If You Leave Me for No Reason, Don't Come Back with Excuses
How many people have you let go of in your life, tired of hearing their excuses, apologies, and justifications? Think about it. We can fall one, two, three, up to ten times, but we’ll get up twenty times, knowing that in the end, we’ve done what’s best for ourselves and our emotional health: we let them leave.
We’ll never understand very well what makes us let certain people into our lives, people who specialize in turning our world upside down, making us live through disappointments, false hopes, and unfair sadness.
If something is important to someone, they will do anything it takes to to take care of it, to protect it. If it’s not important, they’ll rely on excuses to justify a false affection. Don’t let that happen. Try to notice it in time and surround yourself only with people who are authentic, easygoing, and honest.
It’s often said that excuses come from mediocre people, or even more so, from people who are skilled at crafting lies and manipulation. We don’t know how their brains work, why they use these crutches day to day.
What we do know is the feeling these actions produce in us: disappointment. Today, we want to reflect on this kind of behavior. We want to understand it, manage it, and know how to react to it, however difficult it might be.
What’s worse, an excuse or a lie?
Think about it for a moment: What’s worse to you, an excuse or a lie? In reality, both are part of the same face of the coin: a lack of sincerity and bravery. When we make excuses or tell lies, we’re not being honest, and we’re being even less brave.
They say that humans are good at creating pretenses. However, some people turn them into a way of life that masks the irresponsibility of their actions. That’s why excuses are much worse than lies.
There are clever lies and there are white lies, and there are even lies that last a lifetime and are never uncovered. However, excuses and pretenses are utilized more often as vain attempts at emotional manipulation.
Suppose that someone who means a lot to you starts to distance themselves, without giving you a reason. They simply decide to disappear from your life. If you had an intense emotional bond with them, you’ll have to put your heart and your existence back together piece by piece.
But it won’t end there. They’ll soon come back, offering the classic excuses: I needed time to think, when I left I realized everything you meant to me, other people were the cause of the separation.
You could give them a second chance and open your door to them again. However, if they’re the kind of person that always makes excuses, they’ll fall into that behavior again. This is when you decide to let them go.
What are these people who make excuses hiding?
- Fear of responsibility.
- Insecurity about acting on their thoughts. They prefer to mask reality with a lie to justify themselves, defend themselves.
- Inability to admit to mistakes.
- Lack of consistency in their own ideas and feelings, and occasional personal immaturity.
- Lack of self control or appropriate emotional management. They act impulsively without thinking about the consequences, only to later hide behind pretexts or excuses.
- Lack of a good self concept. They don’t want to assume adequate control over their behavior because it requires effort and energy.
Immature behavior that turns into continuous excuses can change only if the person is capable of developing the following:
- Kick the habit of evasive behavior
- Have discipline
- Persistence and inner knowledge
- Consistency
- Responsibility for one’s actions
- Respect for others
Zero tolerance for continuous excuses
If someone leaves you for no reason, it’s because they lack the courage and sincerity to explain the truth to you. What good are excuses if we know that in this case, more pretenses are just hidden lies? You have to let go of people who never did anything to stay, who gave you false hopes, half-truths, and half-hearted love.
Throughout our lives, we’re going to hear a lot of lies, and we will even make our own excuses on occasion, but we’ll never use them to cover up how we truly feel, let alone to hurt someone.
If you feel like the people who “value” you specialize in this kind of trickery and torture, reflect on it and ask yourself how they make you feel. If they violate your integrity, if their falsehoods are already unraveling your heart, practice zero tolerance for their excuses. Distance yourself, and give reasons; don’t look for your own excuses, because even the people who hurt you don’t deserve that. That’s how to live genuinely.
Images courtesy of Ellina Ellis
