If there is one, single thing that most often makes or breaks our relationships (in every form), it’s our ability (or inability) to take responsibility. As the old adage goes, “Know Thyself!” To truly be responsible, means to truly know thyself. This can be accomplished at two levels: Spiritual and human. If you Spiritually know yourself, you would of course know your Divinity, which would, in itself, make your life complete. But, even if you fall short of this level of knowingness, just knowing your human self and what makes you act and react the way you do, would completely change your relationships with others. If you know yourself, as a human being, you would know and understand how your interactions with others are affected by your unhealed wounds, as well as your perceived “needs.” And the greatest of these needs is to be “special.”

The problem begins whenever you (on levels unknown) doubt your Divinity—your state of Unconditional Love. This results in feeling inadequate, which then makes you search for people or things that might compensate by making you feel special. Now, everyone around you will be assigned the duty of “making you feel special.” In other words, you need a “special” feeling for (or from) some-one or some-thing to make you tingle inside to make up for the bliss you lost when you forgot who you were. So, not remembering how to feel Unconditional Love, you feel the need to replace it with a conditional form of false love, called specialness. You will be attracted to people who will like you, support you, and stroke your ego in the ways you think you need to feel more complete or special. And since others can only make you feel special for a limited amount of time, you will eventually feel attacked or rejected every time these other people seem to change the behavior you so desperately need from them. Of course you try to prevent these rude awakenings or let-downs by clinging tenaciously to these other people or even bargaining to keep the relationship alive just so you don’t have to confront the loss of this false sense of specialness. That’s why these are commonly referred to as unhealthy, codependent relationships. Sadly, although these are the people you would classify as people you “like,” this will change as soon as they no longer fulfill your assignment.

There are also people in the world who, for whatever reason, refuse to give you the specialness you thirst for. These are generally the people in your life that you don’t like. These individuals are usually people who fail to make you feel special. In fact, they undoubtedly make you feel very “un-special.” For example, when someone fails to let you into traffic, you are offended because they failed to make you feel special enough to cut in. When you want to engage in a conversation or power struggle with someone but they won’t participate, you then feel ignored or disempowered. When your partner refuses to give you sex, they failed to make you feel special enough to feel desired. When a mother chooses to share her affection with her child, the dad can feel threatened because his specialness is threatened. Even children, who seem so innocent, will battle with their siblings to gain the special attention or approval of their parents and cry when they aren’t getting what they want.

Most people might assume that it’s normal or even healthy to want to feel special to others or to allow others to be special to us. But beware! Hidden behind all forms of specialness (which always includes conditions) lurks the need to compensate for a lack of feeling Unconditional Love—for others or from others. One way to recognize the dysfunctional need to feel special is to observe your relationships to recognize where you feel insecure about your value, or how desirable you feel, or how much you find yourself comparing or competing, or perhaps how often you participate in power struggles. You might also observe how you feel and react when someone doesn’t say or give you something you feel you need. These are all sure signs that you lack wholeness and that you are therefore trying to compensate and are desperately seeking specialness. One way or another, you will eventually discover that your tactics will not work and in fact, may even push others away, thus increasing your angst and making you feel even less special.

Needing to feel special is such a primal, egotistic need, that even animals attack each other for roles of dominance—specialness. One might assume that, given the negative repercussions of living with such a desperate need for specialness, it would be easy to give it up. But the ego tells you that to give up the idea of being special means you are “losing something,” and it has all the tools of the ego-based world to support its case. For example, the ego plants negative emotions such as loneliness in your emotional body. Then, if someone ends a relationship with you (which might very well have been a healthy thing for you), the ego triggers that emotion of loneliness to support the idea that it was the other person rejecting you that made you feel so badly. And since you have forgotten your Divine Nature, you buy into the false conclusion that you must need that other person to feel whole, lovable, and of course, special. Of course none of the ideas that feed our insatiable thirst for specialness are true, but you will never know that unless you are willing to go through the “drug-like” withdrawals of purging yourself from its addictive hold.

