👑 Dear Advocates:
👩❤️💋👨 Healthy relationships are completely possible to achieve with broken, unhealthy people; those people, however, must be mutually willing to make the changes that true love will inevitably bring around during the healing process.
💔Humans aren't perfect, and so often relationships crumble due to not knowing how to handle our weaknesses. After all, we struggle with our own weaknesses as individuals, how in the world are we supposed to help someone else through theirs?
💘 The answer lies somewhere in between the differences between loving a toxic person and enabling a toxic person - and yes, I'm using that word "toxic" because we all have our own areas of toxicity that we bring to each relationship based on our current open wounds, whether we like to admit it or not.
🚫 Enabling a toxic person means silencing your convictions; this is not a good measure of love at all, but in fact, the opposite. Silencing your convictions means making compromises that are fatal to your moral structure; this may be something as small as telling a lie when you know honesty is needed, or something as big as looking the other way when wrong things occur simply because you don't know how else to handle the situation.
⚠️ What happens when we silence our convictions is that cognitive dissonance sets in, piece by piece. Cognitive dissonance is saying or doing something that you don't really believe in, creating an underlying feeling of distrust within yourself, which also creates a lackadaisical and passive approach to everything else in life. When you don't trust yourself and your convictions have been silenced, you're enabling the toxic person within yourself as well as the person you're in relationship with.
💋 Loving a toxic person means silencing the sin; this is the best measure of love one can achieve, other than literally sacrificing your life for someone. Silencing the sin means staying true to your convictions and working through each situation with a strong approach of love's character: honesty, integrity, reliability, loyalty, right doing, patience, etc. This means making decisions that include staying true to your convictions, but doesn't leave the other person wanting or in need.
💞 Love will always find a way to work through situations the right way, without convictions having to be silenced. Love will always find a way to silence instead, the sin, by covering each situation with consistency of character.
💝 Healthy relationships are built on a solid foundation of love, and love will always bring about positive change for a better future, even if great pain is needed to be endured while the open wounds are being healed.
💔Unhealthy relationships are built on a faltering foundation of enabling, and enabling will always bring about negative change for a dark future; great pain will be endured not for the sake of healing, but for the sake of worsening the already open wounds creating the toxic behaviors.
☝️ Advocate for Healthy Relationships today, and ask yourself if you're loving the toxic person within yourself, challenging yourself to stay true to your convictions, or are you enabling the toxic person within yourself, silencing your convictions and allowing the damage to continue? Ask yourself the same for the people you're currently in relationship with. Are you enabling the toxic person within them, or loving the toxic person with them? Choose LOVE!
-Gavi, Your Advocate for Healthy Relationships