Why do People Say One Thing and do Another?

It can be confusing and make you wonder, why do people say one thing and do another? You’re a reasonable person and you go through great lengths to keep your word with other people, and you would think that other people would offer you the same courtesy.

Before we delve into the psychology of it all, let’s remember that we’re all basically good people with good intentions. The problem with good intentions is that the road to hell is paved with them (so they say).

Generally, when someone tells you they’re going to do something, their intent is to actually do it, because they want to please you, to support you, and to feel they are a part of your team. Often, they are so eager to please that they agree to things they may not have thought through fully.

Life is hectic and our desire to “be there” for the people we care about often overrides the realization that things come up in life that may make it difficult to follow through with the commitments we make to our friends. Because of this, we often overextend our ability to do the things we commit to.

So, try not to take it personally when someone says one thing then doesn’t follow through. Keep in mind that their intent was to be there for you because they do care about you.

If you’re the kind of person that does whatever it takes to keep your word and maintain a high level of integrity with those who you make promises to, you know how hard it can be sometimes with the commitments you make to others. While you are to be commended for having such high standards, your expectations of even yourself may be so high that you’re impeding your own quality of life.

Maybe it’s time that you started to lighten up a bit on your own expectations of yourself. When you’re feeling overwhelmed or even panicked about fulfilling your obligations, maybe its time for you to cut yourself a little slack. Sometimes we can get so obsessed about keeping our word that it can lead to destroying your quality of life.

It’s okay to have things come up, and if you’re feeling overwhelmed, this is that greater part of you saying this might be too much for you to bear. So, cut yourself some slack, and be polite about it. Call or text the person you’ve over-committed yourself to and let them know that you might not be able to perform in the manner that you thought you could have when you told them you would do the thing you said you would do.

Once you’ve done that, you can instantly feel the sense of relief that comes from honoring yourself while still letting your friend know that your intention was to keep your word.

It is not the end of the world, just because you failed to follow through on what you said you would do on someone else’s behalf. Forgive yourself and keep moving forward, enjoying honoring yourself.

Keep that in mind the next time someone tells you that they will do something for you, and they fail to follow through. Tell yourself, “I know that things come up,” knowing that you do that, too. Forgive and bless them, because you know that you’re being flexible will be a great source of relief for the person who made you a promise that was just too stressful for them to keep.

Life is not just black and white. There are so many shades of gray in our experience and being flexible actually opens the door for new opportunities that you may have missed along the way when you’re more adaptive to change and allowing the flow of life to progress naturally.

This can be particularly difficult for you if you’ve been trained in a manner to think that life is just black-and-white. For instance, for people who have spent years in the military or a paramilitary organization, they have been trained to see things as this or that without any shades of gray.

This is an effective way to manage large groups of individuals with little or no leeway for life to flow when resources are limited, and chief objectives must be maintained with high levels of performance, but this is unnatural.

Life is flowing, not militaristic.

Of course, there are also toxic people who make it a habit to tell you they will do one thing but do another just to wreak havoc with your life. This is another thing entirely.
These are the people you need to keep at a safer distance, moving them further from your circle of friends. If they are showing you that they are unwilling or unable to do the things they say they will, then it’s on you to stop expecting them to do anything they say. Problem solved.

Release your attachment to expectation, and learn to lighten up on yourself and others.
You got this.

Keep moving and going with the flow.

Forgiveness is the Key

You are the result of a lifetime of abuse and victimization from the sound of your first cry for life until today, you have survived and endured judgment, false accusations, injustice, betrayal, abuse, and trauma. It’s a wonder you’ve made it this far at all.

You are a bundle of emotional wounds and garbage you’ve collected over the course of your life, which explains a lot about who you are and how you respond to the world around you. After all, nobody knows better than you, that you’re the only person you can count on to look after you. This is your primary objective.

You surround yourself with emotional tripwires and landmines to protect yourself and you try to keep all those emotional wounds hidden and suppressed, which is the highest level of self-abuse. All that unresolved trauma compromises your immune system, promotes premature aging, makes you more prone to sickness and disease. If that weren’t enough, is also keeping you separated from all the best things in life.

The fortress you’ve built to protect yourself is nearly impenetrable. You might applaud yourself for doing such a good job of protecting yourself. From inside your fortress you feel safe but if you could see from a higher perspective, you could see you have sentenced yourself to a life in prison of your own making.

