Until you understand your own complex mix of neediness and avoidance, it’s very hard not to resent other people for their complexities, too. https://www.thecut.com/2020/05/ask-polly-my-ex-keeps-emailing-me-and-i-hate-it.html

Self-acceptance requires moving closer to the things about you that upset you. Examining your compulsive reactions, aversions, and need to either avoid or "fix" uneasy situations pretty much sucks. Your shame will latch on and it won't let go.

If you want to understand yourself and you want to develop the flexibility to love a wide range of people, including people who challenge you and sometimes make you feel inadequate by comparison, you have to understand your emotional allergies and self-protective reflexes.

Knowing yourself better keeps you from experiencing other people as incomplete, simply because they’re not like you.

It's hard work, though. No joke. Even if you feel relatively calm and confident overall, if you were raised around unforgiving people, you'll shame yourself into the ground for every fuck up. Take your humbling without deciding that it means you're embarrassing and doomed.

If you want to grow into someone who's flexible and accepting of others and stop feeling so stuck and rigid and fearful and ashamed, you have to dare to look closely at your evasive or disgusted or confrontational reactions under stress.

You can use your personal power and your imagination to build yourself up in private without retreating into easy, safe stories that keep you walled off from other people and send you back into defensive stances from the distant past that no longer serve you that well.

A mistake that humbles you and reveals your compulsions or defenses doesn't signal that you're inadequate or pathetic or worthless. That's an old story you inherited from someone else.

Humbling mistakes are gifts with a note inside that tells you that you're lovable even when you fuck up. You have to open the gift to see the note.

But the temptation to drop-kick the gift out the window and tell the world to go fuck itself is real.