If we have unrequited affection for someone it is emotional masochism. You cannot love someone who doesn't love you - that is merely obsession and infatuation at best. And well, at worst, we are busy realizing our childhood trauma of never feeling good enough, lovable and so forth. Why we unconsciously seek out people who will confirm our automated negative selv-talk. And because we are comfortable with our own trash-talk and believe this to be true about ourselves - that we are not worth it - we stay, we endure and hang on like a cat to the curtain tails. It is painfully pathetic.

I have never understood why anyone would chase someone who is clearly not into them. I find that insulting. Why would we want to chase someone who cannot recognize our uniqueness?

Why would we ever want to try to convince someone to stay, if they want to leave.

Now, it is a fine line, cos obviously we need to fight for what we believe in. We need to show others that we will be there for them, if we have committed to that. Some of us tend to be so easygoing, cos we don't want to pressure anyone, that people think we just don't care. And that is bad. People don't care until they know how much WE care. We WANT people to care. That is where the passion and the connection is. If we can't see how much others really care about us, we will often do outrageous things to try to get a response out of them. Even cheating on them, only to see if they can get hurt by us.

Do we matter enough to them, that we can hurt them?

Yes, it is childish. And it is toxic. But it is not uncommon behaviour patterns. And the highs and lows of an emotional rollercoaster is something that becomes weirdly attractive for many after addiction. Why addicts are told to remain sober 1 year post recovery. Our brain has been hijacked by our drug of choice and we now require intense emotional stimulation and drama to activate some of the same brain areas - in order to feel alive.

That is not a healthy recovery though.

A healthy recovery is getting comfortable with shades of grey.

It is getting comfortable with the sound of silence. It is listening more than we talk. It is observing more than we react. And yet it is also setting clear boundaries and expressing ourselves after we have reflected on the outcome. It is practicing having a brake. When we have struggled with addiction, we tend to have no brakes. We just react, act, overreact or run away and hide. Whatever fits our personality temperament is what we will tend to do instinctively without thinking, when we are in addict mode. Resulting in no problems get solved. Everything stays dormant. We drown in our own self-created suffering.

It is crucial that we get good at understanding return of investment regardless of having no ambition of working at Wall Street. We need to train ourselves in seeing the signs of lack of return of investment to not indulge in unneeded suffering - the fastest way to relapse.

If we are to believe that we are worthy, that we are loveable, that we are indeed created in the image of god - as each one of us are - then we are also required to walk away from people who will not invest in us.

Emotional intelligence is about reading other people - understanding bad investments and drawing out.

If we have low EQ we tend to stay in toxic situations or get caught up in imaginary thinking. Like, we can make him/her like us. Sometimes people come into our lives simply to teach us stuff so we can grow character. Instead what often happens is that we desperately attach ourselves because our wounds get activated. Eventually we find this relation to be toxic, cos we are both bleeding instead of healing. Notice that the other party too might find us to be toxic, cos we might be activating "their stuff". A toxic relationship is never solely a one-way interaction. Every interaction is either love or a call for love. When we do not respond in a loving manner, we lose out on developing character. It is easy to love someone who is loveable, less so to understand that those of us who exhibit the most toxic behavior needs a loving responds the most of all. Every moment we have the opportunity to practice skills that are either loving or judging and distancing. We do not need to stay to be loving. Sometimes we need to walk away. But if we have not learnt the lesson from the interaction, it will repeat itself until we stop acting out our inner wounds.

Chasing rejection, however, is not loving towards ourselves. Whenever we chase something that refuses to acknowledge our worth, it is a lesson that we need to stand up for ourselves and define our own worth. Only when we have low self-worth will we engage in chasing bad investments aka reinforcing rejection of us as worthy beings.

A bad investment is not a sign of our actual worth - it is a sign of our lack of self-worth.

The takeaway here is, that if we struggle with bad investments, we might consider to stop chasing. Chasing has a desperate quality about it, which often says more about our own need to be liked than our like for the other person. Which ironically is quite narcissistic and not loving, regardless of us feeling like the victim of bad investments. Wanting something out of a situation is never a good thing. However, when we give, there needs to be a sharing quality about it, otherwise we are giving ourselves too cheaply. Afterall, no point in throwing pearls for pigs, that's what we should be thinking to stop the masochistic madness.

We might want to consider that before we give someone everything we have, they should want it. It is not wise to simply give someone everything we have, if they don't want it - that is just plain stupidity. We cannot expect a smart reaction to stupidity. So the pattern repeats until we break it.