Forgiveness is the Key

Forgiveness is the key to unlock every level of containment you’ve subjected yourself to.

There’s no denying the multitude of transgressions you’ve endured. The wounds run so very deep. Your pain, fear, and the repressed anger from the grudges you maintain are weapons of those who hurt you in the first place. They continue to hurt and abuse you every moment that you harbor unforgiveness.

The first thought which you might consider would be to ask the question, “Why would I forgive someone for doing that to me?” and you might rather see them punished for what they did, but contemplating retribution is another way the victimizer continues to have power over his or her victim.

Not only are you a victim of your abuser but you subject yourself to continued self-abuse by second-guessing yourself, and feeling guilty, wondering how you could have let someone do that to you? Setting up emotional blockades and numbing your own emotions so that you can’t be hurt like that again.

Playing the part of the victim does offer you emotional support from others who might feel sorry for you, which helps to ease the pain, but it also cements your position in being continually victimized by your abuser.

Forgiveness Can Set You Free

Forgiveness starts with you. You must forgive yourself first. You are not responsible for any of the emotional pain you’ve endured. You never deserved to be disrespected, mistreated, or abused. You were innocent. You were just in the wrong place at the wrong time, or maybe you suffered the abuse because you were strong enough to take it, like a shock absorber, sparing someone else who could not have survived the abuse.

You cannot control what other people do. You are only in control of your own life and forgiving yourself, absolving yourself from any sense of wrongdoing or deservedness is implicit.

Forgive Them

You are not required to face or confront your aggressor(s), all you need to do is to realize that these people were only doing the best they could with what they had at the time. Just as you were only doing the best you could with what you had at that time.

You might even offer up a little empathy, that had you lived that person’s life, you might have committed the same atrocities.

Forgive them. Forgiving them is not about them at all, it’s more about you forgiving them so that you can go on with your life without them continually exerting additional abuse to you over time.

Your forgiveness is complete, when you can look back at the episode without pain, guilt, or anger, and can truly hope that he or she finds his or her own way to claim a better life for themselves in love, without having to strike out at others anymore.

You can learn the lessons from your past without having to carry around all that emotional baggage. No need to seclude yourself deep within your fortress.

You can be free, and forgiveness is the key.

Related: Forgiveness Ain’t Easy, Let Go of Unforgiveness, True Forgiveness, Unforgiveness or Forgiveness

The Freedom Weapon

There is a force so powerful that it tears down the prison walls that keep us contained, locked down, and isolated from the best thing this life has to offer. So powerful is this weapon that it could easily explode destroying the person who attempted to deploy it, so it must be wielded skillfully, if you want to be free of the chains that bind you.

This weapon is activated not from an external power source, but can only be ignited with the love from your heart to start the reaction that will set you safely free. This is hard work, and you have all the skills and equipment necessary to fire off this powerful weapon, at great risk to you.

It will cost you your ego, the holding tight to something that the primal part of you feels is so important, but this only promotes the virus that grows inside you, overtaking all your cells, resulting in your completion of your death sentence while imprisoned. Finding your way out of this prison is your only hope for escape and possibility of positive life outside these walls, where lays the chance of living a full, free life of love, fulfillment and happiness.

But you have to willing to let go and be willing to use

The Freedom Weapon

The freedom weapon is forgiveness. Forgiveness, fueled by love can take out, decimate and eliminate everything that stands between where you are and where you want to be, if what you want is to live a long, healthy and happy life, free from your emotional prison.

On the other side of the walls of unforgiveness, we are able to see life as it really is. Shocking as it may be, once you are there, you become the designer, architect, builder and decorator of your new life of freedom.

There is little more uncomfortable or painful of letting go of what you’ve let encase you in negative states of victimization, guilt, depression, dissention, resentment and anger.

Dare to Forgive

Finding yourself on the other side of forgiveness, your life as a victim ceases. You let go of your need to control that which is beyond your control, are able to see the world from outside yourself and accept the ingredients offered to you by life. In your imprisoned state, the ingredients may look like a pile of rubbish, but to the freedom chef, the most magnificent four course meal or unlimited buffet can be made from the same ingredients.

This is the difference between unforgiveness and forgiveness.

