Tiny Buddha

Category: love & relationships

  • How to Be Whole on Your Own and How This Strengthens Your Relationships

    How to Be Whole on Your Own and How This Strengthens Your Relationships

    “Only through our connectedness to others can we really know and enhance the self. And only through working on the self can we begin to enhance our connectedness to others.” ~Harriet Lerner

    Three decades ago, I married the man with whom I knew I would spend the rest of my life. We each had a rough childhood and had learned a lot about surviving, defending, and protecting ourselves. However, we did not know much about how to maintain a successful relationship.

    We took numerous classes on communication, learned to fight fair, and filled our goodwill bank accounts with lots of positive actions. However, despite our best efforts, something was still missing.

    There were times that the relationship felt smothering, and new types of problems kept arising. I got sick of saying “we” all of the time instead of “I.” Once when I was sick and slept in a different room, I was equally fascinated and worried by how much I enjoyed being by myself.

    Yes, we had learned to reconnect, to repair our troubles, and to deepen our intimacy. However, we had not yet figured out the crucial step necessary for keeping your relationship healthy.

    When it comes to love, we have two essential tasks. One, as most of us know, is to learn the skills and practices that allow relationships to thrive. The other lesson is less familiar to most people, but it is even more important. We must also learn how to love ourselves.

    By self-love, I do not refer to the type of vanity that is fed by money, power, influence, a gym-toned body, and the admiration of others. What I mean is the kind of love that leads to self-care, not only of our physical health but also of our minds and hearts.

    It’s the kind of love that creates for ourselves the time and space to develop and to use our talents. It’s the kind of love that frees us to discover and to foster our true purpose in life.

    To become truly wholehearted in our loving, we have to look at when we have acted in a “half-hearted” manner and when have we been “closed-hearted.” Also, we have to examine when it is that we have responded in a “hard-hearted” way.

    Our biggest challenge is to achieve the “whole” in wholehearted. In order to love anyone in a wholehearted way, we need to make ourselves whole first. We must integrate the two forces—the “me” and the “we.”

    Let me be clear about the three things that are not wholeness:

    • A constant state of happiness
    • An ongoing state of acceptance, love, and balance
    • A perpetual feeling of well-being

    Wholeness truly means accepting “the whole enchilada.” The hard, the sad, the mad, the scared, and the glad are all parts of you. The gratitude and the resentment together make you whole.

    Your acceptance of all the pieces of yourself makes you whole. Here are five practices that can each help us find our wholeness.

    1. Spend quality time with yourself.

    I once heard someone say that spending time with yourself is the greatest practice you can do, and I didn’t understand at the time what the speaker meant.

    While alone, I always felt like I was “by myself.” I mistook being alone for loneliness. It took me years to discover the pleasure of walking in nature, exploring an art museum, or hanging out at a farmer’s market loving my own company as much as with another person.

    2. Each day, check to make sure your self-esteem is balanced by your self-criticism.

    People sometimes mistake self-love for self-indulgence. Challenging myself when I am not living up to my own standards is important, but it must be done with compassion. Learning to love yourself despite your imperfections allows you to accept other people’s imperfections.

    3. Find a practice that centers you.

    Sitting in a lotus position and concentrating on breathing allows some people to find focus; there are also other practices like Zen meditation, walking meditation, Vipanassa meditation, and many more.

    In addition, there are methods of centering that are just as powerful for self-reflection; dance, art, writing, and prayer are just a few examples. What they all have in common is that we can use them to check in.

    4. Take an inventory of where you are right now. Explore it in your mind.

    Body: Am I satisfied with the ways I nourish my body? How can I make even better choices? Examine your nutrition, exercise for strength, flexibility, endurance, and cardiac wellness as well as all of the other kinds of self-care you can practice.

    Mind: Am I feeling fed, challenged, expanded, and interested? Am I growing?

    Spirit: Am I satisfied with the definition I have for spirit? How can I get more in touch my spirit? Is there a place within me where I can find peacefulness, wisdom, and guidance?

    Emotional: How am I coping with my current challenges? Is there a flow of different feelings, or do I find myself stuck on one emotion? Do I feel balanced?

    Social: How am I connected with the people in my life (family, friends, partner, coworkers)? What’s working, and where do I want to make changes?

    5. Develop a daily gratitude practice and begin by showing yourself appreciation.

    Ask yourself about the victories you have had during the week. Acknowledge when you did something that was brave. Thank yourself for taking the time to feel gratitude.

    As you explore these five techniques, you might discover others. You will find you already have wholeness inside; you just have to find the keys to open the door.

    When we feel good about ourselves, we’re more likely to feel generous toward others; it’s a symbiotic relationship. We feel grounded and centered enough to take risks and to reach out to others. We feel safe by acknowledging our shortcomings and forgiving ourselves, so we are able to open up to our partners wholeheartedly.

  • The Most Powerful Way to Help Someone Through Emotional Pain

    The Most Powerful Way to Help Someone Through Emotional Pain

    “When you can’t look on the bright side, I will sit with you in the dark.” ~Unknown

    I walked in for my monthly massage and immediately sensed something was off.

    A layer of desolation hung in the air like an invisible mist, ominous and untouchable, yet so thick I felt as though I could reach out and grab a handful in my fist, like wet cement, oozing out between my fingers.

    I’d been seeing the same masseuse once a month for three years, repeating the same routine each time. I wait in the hallway just outside her rented studio, a large walk-in closet size room in a building filled with hundreds of similar rooms, each rented to private individuals running their small passion businesses. Across from her, a wax studio. Down the hall, a hair salon.

    The building houses the manifested dreams of men and women who finally had enough of the daily nine-to-five grind, fired their bosses, and defiantly forged their way into their own businesses, renting space big enough for their hopes yet small enough for their start-up pockets.

    The appointment started unlike any other. When her door’s closed, it means she’s with another client, so I sit in the hallway, in one of the two wobbly wooden chairs the building provides for each tenant, and wait.

