• Personal Growth

    Positive Affirmations are Not Enough

    June 10, 2010

    This is a sentence used quite often in current psychology writings.  Big discovery!  Truth is, it is not a big or a current discovery.  True counselors and therapists, the ones who deal with the heartache, grief and pain of the human condition have always known this.  There is no mystery here, there is no newsflash here.

    True hurt, grief, pain and despair must be experienced in order to be released.  Therapists and counselors understand this.  Positive affirmations are positive support from self to self, to deal with the negative beliefs that come to be with painful experiences.  A counselor / therapist uses their own positive regard for the client to support the client through the moment.  The positive affirmations go home with the client and help to continue the support throughout the week.

    This is why I say we must embrace positive affirmations.  They are part of what we need to rebuild what is damaged by our resistance to our experience (pain and grief) and our concomitant inappropriate belief structures.  Positive affirmations can put us back on the path to healing and loving ourselves and others.

    So don’t talk trash about positive affirmations, of course they are not enough.  Knowledgeable therapists and counselors have always known this.  Positive affirmations are not trite tricks of the trade either. Positive affirmations can be tools that we apply to show support and love for ourself.  When we are healing from a great hurt or grieving a loss, isn’t any source of support and love a good one?  If that love and support comes from self, isn’t that even better?

    So, geez, don’t put down positive affirmations, well – don’t put down anything.  Positive affirmations can be indicators for self support and self love and what’s the harm in that?

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  • It is What it is...,  Psychology of Life

    Be Here Now

    June 7, 2010

    Experiencing our lives from moment to moment in an alive and conscious way is the only way to have integrity with ourselves.  If we allow our belief systems to encumber the moment, we will stymie our experience and thus stop the experience.

    True hurt must be experienced to be released.  It is our unhinged coping mechanisms that keep us from experiencing our true experience.  Why?  Well, we all resist the pain of life, hoping for and always pursuing the happiness and the joy.  Without the pain of life, happiness and joy eludes us, something to be forever chased that we cannot catch because we are unwilling to have our experience.

    The fact of the matter is that once you are willing to HAVE your experience, what will bubble up, will bubble up – it is not within our control.  This is what scares us.  Many of us store our grief and sadness, hurt and rage for years.  When we finally make the choice to experience ourselves, it can be overwhelming, as all of those feelings have festered “under our skin” into an infection that weakens us.  As the hurts pile up, they become more entrenched and more powerful.

    This process of storing our grief and sadness changes our thought process.  We lose our child like openness and trade it for the defense mechanisms and protective belief structures that will interfere with our ability to experience our lives.  It is almost an oxy-moronic thought process, because the truth is, that “What you resist; persists”.  Hurt, despair and grief unattended to is still hurt, despair and grief.  Only through our experience of them are we able to release them and through release, we can go on to the next emotion of our experience.  Joy is always brief, because we are almost always willing to experience it; that is why it goes away.  Any emotion experienced, moves on, any emotion that is stuck, serves as the plug which keeps us from experiencing anything, including the joy that is available to us.

    So be here now, it may take some work to get here, but it is well worth the experience.  Life brings us everything, including joy, love, connectedness and happiness.  It is up to you to “have” it.

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  • Love and Relationships

    Words

    June 4, 2010

    There are two times in a relationship when you need no words, in the beginning when hot romance and lusty touches are all that you need and then at the end when nothing you say will make any difference whatsoever at all.

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  • Speaking as a Parent

    The Point

    June 2, 2010

    I’m amazed by my children’s reverence for me.  All I have really ever done is love them intensely, and while I think that being loved is a very great thing, I’ve never had any choice about loving them.  It came naturally, it had it’s own strength, it had it’s own life.  So there is a part of me that feels rewarded – for no effort on my part – I never had any choice about loving my kids.  It just is.  I am thinking about all of this because in the last month, I have received great warmth and support from them.  They have managed my life very well.  It is interesting how they will trade  responsibility for me around.  One takes over when there is physical work to do, one takes the lead when there is emotional work to do, one does a lot of nurturing, and medical is yet another facet of  mom-management.

    Who talks to me, when, where and why, may be the result of a family council meeting that I was not invited to.  To be revered and yet “managed” is an interesting experience and can only come from your kids – there is no other place where these unique experiences are formed and then collide.

