You descide

I can make decisions for myself. I decided what clothes I wear in the morning. I decide what I like to eat for dinner. I decide how to spend my free time. I decide what movie to watch or what music to play. I decide what to book to read and when.

So making decisions for myself seems to be something fairly easy to me.

The difficulty comes in, if I need to decide something for me and another person, a friend or partner.
My empathy is right in the way of it very often. I will always choose something that I think the other person would want. For example I would choose the restaurant that I know they like, or the movie that they would enjoy most. Of course, in any kind of relationships it is about compromising and sometimes also doing the things that you know your friend would like most. Even if that means, that this is not what you would choose if you were alone.

And something else came to my mind too. I fairly often find myself only assuming that this is what the other person would prefer. Meaning, I don't even know if they do or if they would prefer my idea. But since I want to avoid conflicts of any sort so badly, I don't even come up with my suggestions.

So I started to unlearn this habits and concentrate on the things I really like. At the same time I can listen to the other persons ideas and then we can find out together what WE would like to do. I needed to walk away from the idea that I always need to be the one to make the best decision. But since I almost feel guilty if we would do something that I like it was not easy for me to do that in the past. But now I can openly discuss different options and making a decisions together helps me actually accepting the result much easier. That has a tremendous result especially if we end up doing something I like and suggested. Since we came to the conclusion together it feels for me more like it is something we both really want while usually I always felt like the other person would only compromise to make me happy. And that is of course not what an Empath wants. We want to make everyone else happy. But we put ourselves usually at the end.

I find myself forgetting about one particular thing: If I am not happy, I also can't make someone else happy. You can not fake happiness, it comes from inside yourself and you really need to feel it. Only if you are happy, you will shine from inside out and effect other people with it.

Love, Lily