    When the door opens and the previous client leaves, we greet with hugs and smiles, expressing mutual joy in seeing each other again. As she closes the door, I take off my clothes and lie on the table face down, exchanging small talk about any happenings since we last saw one another.

    Except this time, on this fateful day, the door opened and I was greeted by an overwhelming sense of sorrow spilling out of the room with a vengeance, as if it had been trapped for decades.

    Standing in place of my masseuse friend was a lifeless, hollow shell of a person with empty zombie eyes. I hardly recognized her.

    Jen (not her real name) was clearly not her usual self.

    I’ve seen her in several bad moods throughout the years but this was beyond moods, and bad was too kind a word.

    Like me, Jen’s an introverted, sensitive soul, and neither of us have tolerance for inauthenticity or meaningless chit chat. We had long established that she didn’t have to be “on” around me, that she was allowed to take off her professional mask and I my client mask and we could simply be ourselves with each other, neither of us having to endure the torture of polite pleasantries if we didn’t feel like it.

    One of my pet peeves is society’s constant pressure and expectation to put on a happy face and pretend everything’s okay while inside things are desperately broken.

    So I said “hi” and walked in, neither expecting a return “hi” nor receiving one. She closed the door behind me and tears suddenly welled in my eyes as I undressed, as if sorrow no longer had the means to escape through the open door and found another way out by hitchhiking my tears.

    I wanted to respect the present moment, even though I didn’t understand it, so I stayed silent and lay on the table, face down, as I’d always done.

    Ten minutes in, between deep long strokes on my back, I heard a soft, almost inaudible, “I lost the girls.”

    Jen had been pregnant with twin girls. I remember the day she told me. She could barely wait for me to get through the door before blurting out, “I’m pregnant!” She and her husband had been trying to get pregnant for a while and finally, she was not only pregnant, she was pregnant with twins!

    And now, she wasn’t anymore.

    I sunk into the massage table as the enormity of what she said dropped into me. And then, I started to get up and tell her that she didn’t have to massage me. We could talk if she wanted, or she could take the extra hour to herself, I’d still pay her. She gently nudged my shoulder back down and said she needed to work; it kept her mind from self-destructing.

    She told me that her soul had been emptied along with her womb, and there was nothing left, let alone tears, inside her.

    I had enough tears for both of us so I told her I’d cry, for her, her girls, and her loss. For the next forty-five minutes, as she released my knots, I released tears, wails, and guttural sobs. It came and went in waves and I became acutely aware of the rhythm of her breathing as it converged with mine and became one.

    Between waves, there were moments of talking.

    Like with me, she had met many of her clients with the exciting news that she was pregnant, and like with me, she also had to tell them she was no longer pregnant. Client after client, spread out over weeks, she had to repeat the same story over and over until every client who knew had been caught up.

    It was a devastating loss for her, and one she had to retell to each client, all hearing it for the first time, all with similar questions and the same sympathetic side tilting heads in response.

    She said her days have been filled with well-intentioned but stale advice like “everything happens for a reason,” and “they’re in a better place now,” and “you’ll get pregnant again.”

    She told me each time she heard these statements, it felt like another jab in her weary stomach. She didn’t care about getting pregnant again, better places, or higher reasons. When a mother’s unborn babies have been ripped away from her, no reason could ever make it right.

    She wasn’t in the headspace to feel better or think of a brighter future, she simply wanted to be acknowledged for the pain she was going through now, but no one had remained with her in the pain. They had all tried to make her feel better, which only made her feel worse.

    In our own discomfort of feeling painful emotions, we try to help others not feel theirs. It’s difficult for us to see someone we love suffering, and naturally, our first impulse is to try to make it go away, whether it’s through reason, logic, distraction, faith or any other means.

    We feel helpless, so we desperately reach for what we know, what we’ve been taught, and what others have done to us in our own moments of suffering. We offer trite words that deep down we know won’t help but we hold onto the hope that they will anyway because we don’t know what else to say or do.

    The more powerful choice is to simply be with someone, accepting and embracing the painful moment as is, without trying to fix or make it better. It goes against our natural urge to want to help, but often, this present moment acceptance of the deep emotions flowing through a person is exactly what they need to help them move through it, in their own time.

    As powerful as it is to shine a light for someone who’s ready to emerge, it is equally powerful to sit with them in the darkness until they’re ready.  

    After the session, Jen told me she felt relief for the first time since it happened, as if a weight had been lifted from her. She hadn’t realized it, but with each client, friend, and loved one who tried to make her feel better, she felt a mounting sense of pressure to feel better, as if there was something even more wrong with her for not being able to.

    She hadn’t been conscious of the constant pressure until it was gone, in our session, when she was finally allowed to feel exactly as she’d been feeling and was fully accepted in her pain.

    Stepping out into the hallway and turning back for a long melting hug, I sensed the profound shift in her energy, vastly different from when I had walked in an hour ago. She was still wounded but there was an element of acceptance in her pain, a faint glow of light within the darkness.

    This sacred, healing light only comes as a result of fully embracing the darkness. It can’t be forced, manipulated, or pushed into existence.

    This is the true power of accepting our own deep pain and sitting with someone in the dark as they feel theirs.

  • What to Do When You Want to Feel Closer to Your Partner

    What to Do When You Want to Feel Closer to Your Partner

    “By letting our deep longing for love and connectedness be exposed…[we are] opening up the channel through which love can enter.” ~John Welwood

    When we feel disconnected from our romantic partner what we often want most is to genuinely feel their love again, to feel connected. And yet, it can be so difficult to simply share that longing.

    So instead of explaining or asking for what we want in a loving way, we complain about what is wrong, about how our partner isn’t showing up for us. Or we simply withdraw.

    This is especially true for sensitive souls like me, who are a bit hard up on assertiveness.

    I was the girl once painfully called a “sheep” by the boy I had a crush on because I would follow my friends into social situations where they talked and laughed with the cute boys, but I could only sit smiling and mute at their side. There was just so much at risk in speaking, and my thoughts came slower when I was feeling nervous, which was often.