    I have been thinking about why I started this blog…

    It really started because in the “push me pull you” conflict of burgeoning young adulthood, I always felt that there was one more thing that I needed to either tell my kids or explain to my kids before they left the safety of home.  Now, mind you, this dilemma of mine has been going on for 18 years – I mean Russ is 36.  It’s been awhile since the first of my many flew-the-coop.  What they taught me as they teetered through their twenties, is that parenting is never a done job.  Gradually the fear that I had not taught them enough was replaced by a fear that I could never teach enough – through the end of time.  And trust me, I don’t believe that I know the secret to life, I just believe that a concept learned must be shared.

    I had to write, hence the blog and the attempt at completing all of life’s lessons for my brood.  The blog gets shaky in purpose at times, and the point is sometimes lost to urgent matters of life, like health and love and romance.  But in the end, it is always really about them and my need – to not lose the lesson.  My family is a hard-headed bunch who prefers experience to wisdom.  Shake that up with this mysterious phenomena of a wildly different personality with each birth and you have no real constructive way to help others with lessons of life.  In fact, each life lesson is different for each personality.  You can be hammering away on intellectual development and that is not what child number two needs, child number one needed that.

    So, there is some innate sense and depth of failure inherent in the process of parenting.  One can never tell what issue will face your child.  Then you add the confounder that each personality will handle the issue differently and you really have some confusion – or at least I do.  (Geez, on some days, I can’t even get their names right.)  Is this a self esteem issue, or is this pride, or is this insight, or is it heartbreak?  How do I respond, what if I lose this moment, this chance at wisdom given, shared?

    So here I am with my blog.  Reading has always had a profound influence on my life and I can say that each of my life’s transitions were shepherded by meaningful works shared by people who – like me – had to write.  I am incredibly grateful to all of those folks who had to share by writing and I am incredibly grateful to be able to write.

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  • Personal Growth

    No Breathing Spark of Illumination

    May 22, 2010

    I go into surgery this week – and that fact – of all things, has me feeling lonely.  So when Lisa said “Do you have anyone to go with you?”  I almost cried in relief because I said “no” and she said “I will take you”.  Lisa is my ghetto babe and she calls me Mama.  She has been there for me more times than I can count and of course, I have never felt adequate to that.

    I know that my family loves me, but I know that this is not a chore for my children.  Johanna (who is 824 miles away from me) texts me “Mom I’m really worried about you! I feel like you aren’t being a hundred % honest with me and I know it’s because u don’t want us to worry.  But I’m literally having stomach aches over it! I can’t loose you and it kills me to think you’re in pain or something’s hurting you!  Please be honest with me about what’s going on and let me know when and what’s happening!  Maybe these stomach aches will go away!  I love u more than words will ever describe!  You are not finished here and have many things to do and see happy and healthy! Take care of yourself mama!”

    Haven’t really processed through this situation, and it is true that I lied to the kids about the biopsy.  But I remember sitting in the Doctor’s office and thinking “No, God would never do that, I am the last one living in my kids life, of course I will live for a long time – God would never take my kids only parent away from them.”  It just doesn’t seem plausible, doesn’t make sense.  I keep going over it in my head.  How did we get here?  I mean as a family, what the hell happened?  Plain and simple, everyone died.  Until I was 37, 15 short / long years ago, I was surrounded by parents – I had 5 of them!  I had a husband, a father to my children.  It’s true our marriage didn’t make it, but we kept up the parenting always.  We were partners in crime when the kids misbehaved; we would plot and manipulate to stay on the same page to discipline and to love.  And now gone, all of them gone, and I am left standing alone.  Normally I am fierce, I can be cruel, I can be endlessly strong.

    But now, as I face this betrayal of my body, I weaken, I cry, God forbid, I’m a sissy.  I can’t stand sissies.

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  • Personal Growth

    Open and Knowing

    May 21, 2010

    Being open is fearful stuff. Anticipation, hope and desire swirl around the edges. Being open allows “knowing” in. Sometimes “knowing” is unpleasant, hurtful, painful. Being open requires faith. Faith waxes and wanes like the moon. Life is all of it…

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  • It is What it is...,  Love and Relationships

    A Great Love Affair

    May 21, 2010

    Is a wonderful thing.  Who can deny the lure and the intensity of romance?  And when the moments join together as if they are meant to be, as if there are no other moment that was meant to be in this time and in this place, the love affair is even greater still.  How does it happen?  How does this magical passion ever occur?  It cannot be explained away by hormones, but must be acknowledged on a deeper level: a level of compassion and congruence.  Further still, there must be a dimension of confluence as times and events come together of their own accord, their own fate, their own living heart.  So how does one think of the Great Love Affair?  Is it a rescue from a moment of despair?  Is it all I need to continue my arduous journey though the mountains, a brief stop in a field overflowing with flowers?  Or is this Great Love Affair so much more?  This is what I think – and of course thinking has no place or purpose in a Great Love Affair, but thinking occurs all the same:  It is what it is.

