Protecting Yourself from Vampires

The biggest blessing of protecting yourself from difficult people is gaining the freedom to genuinely see the seed of goodness that God planted in their hearts and their significant roles in refining and molding you to the wiser, more loving, and more joyful person that you are now…or simply the better you.

Do you feel exhausted? Are you fed up? Is someone sucking your energy?

You have the power to protect yourself!

After spotting your vampire, it is important to protect yourselves from your personal vampires; otherwise, they will attack your core and decay your soul or will influence you and make you one of them.

Their national game that exhausts you is the “Damned if you do; Damned if you Don’t” game.

Whether your vampire is your parent, boss, spouse, or close friend, you still need to protect yourself from them so you can love them more, or at least preserve yourself so you can give more of yourself—you have the energy and zest to serve, care for, and love those who deserve your energy most.

You cannot give what you don’t have! If your energy is low, you cannot help others. If you’re stressed out and irritated, it’s hard to sincerely share joy. If your heart is full of hatred, how can you genuinely give love? If you lack knowledge, how can you properly guide and teach the younger ones?

Hence, we need to protect ourselves so we have selves to give to others through service, friendships, and by simply sharing blessings.

But in order to protect ourselves from these difficult persons, we need first to recognize and appreciate that “understanding” them is the key to free ourselves from their bondage and vicious cycle. Still, we need to protect ourselves from them.

Don’t allow them to abuse you, nor allow yourself to spoil or tolerate them. Otherwise, you will bear the consequences of making a vampire in others.

If you love someone, you set him free and want him to be happy and successful… same goes for yourself (Leviticus 19:18, “love your neighbor as yourself.”)

Loving our vampire neighbors does not mean allowing them to stress us out. Instead, loving them means not spoiling and tolerating them and protecting ourselves from them by putting boundaries or limitations so we can love them properly sans the decaying stress between us.

Unless you’re free from the power of difficult people, you cannot understand and love them.

Remember, you have the power to break free and to protect yourself! You will not be tested beyond your capacity to solve your trials, including freeing yourself from your vampires.

We can protect ourselves from the vampires by preparing for their “Damned if you do; Damned if you don’t” game without the intention to hurt them.

So basic and simple like ABC 123. Here’s how…

Be aware. We need to deliberately and properly prepare for the difficult situations the vampires have had hurling at us time and again; so when it happens again, we already know what to do to protect ourselves and go about the situation to avoid further and unnecessary hurts.

Love ourselves. Loving oneself breeds respect for oneself. It makes us feel good about ourselves; thus loving ourselves naturally and automatically creates sturdy wall that protects us from exhausting vampires. Properly loving ourselves results in good health, good disposition, and doing good to others.

Living with a vampire is tantamount to allowing ourselves to be punished emotionally (sleepless nights and trauma), physically (sickness due to stress), spiritually (losing purpose, dreams, vision, and direction).

Damned if you do… damned if you don’t game.

Imagine this: You’re watching TV at home with your older brother. You’re enjoying the show. You’re laughing, you’re learning. Then suddenly you feel hungry. You get your favorite pasta and bread from the dining table, the last serving and the only food left by your mom for afternoon snack. When you return to the living room, your brother is surfing the channels and asks you to give him your food…  if you will give him the food he will eat them all as he scans the channels through the only remote; if you will not, he will throw hurting words at you, bully you, and will still get the food from you and will not let you hold the remote control as he is watches another show.

So what you do…

      1.    Retreat and find food elsewhere

Take one step backward so you can take two steps forward.

This may mean staying away and taking a break, pausing and catching some breath, and recuperating elsewhere for a while.

It may also mean not cutting relationship with the vampires. It may mean decreasing your time with the vampires. By doing this, you strike your chances of being drained or influenced by the vampire (Proverbs 22:24-25, “Do not make friends with a hot-tempered  person, do not associate with one easily angered, or you may learn their ways and get yourself ensnared.”)