    Somewhere along the line, I ended up resorting unconsciously to using the tactic of complaining in an attempt to get the affection I wanted. No wonder my first marriage fizzled!

    About two years into my current relationship, which had been going wonderfully, I started to notice that I was generating negative interactions more and more frequently.

    My voice would get a little whiny when I wanted to do something with him. Or I would accuse him of not paying enough attention to me, or of spending too much time working. Sometimes tears would be the only outward sign that I was feeling disconnected.

    This tactic of trying to get what we want through accusation or complaint is very normal for many of us. Because if we straight out say what we long for we are exposing our heart. We are showing our vulnerability. And that can be very uncomfortable.

    This is doubly true for those of us like me who tend to be very sensitive and driven by feeling. We often feel shame about what is seen as abnormal emotionality. We prefer to appear as the culture expects us to be: strong and steady, certainly not needy!

    But because of our conscientious and caring nature, we tend to value and cherish deep connection above much else. This makes revealing our tender vulnerable heart in intimate relationship especially unnerving, as it seems so much is at stake.

    We prefer to stay safely guarded behind our complaint. It is easier to focus on what our partner isn’t giving us. If we never share what we want outright, they could never reject us. Right?

    Wrong. What we often get in response is distance. Which feels to many of us remarkably like rejection.

    Ironically, it is the very act of showing our heart in this naked way that has the power to create that deep intimacy we long for. Scary as it may be.

    I will put simply what years of reading relationship books never made clear for me, but trial and error (lots of it!) have:

    If your subtle hints or outright complaints aren’t working, you need to ask for what you want. With your voice. When you frame your request positively, with no hint of complaint or disrespect, it will blow your mind how effective it is!

    Here are some easy ways to make sharing your desire to connect a positive experience for both you and your partner:

    1. Discover what you desire.

    When you are tempted to accuse, complain, or withdraw in a sense of anticipated rejection, take it as a sign to discover what you actually desire.

    This might require some deep listening—to yourself! Luckily that is a skill that sensitive people are innately good at—we are naturally attuned to what our hearts are asking of us. So use that to your advantage. Ask yourself, “What do l really want? How do I long to connect?”

    There are so many ways to feel a sense of loving connection with our partner. We may desire different types of intimacy at different moments, so the answer may be different every time. And it will be unique to you. Not everyone feels most connected when snuggling, like I do.

    Some of us feel most close when we simply share time together engaging in activity like cooking a meal, dining out, playing a card game, hiking a mountain, etc. For some of us, receiving a gift or some words of appreciating is powerfully connecting. Having long meaningful conversations is another way I feel very close to my partner.

    So take the time to discover your most pure longing for that moment. Perhaps you actually just want time to connect with yourself. But if it is a longing for intimacy with your partner, prepare to present it.

    2. Do not deny or condemn your longing to connect.

    Remind yourself that this longing is simply human. Trust that your desire to feel loved and loving is benevolent. In fact, it is essential for our mental, emotional, and physical health to have affectionate touch and loving attention.

    Did you know that having a loving and supportive long-term relationship predicts longevity more than not being a smoker or not being obese? It’s also the single biggest predictor of overall life happiness. This is especially so for those of us with the tendency toward sensitivity.

    Reassuring yourself of all this helps tremendously when you are amping up your courage.

    3. Make it easier to ask.

    If there is fear, notice it is simple energy in the form of sensations in the body. Melt it with breath by taking a few deep belly breaths. Sense your hands or feet, the softness of your lips. Wiggle them all a little. This will help ease fear’s grip. Then ask for what you want using a positive, confident as possible, non-demanding tone.

    Keep in mind that most partners feel wonderful when they can please their loved ones, especially when they are being respected. So asking in the following ways can be a gift to him, as well as yourself.

    Eliminating the word “you” and simply stating what you want often inspires in your partner a desire to rise up and please you. For example, “I would love to be held right now”.

    Yet, sometimes it can be too frightening to say those words, so make it easier for yourself and say, “I miss you. Any chance you are up for cozying up together on the couch?” Or, “I would love it if you would hold me.”

    You can use the same words if you desire to connect in other less physical ways. For example, “I miss you. Any chance you are up for eating a meal alone together by candlelight after the kids go to bed?” Or, “ I would love to go for a hike together tomorrow.”

    Last time I asked my partner in such a way he responded, “I totally want to when you say it like that.”

    Find your own most natural way to express your request, with no trace of complaint.

    Risk your partner seeing your longing. More likely than not they will find it sexy and captivating. They will be inspired to show up more fully, and effortlessly return the tenderness, and you will be deeply awash in connected intimacy.

    4. Understand and honor the Pendulum Principle.

    Know that it is totally normal for partners to have different needs for closeness and space in the relationship. Sometimes the timing is off and your bid for closeness may line up with your partner’s need for space.

    I call it the Pendulum Principle. Like a pendulum, healthy people (and especially highly sensitive people) swing back and forth between needing independence and togetherness. Go far in the direction of independence and it is time to swing back toward togetherness. This happens for all of us.

    For example, there have been times I have asked for connection and my man has been literally falling asleep as I spoke. As tempting as it is to take it personally if they cannot or do not want to connect at that particular moment, please refrain. Speaking from experience, that will only create resentment and distance.

    Remind yourself that your sweetie is simply tired, has something else weighing on their mind, or needs some space to do their own thing for a bit. Trust that your brave vulnerability is still having a beautiful affect and your loving request was heard and appreciated. When the time is right for your partner, they will be much more excited to honor it than when it came in the form of a complaint.

    5. Prep your partner for the next time the complaint monster shows up. 

    As the saying goes, old habits die hard. It is likely you will need to keep practicing this new, more positively assertive way of getting your intimacy needs met before it becomes habit.