    And while I sometimes do not know, nor – do I understand the “is”.  I know that it is what it is, not within my power and control – not within my wishing – not even within my thinking.

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  • Philosophy

    “We Are Pack”

    May 11, 2010

    And while I am the leader of the pack, I cannot tell you how to be a member of the pack.  I have seen many come and go.  I do not know how or why some stay.  I do not know how or why new – become members of the pack. 

    As we first met my daughter-in-law, we were challenged. .. My daughter-in-law is a bright and vivid woman, educated, stylish, smart, very smart.   I am sure that several of us simply stared at her for the first two years after her introduction to the pack.  Some time after that, and there is no defining moment, she became pack.  And now, she is with us and is us.  I don’t even know how I knew that the shift occurred, but suddenly one day, she was among us differently.  I know that she did not try, as in trying – to be a member of the pack, it is simply part of her.

    I have seen others, try very hard to be a member of the pack.  They may even travel with us for several years.  But they are not members of the pack and in the end our paths must separate and the pack moves on.

    Still others, come to us and they are a member of the pack on the day that they come to us.  What makes them our pack – immediately?  I do not know, but they are there and they will stay.

    And what is the pack?  My son and I read a genre of writing that includes magic and great voyages and mysterious mages and among those books, which include thousands and thousands of pages in the telling of the story, there came to us a story.  This story included a telepathic connection between a man and his wolf.  They experienced each other, and so the story is about the two of them and how their disparate bodies could think as one.  Often the man had to balance human thinking against the thought process of the wolf community.   When the wolf committed great acts of loyalty and self sacrifice for another, and the man would question his motivation, the wolf always responded simply “we are pack”.  When the man had to give deeply of himself to others in loyalty and brave deeds, the man would question himself for this, the wolf would respond simply to the man to help him understand his need to serve others with “we are pack”. In this magical mystical place a pack is…

    Always there for each other in any need.  Hears distress from each other, no matter how many miles separate them.  Bears a love for the pack, sometimes maddening, sometimes daunting, but always a love for the pack.  The pack is never to be abandoned, can be lost, even for a time, but never abandoned.  The pack stands strong, no matter that one may be weak.  A weakness is to be held up, not beat down.  And there are no secrets from the pack, respect for privacy, but no secrets. 

    And I, who am the leader of the pack, do not know how one gets in or another can never get in.  It just is.  And the pack moves on.

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  • Love and Relationships

    ??Relationship??

    May 6, 2010

    I thought that I had figured out what makes relationships go sideways.  The fulcrum – I thought – was this slippery slope of codependence wherein one partner decides to act badly and the other partner decides to acquiesce to the bad behavior.  There is more, so much more to the destructive dynamic, so often framed as “I Love You”.

    When I agree to be the partner of someone who is passive, there are hidden agreements that tag along with passive. Those hidden agreements include: You make the decision so I (the passive one) am not responsible for any of the decisions, nor am I responsible for the outcome of those decisions.  There is nothing inherently wrong with passivity.  There are just a lot of responsibilities for the partner of passivity.

    When I agree to be the partner of someone who is dominant, then I must also agree to trust the decision making process of the partner.  One of the features of a dominant personality is that the majority of decisions WILL be made by the dominant one.  Does the dominant one get all of the responsibility and ultimately the BLAME?

    Does dominant / passive have to match up?  Do situations alter our willingness to be dominant or passive? Did my decision screw things up unalterably?  Did your decision screw things up unalterably?

    How do you balance all of that with partnership and negotiation?  Or rather how do you HAVE partnership and negotiation and your need for passivity / dominance?

    And finally, the big question: what pushes us over the edge into sickness?  Sickness defined as interacting in a way that when observed objectively will bring a groan even to the hardiest souls.  That kind of sickness…what takes us over the edge into it?

    All that I am able to conclude is that we must watch every single little decision that we make in a relationship.  That if indeed I am the dominant one, that I do not accept all of the responsibility and blame for everything and that if I am the passive one, that I do not pass all of my willingness over to another.  Each activity and each decision deserves it’s own process and is not to be relegated to “okay you decide”, or “no I am the boss”.

    The other thing, and the concept I have believed for decades: is that relationships are this complicated spiderweb of possibilities for travel and yet are spun from the same old pattern.

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