Are You in Relationship with the Person or Their Potential?

by Matt Kahn

Who needs to read this? 

If you project someone’s potential onto them, it is a greater likelihood they will project their unexpressed pain onto you. Even though you may be able to see someone’s potential, it doesn’t mean they are within a timespan of bringing it to life. Even worse, when you make it your goal to help someone step into the potential you see within the context of a platonic, familial, or romantic relationship, you are no longer relating to the person in view, but a promise you have projected onto them in becoming the very qualities absent from your own relationship with self.

To be in relationship with someone’s potential is like having a vision of your child’s future. What if you suddenly saw in your mind’s eye that your ten-year-old would grow up to be one of the most accomplished and in-demand accountants in the country — only to then hand your ten-year-old child your tax returns thirty years before they are able to take on new clients? Just as ridiculous as that would be, it is equally as far-reaching to give others access to the depths of your deepest vulnerabilities lifetimes before they are ready to handle the human heart with respect, responsibility, and care.

What if someone who projects their emotional density onto you is their soul’s way of saying, “I appreciate you reflecting the qualities I will one day personify, but I’m lifetimes away from being interested or able to be who you see me one day becoming.

I am only projecting my pain to show you all that’s in the way of being who you need me to be. All so you may make course-corrective choices in support of who you are now, instead of trying to fast-track a journey I am taking at my own rate of speed. If you could please honor me as someone teaching you to strengthen the power of your voice and to be more comfortable maintaining the boundaries that amplify your self-esteem, you will come out of this relationship more worthy of the goodness I am unable to provide given where I am at my stage of evolution.”

These are the words the soul conveys to you while decorated in the manipulative patterning that lets you know when someone in your life is too consumed in pain to feel safe enough for conscious interaction. What a mind-blowing revelation to recognize equal to the safety you may lack when engulfed in other people’s darkness is a matching lack of safety others experience when you insist on having conversations of conscious accountability with those who aren’t ready to face it.

If someone hasn’t developed the safety to be self-aware, what makes you think they are ready to explore a journey of intimacy, whether as friends, family, or lovers?

This is why the Universe invented small talk as a social cocoon for those still developing the coping skills to love and be loved from a space of safety and respect.

Even when in romantic scenarios, there are those who are willing to engage sexually as an avoidance of their own pain without being equally interested in the intimacy of communication and connection. If you find it useful to expose your innocence to that type of de-compartmentalized imbalance of interaction, there are plenty of people happy to explore the beauty of your body, while taking for themselves the power that insecurities tend to so easily give away.

My hope is that you will read these words, feel into their relevance, and take the time to shift out of relating to other people’s potential, including your own, so you are able to be aware of your most important life choices by meeting each moment in truth.

This is not a judgment against anyone, but a self-reflective opportunity to give to yourself what is no one else’s job to provide you. With the hope that you set such an incredibly high bar of ethical value in your life that it lets the quantum field know you are finally ready for a depth of meaningful connection that will blow the doors of your heart completely off its hinges. From this space, there is no longer a power struggle feeding the patterning of those, who only want what they want from you and nothing more, while not racking up late penalty fees on your tax returns by waiting for a ten-year-old to figure it out.

Love is fierce today. It is only the beginning.