    It can help to have a conversation about how this can be hard for you and how deeply you want to be able to voice your need for intimacy in a positive way. Tell them you’d love their support as you navigate the challenge of changing your habit. Ask them to help you out if they ever notice you closing down or beginning to complain about them not showing up for you.

    Your partner will likely be more than happy to help you grow in this way—but you’ve got to ask!

    Ever since I learned how to reveal my deep wish to feel loved in the form of a request, my partner and I have been experiencing richer intimacy that ever. I am letting him see my real exposed self. My vulnerability is magnetic. It allows him to actually feel connected with me, the true tender me, and makes honoring my request a luscious delight.

    Once he said, “It is so great when you ask because sometimes I just get caught up in other things and forget how important it is for me to connect like that. Thank you for reminding me of what really matters.”

  • The 10 Most Important Things We Can Do for the People We Love

    The 10 Most Important Things We Can Do for the People We Love

    People. Life is all about people.

    We don’t have to have a ton of relationships, but we all need people in our lives who get us. Who’ve seen our freak flag countless times and love when it comes out.

    People who tag us on memes that capture our spirit, or Tasty videos they know we’d drool over. People who text us with random pictures of bumper stickers or book covers or bath mats or beard accessories with a note that reads “Saw this and thought of you.”

    We all need these kind of close connections to feel a sense of security and belonging in the world.

    We need people who think of us, look out for us, accept us, bring out the best in us, and challenge us to be the best us we can possibly be. And we need to be that person for them.

    It could be the family you were born into, the one that you chose, or the one that chose you after plowing down the big wall you erected to keep yourself safe.

    Whoever makes up your tribe, and regardless of its size, these are the kinds of relationships that make everything else seem manageable.

    Whether you’re having a hard day or a hard month or a hard year, a call or a hug from the right person can remind you that life really is worth living. And when things are going well, it’s all the more enjoyable for having people you love to share it with.

    Most of us would agree that our relationships are the most important thing. That a layoff or lost opportunity can be tolerated so long as the people we love are healthy and safe.

    And yet it’s all too easy to lose sight of the big picture when we’re knee-deep in the struggles of our daily lives. It’s easy to deprioritize the little things that keep relationships strong when we’re worried about our debt and our deadlines.

    It’s human nature—our negativity bias: we’re more sensitive to what’s going wrong than what’s going right. It’s how we’re wired, a means to keep ourselves safe.

    But life is about more than just being safe. Or at least I want it to be. I want to focus more on what I love than what I fear. I want to be proactive, not just reactive. I want to wake up every day and be the good that happens to someone else instead of just playing defense to prevent bad from happening to me.

    So this year, instead of focusing mostly on everything I want to gain or achieve, I plan to live each day with the following intentions in mind.

    I intend to…

    1. Be present.

    I will put down my phone and focus fully on the person in front of me. My texts and emails will be there later. The person in front of me won’t.

    2. Listen deeply.

    Instead of plotting what I’m going to say next, or collecting mental buckets of sage advice I can’t wait to dole out, I will listen completely, with the primary goals of understanding and being there.

    3. Speak truthfully.

    Even when it feels awkward and uncomfortable, I will share what’s true for me. I won’t exclude the messy parts, no matter how tempting it may be to try to appear perfect. The jig is up—I’m not. Not even close! And neither are you. Let’s be beautiful messes together.

    4. Accept fully.

    I will see your quirks and edges and shortcomings and peccadillos and will accept them all as crucial parts of the complete package that is you.

    5. Interpret compassionately.

    Instead of assuming the worst, I will give you the benefit of the doubt, as I would want to receive it. I’ll assume you didn’t mean to be rude or to hurt my feelings. That it came out wrong, or you were triggered and reacting from a place of hurt, or you were simply having a bad day. And then I’ll stop assuming and ask to verify, “Is everything okay?”

    6. Forgive often.

    I will take every perceived slight or offense and put it through my mental shredder before I go to sleep each night. And if I can’t let it go, perhaps because it’s too big to simply discard, I’ll tell you how I feel and what I need so we can work through it together.

    7. Appreciate vocally.

    I will let you know that I admire how you always stick up for the little guy and love how you make everyone laugh. I will compliment you on your passions, your parenting, and how you exude peace, because you’re awesome and you should know it.

    8. Give freely.

    I will give my love, support, understanding, and well wishes; I’ll give things new and old that I think will be helpful. If there’s something you need that I no longer do, I’ll send it with a note that reads, “I thought you could put this to good use. And if not, sorry for sending you clutter!”

    9. Remain unbiased.

    I will put aside everything I think I know about you based on who you appear to be, and will be open-minded when you tell me or show me what you believe and what you stand for.

    10. Love anyway.

    Even if you’re stubborn or moody or judgmental, I will love you anyway. And when I’m stubborn, moody, and judgmental I’ll try to do the same for myself. I’ll try to rise above petty thoughts and sweeping generalizations and keep sight of who you and I really are: good people who are doing our best to navigate a sometimes-painful world.

    Because we all stress and strain and struggle sometimes. We all get fed up, ticked off, and let down, and at times we all lash out.

    In these moments when we feel lost and down on ourselves, it helps to see ourselves through the eyes of someone who believes in us. And it helps to remember we’re not alone, and that someone else really cares.

    Someone who’ll stand by us at our worst and inspire us to be our best.

    Someone who’ll sit on a roof with us and and talk about everything big or nothing important for a while. Someone who might not always know which one we need, but who’s willing to ask and find out.

    This is the kind of friend I want to have, and the kind of friend I want to be. Because life is all about people. And all people need a little love.

  • Why I No Longer Depend on Anyone Else for Happiness, Fun, or Excitement

    Why I No Longer Depend on Anyone Else for Happiness, Fun, or Excitement

    “Never put the key to your happiness in someone else’s pocket.” ~Unknown

    It was Saturday night. I sat, at my breakfast bar in my apartment, alone and in semi-darkness. Only one small lamp was turned on in the corner.

    I was fuming, confused, and most of all, sad. I sprang off the breakfast barstool and began to pace. There were so many emotions circling around in me I had to keep moving in an effort to release them.