All relationships must be transformed from being conditional (contingent on you being made to feel special), to unconditional (contingent on nothing). The latter merely reminds you that you are loved by God, complete within yourself, and have no needs for anyone to fill. This level of understanding and responsibility allows you to realize that any uncertainty about these truths will be mirrored in your relationships and show you where you still have work to do.

Each time you achieve a feeling of ego-based specialness, it is a victory for your ego and its casualties include everyone involved. The pursuit of specialness is worse than nearly any addiction and is always at the cost of peace. As soon as you manage to scratch up an ounce of specialness in your life, you will wage wars to protect it or keep it from getting away from you, thus losing peace and your True Identity. The teachings of Buddha and A Course in Miracles both explain that all forms of specialness that we assign to others results in attachments, such as the attachment to keeping the specialness from getting away. But since the very thing you are attached to will either change or disappear, the specialness always ends in some form of suffering. ACIM says, “Your specialness is attacked by everything that walks and breathes.”

If specialness were a flowering weed, its roots would be the belief that you are separate from God, its stem would be desperation, its flower would be specialness—which of course blooms to get attention and dies soon after, and it’s fragrance would then be the resulting codependent relationships. The stem of desperation not only supports the flower of specialness but, being so desperate, will cause unhealthy states of being such as fear, hyper-defensiveness, jealousy, and conditional love—all of which is predictable given that it is rooted in the error thinking that you are apart from God and the Garden of Eden.

As soon as you begin to define who you are by the conditional love or ego-based needs of your relationships, you immediately replace the freedom and joy that comes only with Unconditional Love with the unquenchable need to feel special. In so doing, you will never be able to truly know one another but instead, only know others through the concepts of who you want them to be. These concepts come from what you believe you need from them, which comes from who you believe you are. The more limited you believe yourself to be, the more limitations you’ll need to place on another. As an ego-based person, you will determine who you are by what you get from the outside world. You will also feel constantly threatened or affected by what other people do. The actions, feelings, and comments of others will then threaten your reality and your specialness, which feels unbearable enough to make you grab yet another person to help you deal with the pain by again making you feel loved, loveable, and special. And so begins another cycle of codependence that will continue to control your life.

As much as we wish it weren’t so, we are technically not “special” even in the eyes of God. The reason is that God loves us ALL as ONE BEING and not as parts. God actually doesn’t have the ability to experience degrees of love, such as a special love for Jesus and less for Hitler. This might feel a little shocking or depressing but only to the ego part of you that thinks it needs to be special. Think about it; could God really love a part of its ONE child/creation more than another part? This is about as sane as trying to shampoo one hair on your head that you have a special fondness for more so than all your other hairs. God loves us unconditionally and specialness is the opposite of Unconditional Love, because being special is totally conditional. Unconditional Love brings you freedom; specialness only offers limitations and captivity. Every time you try to create specialness, you are settling for something that is not real, will not last, will bring you pain, and will confirm that you are not already loved nor complete within yourself. So, do you still want to be special?

Fortunately, there’s an answer to this dilemma. We must learn to love unconditionally and to surrender all egotistical needs to be special or to make others egotistically special to us. In the ultimate sense, all of our relations are the same and equally deserving of our love and kindness. So we are destined to eventually love everyone—equally. Does this mean you have to move every man, woman, and child into your home? Of course not. You can love everyone with an intention of loving them as God loves them—unconditionally—yet you are also welcome to decide which forms of love are most appropriate for each person at any given moment. So love them all equally, but freely choose how to express that love in a way that feels right for each given scenario, which may vary from your child to a stranger and from your partner to your friend. Even Jesus and Buddha loved everyone but still chose to treat some of their apostles differently than others.

The more you are filled with Spirit, the more complete within yourself you will feel, thus preventing you from needing anyone else to make you feel special. Although all relationships in this world begin as special, due to being rooted in the perception that we are separate, they can be healed by forgiving the misperceptions we project into them, thus making the relationship holy again. When a relationship is healed, it becomes Holy or Whole—One. What is ONE cannot be special, since special is defined as, “one ‘part’ being more special than another ‘part.’” As we learn to bring ourselves and our relationships prayerfully to the altar of Unconditional Love, asking for the guidance on how to forgive errors and love only in unconditional ways, all forms of specialness will merely evaporate before the Light of God.