If your boyfriend or girlfriend is cheating on you or manipulating you, then walk out and find food elsewhere. If you have friends who are sucking your energy, joy, and peace, then spend lesser time with them.

      2.      Protect your head and eat your food

Bask in the sun, float on top of the wave.

This entails creating an emotional space between you and the difficult person.

If your vampire is your boss, spouse, or parents, you cannot just walk out immediately and create a physical space; hence you create an emotional space. As Eleanor Roosevelt puts it, “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”

We can create emotional space by imagining, especially when the truth is not obvious.

Imagine your difficult person as little Hercules.

Reduce the significance and impact of your vampire on you. Whatever he says or does becomes insignificant to you. You no longer focus on his sweet empty words or you can take his harsh words as unsharpened doubled-bladed sword. Now, you see your little Hercules vampire shout at you, but you cannot understand his little voice. You see him, but you’re no longer terrified.

Though this way, you focus on the only two important opinions, “First, what God thinks of you—full of potential, beautiful lamb, and a victor; second, your opinion of yourself—who you can be and want to be.”

Imagine an angel coming.

Through this way, you emphasize the element of “understanding.”

You see his brokenness not his badness.

By surrendering the difficult person to God, you let your angel come to take the vampire from your life to bring it to God’s repair room.

Imagine the truth.

Through this way, you give yourself time to “retrospect, honestly evaluate yourself, and listen to the hopes and dreams of the still voice inside you.”

The evil is in the business of deceiving you.

If one wants to become better in whatever aspect of his life, the evil will always try to pull him down, trap him, or to block the way just to keep him chained in his dark, unhappy underworld.

So, “Watch and pray so you will not fall into temptation (Mark 14:38), and  If God is for us, who can be against us? It is God who justifies (Romans 8:31-32).” 

If you want to get rid of your emotional vampires and achieve your dreams, you need someone who believes in you and in your dreams and who supports and cheers you on as you reach them.

There will always be people who will spice up your life with difficulty and challenges, whether they’re conscious of it or not. Moreover, there will always be people around you who will hold opinion about what you believe in or do, and they may even have predictions about your life… but hey, it’s okay!

 

You have a choice… to remain with the vampire or to break free.

You have two important stronghold… what God thinks of you and what you think of yourself.

The biggest blessing of protecting yourself from difficult people is gaining the freedom to genuinely see the seed of goodness that God planted in their hearts and their significant roles in refining and molding you to the wiser, more loving, and more joyful person that you are now…or simply the better you.

FLY! First Love Yourself.

 (Third and last installment, Unfinished Business: Transforming the Vampire will be posted soon)

Float on Tears or Fly with Grace

Do you still often find yourself subconsciously picking up all the pieces of shattered memories and pulling through all the yarns that could link you back with him?

Whatever caused our cherished relationships to break, many of us, women, remain locked up in the past that we want to blow life to all the images that flash in our heads and turn them into reality. Since women usually have a relatively longer bargaining phase than men, many of us succumb to our emotions and let go of our pride just to rekindle the old flame. However, due to some not-so-good experiences, there are also others who desire to get their men back in their lives because they want to turn the tables around.

Whatever our motives are in winning our men back, we can always resolve to live our lives in ways that will both favor our victory in deliberately getting our men back and our success in purposely improving ourselves—that may unintentionally lead him back to us.

1. We can have a solid kick off by having a clear and resolute decision of loving ourselves first before anybody else.

Men in our generation are aware that only when one is capable of loving herself enough, that she is able to love others properly. In our fast-paced and competitive environment today, most men prefer women who value and respect themselves for this means security and assurance, whether men are around or not.

A woman who values and respects oneself will not allow herself to fall into wrongdoings that might affect each of them, and eventually the relationship. She will commit herself to continuous growth—discovering what she can do and how she can do it best—so her man will always have something to be proud of her and so she has a good self-image of herself, preventing her to feel insecure and jealous.