    I spun around and looked at the clock above my kitchen—it was almost 7pm! He had said he was going to be there by 6pm.

    Why was he not there? Did he not know I was depending on him? Didn’t he know I had planned my schedule to be there in time to hang out?

    I didn’t have any other plans and felt stuck waiting in limbo. Where was he? I felt the emotions rising toward my throat as they bubbled up and threatened to explode.

    I picked up my phone and called my boyfriend, trembling with frustration as the phone rang. He picked up on the third ring.

    I had been waiting to hang out with him after work all day. I had imagined us meeting on time at 6pm and having a great evening together.

    In my head, I had imagined us going out for a bite to eat and then maybe catching a new movie at the theatre or going to a comedy club. My day had been uneventful and boring, and I was looking forward to having an exciting evening.

    I had planned and expected and prepared perfectly, and he was ruining it again! Like so many nights in the past, his job had kept him late and he was not there for me when I needed him.

    “Where are you?” I barked in his ear as soon as he picked up the phone. “I’ve been waiting. I’m here at my apartment waiting to hang out with you, and you’re not here. I’ve been looking forward to hanging out all day!”

    He seemed taken aback by my anger, and he fumbled for an answer to soothe me. He explained that work had kept him late and he was on his way back. He apologized for not updating me on his arrival time and assured me that he would be there soon. I spat out an “Okay, whatever,” and hung up angrily.

    And there it was—the usual start to our weekends together. I slumped down in a kitchen chair realizing I had done it again. What was wrong with me?

    My boyfriend worked a lot. Almost ten-hour days when you added it all up. And he worked Saturdays too. Still, I always seemed to depend on him to bring some excitement and joy to my monotonous days.

    Every Saturday would start the same: I would feel like I had been bored and waiting all week to have time together and do something fun, and he would usually arrive late or tired after work and I’d be crushed and irritated. I would then fire off some hurtful words that would give a sour taste to our weekends together right from the start.

    It was a vicious cycle. And I never understood why I was so dependent on my boyfriend and why I felt so abandoned and hurt if we were not able to hang out exactly when or how I wanted.

    It wouldn’t be until several weeks later that the cure to this vicious cycle came to me and the person to blame became clear.

    One Saturday night my boyfriend decided to go out with one of his close guy friends instead of hanging out with me. Immediately the abandonment and lonely bells started to sound off noisily in my head. I felt the anger rising in me, and I spent the next day simultaneously fuming and hurt.

    But the following day when my boyfriend and I sat down to talk about it, I started to realize something: While he could make an effort to text or call me if he was going to be late in the future, the real issue was not with my boyfriend. The problem was me.

    It took a few days of serious introspection, but I finally realized that I depended on my boyfriend for my happiness. I expected him to always be there emotionally and physically, to handle any issue I was going through.

    I unknowingly expected him to tackle any kind of emotional turmoil in my head, and to be there to take me out and show me a good time whenever was convenient for me, regardless of his schedule.

    In fact, if he didn’t do these things perfectly and at my convenience, I felt hurt and abandoned and lashed out. I saw it as a sign that he did not love me and did not care about our relationship.

    It was hard to admit, but having a boyfriend had allowed me to use another person as a crutch. I expected him to be perfect and give me all the things I was not providing for myself—emotional release, a social life, and validation.

    It became clear to me that I had put an unfair burden on him. I knew our relationship would not survive if I did not make a change.

    Here are the top three things I realized during that time (insights that can apply in romantic or platonic relationships):

    1. Expecting someone else to make me happy is objectifying them.

    In a sense, my boyfriend was a tool for my happiness. I had placed an enormous amount of pressure on him to perfectly handle all my difficulties and supply all the things that were missing in my life.

    But only I have the right toolbox that can “fix” what isn’t working. My boyfriend is not a tool. He is a whole person with his own emotions, struggles, goals, hopes, and dreams. Reducing him to a tool for my happiness is objectification, and it limits the growth and deepening of our relationship.

    It is unfair to expect someone to help you become a whole person. More importantly, we already have everything we need within us to live our best life; we do not have to look outside ourselves or to anyone else.

    This relationship has taught me many lessons, but perhaps the biggest one is that I cannot wait around for anyone else to bring happiness and excitement to my life. I have to go out there and create it! I also cannot expect one person alone to take my loneliness away.

    2. I alone am responsible for my happiness and excitement in life.

    Because I work from home and lack coworkers and social interaction, I am susceptible to feeling isolated. There were so many days when I would count on my boyfriend to come pick me up, take me out, or invite me to a fun event. If this did not happen, I would feel unhappy and angry. But really, I should never depend on someone else to bring me excitement, joy, or happiness. That is my responsibility!

    I eventually realized that instead of depending on my boyfriend to fill a void in my life, I had to start taking accountability and doing it for myself.

    From then onward, I started reconnecting with old friends and going out more. I said yes to different activities and invitations. Creative events like painting, spoken word, and concerts make me happy, so I now make a point to do these things with or without my boyfriend.

    Having my own friends outside of my romantic relationship—my own interests, my own invitations, and my own plans—keeps me feeling whole. It also reminds me that I have to take charge of my day, my emotions, and my social life.

    I started getting out of my comfort zone and outside of the overly introverted bubble that kept me so lonely all the time. Now that I have reconnected with and strengthened my relationship with my own circle of friends, I no longer put pressure on my boyfriend.

    I now know that even if he has to cancel plans or he chooses to hang with another friend, it does not make or break my day. I have my own support group and circle of friends to hang out with, and I can bring excitement to my own life.

    3. You can reclaim your power.

    If you’re like me, you are probably in the habit of placing your power in others’ hands. You may think thoughts along the lines of:

    If he doesn’t text me today, I’m going to be crushed

    If she doesn’t go to this event with me tonight, I’m going to be so disappointed and I’m just not going to go at all.

    If they don’t invite me to the party on Friday, my night will be ruined!

