Often times people battling with insecurity see themselves as the capital or the center of the world. They unconsciously turn themselves into a god that must be worshiped by their spouses and feel other people’s lives should stop because they are around. They simply forget that the best the world can offer is a minute silence when you are gone.
I want everyone of us to understand that your spouse is an individual with a life before he married you and his life has to continue now that he is married to you. You can’t chase away the people that God used over the years to mould him/her to become somebody that you found good enough to marry. The question you may even need to ask yourself is ‘In my X years of existence who has become better by coming in contact with me?’
It would shock you to discover that you never had a life before getting married and that is why you are trying so hard to snuff life out your spouse because there is a vacuum in your life that has always been there that you thought marriage would fill.
The effect of your insecurity won’t cost you alone. It affects everyone around you such that you may not be able to establish a healthy and long lasting relationship. You strive so hard to control everything and everyone around you such that you make them pretend to be who they are not in their quest to satisfy you. But you hardly ever know that while you live in a fool’s paradise of ‘now I have them under me’ they live in a hypocritical paradise of ‘I will pretend whenever he/she is around and live my real life when he/she is out of sight’
Let me ask you some other questions:
– How many friends do you have at the moment?
– How many new relationships have you had and sustained over the years?
– Mention that one person that you have never had a cause to complain about?
– If I ask you to describe yourself in a sentence how would you introduce yourself?
– If you lose every material possession you have at the moment what will happen to you?
– How often do you smile in a day?
– When last did you laugh at yourself for making a mistake?
– How often do you genuinely see needs around your perceived enemy and try to meet the needs.
Insecurity makes positional leaders out of people because they want to just hold unto whatever they have thinking their lives only consist on the abundance of what they have. So they abuse people and positions that they would rather die than bow out honorably when the ovation is loudest.
If we are to go far in life and build sustainable marriages then we must be able to deal with insecurity once and for all and here comes the questions
Who are you without your spouse and your qualifications?
Answering that question is the greatest key to discovering where the real problem is and taking the right steps to correct it before it is too late.
You can’t afford to start making up a movie that only exist about your spouse in your imagination because you feel so insecure. It won’t help anyone because nobody sees the movie but you and it is not even marketable.
I think it is time to think healthy and spend your time thinking about things that are noble, loving, admirable, right, excellent and praise worthy.
I often wonder how difficult it is for ladies to make friends among themselves. They call it the ‘women thing’ such that overtime you can find a woman who has no single friend apart from her spouse. That is a woman that is out of order because women naturally cherish and build relationships more than men. But now our quest to keep to ourselves and not give ourselves away ultimately comes back to haunt us in marriage.
I am so sure the question on the lips of everyone is how do I overcome insecurity?
I will start answering your question with a quote from a wise sage ‘He that must make friends must show himself friendly’. Many of the insecurity problems we encountered could have been dealt with if we had submitted to the discipline of friendship.
I often see people pray about a particular habit asking God to take it away from them and when God answers it by sending the people that will make things more difficult for them so that they can learn and change they hardly see it as answered prayers they come back complaining feeling God hasn’t answered their prayers. So if you have been praying to overcome insecurity it is not impossible that God begins to bless your friends and spouse faster than you and instead of celebrating with them you are finding it so hard to survive their success wishing it were you.
You may need to engage yourself in a soul search by asking the following questions
– What happened in the past that is responsible for your insecurity
– Are there some beliefs that make you insecure?
– What has your insecurity cost you so far?
– What usually happens before you experience insecurity?
– How can you overcome overdependence on people and material things – this may mean you giving out some of the things that you wouldn’t have given away ordinarily
– What kind of person would have I become if I can overcome insecurity
– What are the obstacles that may prevent me from taking the necessary actions to overcoming insecurity?
Once you have sincerely answered the questions I want you to understand that what you been running away from all these years is where your miracle lies. Relationship is the crucible through which character is developed. The beauty of the pain we experience in negative situations like breach of trust, heartbreaks, hurts and disagreement is that it helps you learn more about people and how they are not the same but many of us are too fast to run out of unpleasant situations without learning what we ought to have learnt.
Many of us ran away from home because we felt our parents were too hard so we missed out of the opportunity of learning how to deal with a difficult father. Some of us left a place of work because of a difficult boss so we lost out of learning endurance or influencing a difficult boss. Many of us on the other hand broke up with a friend as a result of trust that was betrayed and never made another friend afterwards because we kept judging others from the screen of the last friendship. The truth is life positions some people around you for you to learn some lessons and when you skip the class by running away the class waits for you in the future.
How do I overcome insecurity?
To be continued
NB: First published July 2012