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Originally Posted by SmartAlx  And let it knock me over? No thank you.
Your metaphor is backwards. Consider one person being stronger. He naturally pushes harder. The other person must push hard just to KEEP the balance. If the stronger one says, "you are pushing too hard so I'm going to push even harder," THEN your situation comes up, but ONLY after the stronger person tries to offset the balance. It is the person who pushes to offset the balance that is in the wrong. I only resist what would knock me over. I resist to KEEP the balance.
If a circumstance, a personality trait, or a person is TRYING to push me over and I do not fight it then I will fall over. I HAVE to keep fighting or I get run over. Is this so hard to understand? |
This is easy to understand. However, I don't think that the metaphor of two people fighting against each other to stand up is such a good metaphor. It might be better applied within a relationship where you get upset at a certain behavior of your partner that you don't accept. In this instance, there is only you. You have a trait you are resisting--shyness or social awkwardness. It isn't pushing against you, it merely exists in you and you are resisting that it exists. There is no one pushing back at you but yourself. You have some sort of fear, it seems, of not having friends if you embrace your lack of social skills.
The idea of acceptance, even within a relationship with another person, is that when you stop resisting, the other side will also stop resisting, not push you over.
You need the acceptance of how you are in this current moment to create the fear-free, safe environment of love and acceptance that brings the freedom for you to grow and find out what you have beneath the fear and the shyness. Since you have church-going friends, I presume you are Christian and must be familiar with the following verse about love and fear:
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There is no fear in love: but perfect love casteth out fear, because fear hath punishment; and he that feareth is not made perfect in love. - 1 John 4:18
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When you embrace your shyness and your social situation with acceptance and love, your fears around your social awkwardness will disintegrate, because, as it says above, love dispells fear, and when you are no longer afraid of the consequences of your poor social skills, you will naturally begin to discover who you are beneath those fears.