    I used to say these kinds of things often, and still have to fight against this kind of thinking. In all of these statements, I am letting someone else’s actions control my own mood and happiness. I am letting the actions of others affect what I choose to do.

    Oftentimes, if my boyfriend and I went the day without talking, I would let it ruin my entire day. I didn’t even try to find things that I liked to do to spice up my day, or hang out with friends, or do something exciting. I just wallowed in my pity and irritation. I allowed his actions to control me. I gave my power to him.

    I would also depend on my boyfriend to go to events with me. If he was not able to make it because of his job or an emergency, I wouldn’t go at all (even if I had been looking forward to it). Then, because I felt like I had missed out, I would be mad and disappointed with him.

    That is releasing my power into his hands. Now, even though I can be quiet and sometimes nervous about new social situations, I will make a point to still go to an event even if my friends or boyfriend cannot make it. As my mother used to say, “Don’t let one monkey stop your show.”

    Do you put your power in other people’s hands? Will someone canceling plans or doing something unexpected wreck your day, or will you empower yourself to create your own happiness?

    Even if someone changes plans or cannot go to a fun event with you, if it will bring you happiness, go anyway! Do not allow the actions of others to control your actions or emotions. Reclaim your power.

    —

    I am working to create a tighter circle of friends, and I understand clearly that I cannot depend solely on my boyfriend (or any other person for that matter) for my happiness and social life. Our relationship will not survive if I do not learn to take responsibility for my happiness and stop waiting around for one person.

    This had been a hard lesson for me, but it is one that I chose to act on every week, and I will continue to work on it because the journey to empowerment and happiness is a lifelong one.

  • Growing from Ghosting: 5 Things To Consider While Dealing with Silence

    Growing from Ghosting: 5 Things To Consider While Dealing with Silence

    “The important thing to remember is that when someone ghosts you, it says nothing about you or your worthiness for love and everything about the person doing the ghosting. It shows he/she doesn’t have the courage to deal with the discomfort of their emotions or yours, and they either don’t understand the impact of their behavior or worse, don’t care.” ~Jennice Vilhauer

    Let’s get this out of the way first: Ghosting is crappy etiquette. There’s no real, concrete excuse for it, except perhaps pure, unadulterated laziness with a touch of cruelty.

    We take for granted how much technology has changed the way we interact with people. We are humans first, but it seems we may be conflict-avoiding robots second. Efficiency and avoidance reign supreme in this futuristic dating world of 2017, and because of how easy it is to disregard anything and everything, common courtesy has now become painfully underutilized.

    To be frank: it is exceptionally easy to ghost someone who has no connection to your life previous to the one encounter. If you aren’t feeling it with this new person, and you don’t want to use the mental leaps it takes to articulate a rejection to a practical stranger, then more likely than not you won’t communicate at all.

    Access to the ignore button has never been easier, and pressing “unmatch” on Tinder equates deleting the person from your headspace and your own personal universe. Here are five things to consider in the land of ghosts.

    1. What do you really want from the person who’s ghosting you?

    In the land where easy hookups are abundant, polyamory is normal, and ethical non-monogamy sounds like something you’d see at a farmers market, here we all are, trying to figure this new world of dating out. With each generation of dating (and dating apps), we are met with new terminology, new hats to try on for ourselves, and we’re re-focusing our energies on what we are really looking for.

    I am a monogamous person. That doesn’t mean that in my fifty-plus first dates, I haven’t been able to recognize some of my own awful behavior (long, dramatic paragraphs of anxiety-ridden texts to a new potential date, anyone?), so I’ve had to reexamine myself a multitude of times, take a major chill pill, and reorganize my needs and desires.

    That being said, asking myself, “What am I really looking for?” after I get painfully ghosted is seemingly the best question to ask.

    Why exactly was this painful (beyond it being inhuman and previously nonexistent before modern day dating)? Did I just want acknowledgement of my humanity? Closure so I can focus on the next person? Did I even find this person particularly interesting? What other things are going on in my life that are causing me to react so strongly?

    Yes, monogamy is important to me, but getting overly upset about a person who feels no attachment toward me is a new kind of character building experience. Ghosting is a reminder that life is unfair and often severe. Technology has made communicating with each other easier to access, and yet has created a strange isolating landscape in which we are all a part of.

    This feeling of desertion still applies to people who have been ghosted after several dates, or friendships that have suddenly and painfully disappeared; it just becomes more painful and potent.

    2. The sea of excuses don’t feel any better than being ghosted.

    I got on my old OKCupid account a couple years after being off. In a cruel twist of fate, I saw a sea of all of the men that I dated previously. We were all in this together, apparently, like some sort of sad loner club no one signed up for.

    Here we were, the men that ghosted me and the men that like to me too much, and I didn’t feel the same. Somehow, after years we were all still here, and all using the same tired profile pictures.

    After a few days, a man messaged me a lackluster apology that he ghosted me as he was going through “some stuff” at the time. And with that, he walked back into the internet, never responding my follow-up questions. Gee, thanks, I’m glad I could be a vessel in which you exonerated yourself from your strange guilt.

    Does it feel better that he weakly apologized and gave a vague excuse for his behavior three years later? Not particularly. So, expecting any explanation at a later time isn’t helpful in this ghosting journey that we are all on.

    More common than ghosting, here are some boring/obvious excuses I have heard instead of being ghosted, and they feel about the same as the disappearing act itself. In no particular order:

    “Sorry, I’m not really looking for anything serious right now.” (They say, fully aware that I was a monogamous person looking for something serious before meeting.)

    “You lied on your profile. You said you were 5’8”, but you’re taller.” (He says, as he lied about his own height, weight, blah, blah, blah. For the record, I’ve been 5’8” since I was twelve, unless I had a spontaneous growth spurt at thirty.)

    “I didn’t sense a connection.” (He says, as he talked at me the entire time, completely unaware that I actually possessed a personality that he didn’t want to take part in.)