A woman who loves herself is naturally caring, understanding, sympathetic, and supportive because she herself knows what love is and how it is to be loved.

2. We must learn the skill on how to properly and decently send our men signals that we are totally over and have already accepted the breakup—although the reality is otherwise.

Making a man believe that you have already moved on usually hits his ego and stirs him to think whether he is your loss or you are his loss. Showing no desperation in winning him back conversely makes him desperate to come back to you to prove his worth and chase the self-sufficient woman that he has just left.

Men over 25 years old usually don’t find women who are clingy, possessive, and obsessed cute and lovable. The older the men gets, all the more they appreciate women who can be their partners rather than their pets.

3. It is also important that we always look our best—internally and externally. Maintaining inner and outer beauty will in no way drive away your man.

Take advantage of how well you have known him in your years together. Put on a dress that has the color and style he likes; arrange your hair the way that he finds sexy; and use the perfume you were using so his feeling will be swept back to the times when you were still together.

Having a girlfriend with a good heart and a prudent mind is nothing but an ideal significant other for most men. External beauty fades through the years, but internal beauty becomes more valuable as years go by—serving as the couple’s armor against life’s series of storms and relationship trials.

Any ex-boyfriend couldn’t help but snivel on the sight of a beautiful woman with a golden heart being admired and respected by other men.

4. Maintaining warm relationships with our men’s friends and family members is also another good move that requires discreet moves.

Being nice and warm with his crowd is like having a free of charge award-winning advertisement on how good you are as a friend and a family member. Nonetheless, sincerity must be the main theme of your personal ad. Friends are like sharks sharp in smelling deceptions and role plays, but they can also be your genie helping you get what you wish for.

Being warm and nice with his clique will show how diplomatic you are in dealing issues. Also, this can signal to him that you are a good partner to be with in both good and not-so-good times.

5. Lastly, let’s just always be ourselves.

Being the woman that you really are will help ignite his feelings once more. Who you truly are was the reason why he became attracted to you. Maybe it’s the perfect time to look at yourself and retrospect. Have you changed a lot? Are the changes because of improvement? Or you have already matured that’s why there are changes.

While doing all these, you are also helping yourself become the esteemed woman you need to be whether he comes back to your or not. If he comes back, it means you are really wired and meant for each other. If he doesn’t, then rejoice because you have already started spreading your wings and now more prepared to take off and soar the vast heavens of possibilities and opportunities.

Level Up and Roar

There are a lot of things—both pleasant and unpleasant—in life that escape our senses from being recognized as the actual answers to the ones we had long been yearning for.

Others are undeniably good (or sometimes sugar-coated bitter gourd) that we easily discern, or claim, them as the answers to our yearnings. Some have façade that are rather unfamiliar, gloomy, scary, and sometimes pain-inducing, that just by the mere sight of them we shiver.

Nonetheless, only when we have already gone through the frontage that we come to realize that inside there is an overflowing abundance of great things that are just part of the answers to our prayers—more wonderful things are yet to come. We just have to take some courageous steps forward to experience them—God doesn’t want us to just see them from afar, but to experience them and own them ourselves.

I wouldn’t appreciate the value of challenging moments—melancholic, scarcity, chaotic—if had easily thrown my hands up and go back to my comfort zone.

Because of those moments I now see things more beautifully; I have more patience to wait; I have more energy and reasons to inspire myself to keep going; I become happier; and I don’t easily get worried nor easily get mad.

Certainly life has become brighter and lighter for me.

In times of surrendering things, I wouldn’t realize the genuine and wonderful freedom I am entitled to have, which I enjoy right now, if I tied myself to a certain sugar-coated, glazed with honey and strawberry uninteresting routine. I could have blinded myself and regret my life years before I pass.

If I didn’t take bold steps forward perhaps until now I am stuck with round-about questions and deceptively see the putrid fantasy as the nirvana, when in fact it is just the distorted shadow of reality.