If you feel like life, someone, or something is out to get you prior to forgiving, afterwards you are empowered to see it more like a game, and when you see someone or something coming at you, you can smile, twist and with the most simple movements and gestures, deflect your attacker, disarming and disempowering them. It’s like emotional kung fu. You allow the energy of others be their own undoing as it has little effect on you.

You can now see these people, situations and circumstances for what they are, and might be surprised that you can have empathy or understanding for their need to act out in such a way, feeling sorry for them, or loving them for the unfortunate life they have chosen to live.

You become lovingly courageous and unafraid in this state of forgiveness. You are able to breathe easier, enjoy greater health and vitality, even surrounded by a world lost to this idea of freedom.

This is part of the deep inner work, but it is worth it.

Your forgiveness opens the doorway to a new world of possibilities filled with love and adventure and brings your wildest dreams within your reach.

Forgiveness releases you from your own prison, where a better life awaits your arrival on the other side of these walls.

Unforgiveness or Forgiveness

What do you have the tendency to hold inside, a state of unforgiveness or forgiveness?

What if someone assaulted you either physically, verbally or emotionally? What if someone you trusted betrayed you? What if someone stole something that belonged to you or otherwise wronged you in some way? What do you do?

Unforgiveness or forgiveness? Which side of the bars are you on?

Forgive them

The idea of forgiving someone for doing something to hurt us, our feelings, or otherwise negatively impact our lives sounds ludicrous. We have been programmed to do anything but forgive. When we have been wronged, we want revenge or justice, and we want it now. Not dissimilar to Alice in Wonderland’s Red Queen asserting, “Off with is head!”

We get all righteous and indignant insisting that our basic moral code reads, “An eye for an eye,” indicating that retaliation is warranted and honorable.

When you have suffered an injustice you have one of two things you can do, either harbor unforgiveness, or to embrace the idea of forgiveness and let it go.

The idea of forgiveness is crazy-making for most of us, because retribution seems much more satisfying. If someone does something to harm someone else, they must be severely punished. It is this positioning that has our prisons filled to maximum capacity.

As we pass more and more laws to penalize more and more Americans the rate of incarceration increases exponentially. In fact, is we keep creating new laws and arresting more and more wrongdoers, in the next three decades you will either be imprisoned or work for the judicial system.

And where does all this incarceration get us? It fills us with negative emotions, keeps us in a virtual state of fear and causes us to harbor hatred. Think about how much you hold onto negative emotions about being victimized by someone else. You can hold a grudge for a lifetime, and feel as though it’s warranted and justified.

What does holding fast to these negative emotions do to you? It causes you to spin a whirlpool of negative emotions, causing premature aging and deterioration of all of you; your mind, body and soul.

What good is it to seek revenge, when you could just let it go and live a better, happier life? You could let someone’s negative words of deeds overpower you and cause you to wither away and ultimately put you in an early grave, or live a better life, you best life and make the world a better place. How? By

Forgiving

Many people would state, “I cannot forgive,” him or her because what he or she, “did was unforgiveable.”

What you fail to understand is every moment you hold tight to your lack of forgiveness, you bolster the very thing that hurt you or caused you harm, and you allow someone else (the person who committed the action against you) to have power over you. Every minute you ruminate about this person or what they did to disrespect or otherwise harm you, you reward them with control over you. How much more power does this individual need to have over you?

We take it personal because we feel someone has done something to us, when in fact the thing that happened to you to hurt you or your feelings actually had little or nothing to do with you. You were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time because if it didn’t happen to you, it would have happened to someone else.

If you think about it, God selected you to be the recipient of the wrongdoing because you could handle it (‘ere the phrase, “God will not give you anything you can’t handle). Which implies, Yes. God thinks you are a superhero because no one else was uniquely qualified to deal with this injustice.

Unforgiveness is your own prison. Your only hope for escape is to enact your prison break with forgiveness.

Remember, forgiveness is not for the wrongdoer. Forgiveness is for you. Forgiveness does not condone any sin against you, it simply releases you from your prison, allowing karma, God, the local jurisdictions, state or federal agencies to deal with the offender in any what they choose.

If you’ve forgiven, you walk away, retaining the education you received from this incident or circumstance as you keep moving forward. You needn’t forget the incident, but you must find a way to forgive in such a manner as to be able to think or talk about the event without experiencing any emotional distress.

After all, the best revenge is to live a successful life filled with happiness and abundance in spite of any transgression that has visited you.