    “You’re too good for me.” (Yes, probably so.)

    People are either desperate or not desperate enough. This ebb and flow of dating is equal parts predictable and surprising. Protect your heart, date whoever you want, but know that you will eventually get your feelings hurt. Whether it’s half-baked excuses, or radio silence forever. You know the saying though: better to buy a ticket to the lottery than never to have played, right? RIGHT?

    3. Know that you may ghost someone yourself.

    Even I, Queen of All Emotions, have accidentally ghosted someone before.

    Have you ever met someone so unremarkable you just simply forgot about them? You sat there during your date shrugging your shoulders, stirring your iced tea, wondering if this person had a pulse.

    He stared at me blankly, asked me what I did, and I felt as if I was in a weird, monotone interview for a job that I didn’t remember applying for. As careful as I am, I accidentally ghosted someone and they were sad about it. I couldn’t even bring myself to apologize in fear I would open up the strange waves of communication with this person again.

    It happens. I get it. It’s a two-way street and I’m human enough to realize my shortcomings. I’m sorry, Kevin. Or was it Brian? James? Steven?

    4. You cannot educate a ghost.

    This may be the most important realization on my journey through ghost country: You simply cannot educate a ghost. There will always be people perpetuating this stereotype of non-consideration (maybe even you!).

    These people are not in your control. Sending them a “wake up call” does not work. It’s not your job to educate them.

    This idea has been the hardest thing for me to accept. I have sent paragraphs of texts to men who have ghosted me. This only solidifies the silence. Obviously the person is not texting you back if you’re going to badger him on his shortcomings.

    Maybe they’re going through something, you’re not on their mind, they don’t care in the slightest, or their phone was eaten by an alligator. Whatever the case may be, they don’t care enough to contact you, so your novel of setting the balance right in the world will go to blind eyes. It will drive you insane if you allow it. Do not allow it.

    As long as you’re honest with yourself about your needs, somewhat earnest in whatever you’re trying to accomplish datingwise, then you can overcome this. It’s all you can do. Getting ghosted means actively becoming a stronger, wiser person, because the alternative is bitterness and never ending frustration.

    Technology is still the Wild West of communication. We know how to correctly formulate an email to our boss, a job prospect, your great aunt Mabel, but to someone who is virtually meaningless to us, it’s becomes considerably more of a gray area.

    In general, people just don’t know how to socialize properly in a digital format, so we have created a culture where we simply don’t. And because this was a casual encounter, saying something at all could put us in a situation where the other person over-compensates with their hurricane of emotions if the feelings weren’t mutual.

    I get it, you don’t want to deal with a hot mess and I don’t want to deal with your issues either, and thus perpetuates the ghosting cycle of life.

    5. In other words, relax.

    Know that you’re putting in the effort. Know that if things are supposed to work out they will work out. Find a mantra, yoga, meditation technique, eat a giant plate of pancakes, do whatever makes you feel better to get over the first few hurdles of the unavoidable ghosting epidemic.

    No one ever promised us that dating was always going to be enjoyable. The funny anecdotes in romantic comedies make it look like a barrel of laughs, but sometimes it simply isn’t. Accepting this is an unfortunate part of the trade off of putting yourself out there is like learning a tedious aspect of your job. You’re going to hate it at first, but if you still want to date, this is part of the job description.

    In other words, be brave, certainly put yourself out there, but also send only one follow-up text, otherwise you will drive yourself into certain madness.

  • Why No One Wants Unsolicited Advice (and What Actually Helps)

    Why No One Wants Unsolicited Advice (and What Actually Helps)

    “To meet complaint with unrequested council earns for the advisor a fortune of hidden contempt.” ~Greek Proverb

    When people start dumping their complaints and woeful stories on you, how do you respond?

    Do you see it as your golden opportunity to be of help to them?

    Do you make it your mission to put your wealth of knowledge and wisdom to good use by coaching them through their difficulties?

    I mean, isn’t this a great chance to share the extent of your wisdom and understanding, and also be of help to someone in their time of need?

    But the most important question of all is this:

    When you’ve encountered this situation, did they ask you for your assistance before you started advising them?

    When people dumped their complaints on me, there was a time when I took the initiative and voluntarily started counseling them on their problem, even though they never asked me for my guidance.

    I thought I was being helpful.

    But then I made an important breakthrough discovery in maintaining the connections I had with others without accidentally destroying them.

    Let me start at the beginning of my story…

    When someone used to dump their problems on me, I used to think:

    “Oh, they have this problem. I have the answers. I’ll be a good friend or family member and help them solve it, all because I care about them.”

    I remember this one time, a friend of mine was having trouble dating women and he would complain about it to me.

    Guess what I did?

    Did I listen and seek to understand him, where he was coming from, and how he felt about the situation?

    Nope.

    What did I do?

    I started right in on giving him unsolicited advice about how he could get better at dating women.

    I thought I was being helpful.

    But you know what?

    I noticed a very curious thing happening as I did this…

    I observed that his body language and voice tone started showing signs of irritation. I could tell he wasn’t welcoming and responding positively to my advice, even though I knew it was solid, and even though he was verbally agreeing with what I was saying.

    Later, I started to wonder why this was.

    Here he had a problem, I thought. Didn’t he want a solution?

    Surely, he wanted one, right?

    After all, why gripe about something if it’s not going to lead to a constructive outcome that brings about the desired results?

    This investigation led me to question how I reacted when I shared my own problems with people and they responded by giving me unsolicited advice—which, incidentally, only happened for the first time after the incident with my friend and his dating problems.

    Isn’t it funny how we sometimes don’t know that something’s annoying and maybe even condescending until we’ve been on the receiving end of the very same behavior ourselves?

    I find it interesting that we often don’t know that we’re acting in ways that are turn-offs to others until we’ve had someone behave or treat us in the exact same way.

    Isn’t it often only then that we have the epiphany?

    Well, that’s what I learned about giving people unsolicited advice, especially in response to them dumping their problems on me—it’s patronizing and condescending.