Life is much much more meaningful than my own fancy, than the life in the cave.

It’s a wonderful feeling for once in my life I have my own time and I don’t have to worry about someone or something else before the right time when I will forever be committed. It’s nice if I can responsibly freely do whatever I want to do which I could no longer enjoy when I grow old because it may no longer be inappropriate for my age. It’s wonderful to break free to give other people and other hobbies importance than just focusing my energy and time to one person or thing.

It’s beneficial to note that without the uncomfortable feeling induced by the unfamiliar façade, I wouldn’t be able to clearly see and optimize my ‘built-in healer’ [of emotional and physical infirmity] and to realize more fully the essence of ‘enjoying and loving ourselves in generous and humble manner first so when our happiness and love overflow we can reach and touch more and more people.

Now I see it better…

Good thing I wasn’t specific with my prayer that time, when I was still unripe and a cab asking God for happier life, more meaningful moments, and enjoyable youth. I wasn’t specific because I wasn’t sure if I was genuinely happy with where I was. Now, I have unlocked my life for and welcomed more loved ones.

The deepest fibers of my humanity have now been awakened to enjoy the reality, no matter how sour or spicy they get.

If I didn’t break free and didn’t take bold moves, I would certainly catch myself right now sitting on the corner still bargaining for more interesting and meaningful life—I mean the one which is anchored to His word and has limitations, for only when you know your boundaries that you can actually act in liberty.

When things are really not meant to be, the more you try to fix things, all the worse and complicated things get.

It’s amazing that God gives us a birth right to be constantly in molding process until we become who He intends us to be. No matter how painful the process is, He keeps on pouring us strength and wisdom. No matter how many times we turn our back from Him because of pain, He keeps on coming back to our heart just to give us our gift of eternal wonderful life.

Like a potter, God constantly moves and tosses things until we become the kind of person He shaped us to be and until we receive the ever-wonderful life He designed us to have.

It only takes a faith like a mustard seed that flourishes into a humongous tree of enlightenment and victory for us to enter into the paradise He prepared for us.

At last, like a cab turning into  lion I have transcended the hill of the unfamiliar feat and now roaring triumphantly on the peak of the mountain of victory.

Difficult beginning is not that bad after all

Some people say, ‘beginning is always difficult.’

It may be true… but now I believe that it’s always relative with one's perspective, with one's priorities, with one's strength, with one's wisdom, and most especially, with how much one trust God’s abundance.

In times when we are surprised by circumstances, we may become more vulnerable or we may become indifferent. When unwanted things happen deliberately, we can be prepared to face everything or we can be resistant to what we know will happen next and plot our counteraction to protect our egos.

Others say live life like Teflon, wherein you just let things slide off. No sticking to the situation nor persons. Some may advise us to get on our knees, close our eyes, clasp our hands together, and pray sincerely.

Whichever we decide to follow, in the end it’s still up to us to decide how we will let external factors affect us and how we will live our lives moving forward.

Me, being a person who distinguishes special from general or common (why is there such a word 'special' after all?), there are persons and circumstances that I treat like a Teflon and there are things which I willingly endure and joyfully see difficulty as a sandpaper or a coal-transforming-to-a-diamond until their accompanying pain and pressure come to their natural end, believing that through my strong faith in Him I will attain progress everday and through my sincere prayer God will overflow His abundance upon me.

I’m surprised that now even though I still randomly feel the pain brought a specific subject, I just see it as part and parcel of the necessary process for me to gradually achieve my full potential and experience the wonderful life at its best.

We just have to believe that through our good stance about life, we can heal our own selves through the help of God and the prayers of our loved ones. Truly our trials are just avenues for miracles to happen in our lives.

Now I can say that difficult beginning is a premise for a sweet surrender towards a wonderful and blessed life. Let’s perk up our cheerful hearts and open our grateful eyes!