But the main thing is that you learn and you move forward and you grow through it and you have reasonable boundaries to where you are a functioning, peaceful, loving person that is no longer being affected by negative people in their life, in your life. Thank you for joining us where the heart is heard. Partnership Vision Ministries, stay driven by love so you can wreck all the fear. You can check us out on Instagram at Partnership Vision Ministries or on Facebook on Partnership Vision Ministries page, and even Twitter at TVisionM. Y'all come back now, you hear?