    Reacting to people who complain by telling them how they should solve their problems “forcibly” places us in the “superior” role to them. It frames us as the person with the “higher social rank” in the interaction, and lowers the complainer down into an inferior role.

    And who likes to feel inferior to others?

    But what do we think?

    Isn’t it this:

    “Oh, aren’t I being a great friend? I’m helping them out!”

    But is it possible that we’re actually sending them a completely different message from the one we think we are?

    Could it be possible that what they end up hearing is something else?

    And could it also be possible that that message is something offensive and insulting to them?

    Want to know what the recipient of unsolicited advice really hears?

    I’ll warn you…

    It’s not too flattering, and you may be ashamed of yourself to discover the true message behind your actions.

    Between the lines, they hear you saying this to them:

    “I think you’re inadequate and incompetent, and you require my superior knowledge and wisdom to make progress here. Without my help and intervention, you are a helpless victim incapable of dealing with your own problems. You should feel lucky that I’m even putting in my precious time and effort to give you some assistance. Furthermore, I don’t accept you the way you are. I’m making it my mission to change you so that you fit into my ideal of who I think you should be instead of accepting you as you are.”

    Now imagine if someone said that directly to your face.

    How would you feel?

    Probably not very good, right?

    Well, guess what?

    That’s exactly how you’re making people feel when you give them unsolicited advice in response to their complaints.

    So wouldn’t it greatly improve your ability to connect with people and win their esteem if you stopped making them feel this way?

    For what’s more important than earning the love and respect of others?

    Or, would you rather sacrifice their love and respect just so you can have your chance in the spotlight to prop yourself up as a “knowledgeable” and “wise” person?

    And all for what?

    Just to get an ego boost, at someone else’s expense?

    After all, what does it profit us to share our “superior” wisdom and guidance with someone if all it earns us is their contempt?

    And how does that really benefit us and our relationship with that person?

    It doesn’t, does it?

    Now let me ask you this:

    Have you ever asked yourself why people dump their problems on others in the first place?

    What do you think they really want by doing so?

    Do you think they do it because they want a solution to their problem?

    Do you think they do it because they want your help?

    After all, isn’t that what we tell ourselves is the truth of the matter?

    But are those the real reasons?

    After all, if they wanted a solution and some help, wouldn’t they ask us for our feedback, opinions, or advice somewhere in there?

    But do they?

    Well, guess what?

    Almost every time people complain, they’re not doing it because they actually want a solution to their problems. They’re not doing it because they want our help. They’re doing it for another reason altogether.

    And what do they want exactly?

    Simply this:

    To be understood and receive sympathy.

    That’s what they really want.

    And more specifically, what they want is for someone to understand how difficult what they’re going through is for them.

    That’s the response they really want from us.

    Not unsolicited advice.

    Trust me, that’s the last thing they want.

    I mean, are you aware that people secretly hate and resent unsolicited advice, even though they’ll probably never tell us that to our face?

    Instead, they’ll just put on a polite smile while perhaps they secretly fume about it behind their cordial mask.

    I’ve discovered an important lesson in fostering healthy relationships is to stop trying to help people with their problems when they complain about them—unless they specifically ask for it. Instead, I’ve found it much wiser to seek to understand what they’re going through and what they must be feeling.

    Then focus on that.

    What people really want when they complain is to have their feelings not only understood but at the same time validated.

    In short, people simply want affirmation on how much whatever they’re going through sucks and how hard it is.

    If what you want is to connect with people in these types of situations instead of earning their resentment, don’t treat them like they’re a useless person who can’t do anything for themselves with your unrequested guidance.

    Instead, identify the emotion they’re feeling, and then ask them about that.

    Let me give you an example…

    If someone is complaining that a person in their life isn’t giving them enough attention, instead of advising them and giving them tips on how they can get more attention from that person, try to identify what they must be feeling and then ask them about that.

    In this case, you might say:

    “So you’re feeling unloved?”

    Their eyes will probably light up as if you’ve just read their mind, as they exclaim, “Yeah! That’s exactly it!”

    Then you might follow-up with some kind of affirmation and then maybe even tell a very short story that relates to their situation.

    Perhaps you might say:

    “That really sucks, and I think I know what you’re going through. I once had a partner who would only pay me attention when they wanted something from me. I felt like I didn’t really matter to them, like they didn’t really care about me as a person.”

    Why not let people work through their own problems and issues—even if you can see the error of their ways, and even if the solution seems obvious to you.

    Why not respect them and let them figure it out on their own time, on their own terms, and in their own way unless they ask you for help?

    When people dump their complaints and problems on you, if you really care about them, why patronize them with your unsolicited advice?

    Why add fuel to the fire?

    Aren’t they probably already feeling stuck or down enough as it is to have to endure someone’s condescension on top of it?

    So why not try this approach to dealing with others’ complaints?

    I encourage you to test this out the next time you find yourself in a situation where someone is dumping their problems on you.

    Instead of “jumping to their rescue” with your saving grace and advice, seek to discover the emotion they must be feeling.

    Then ask them if that’s how they feel.

    If they confirm your suspicion, affirm how bad that must be, and maybe even share your own short story about the same or similar experience.

    Then I suggest changing the subject at the first opportunity. Maybe even use your story to lead into it—because I wouldn’t advise focusing an entire conversation around how negative something is.

    I believe in nurturing a positive outlook on life, yet at the same time being realistic, honest, and understanding that, yes, life does sometimes suck and it’s wise to accept that rather than living in an illusion where the world is filled with rainbows and lollipops.

    There are, of course, ways of truly helping people with their problems without giving them unsolicited advice, but that’s an article in itself.

    Ultimately, it all comes down to this…

    What would you rather have:

    A strong connection with the people in your life, or the certain knowledge that they harbor hidden feelings of resentment toward you due to your unwanted, condescending advice?

    The choice is yours.

  • 5 Questions To Ask Yourself Before You Start Looking For Love

    5 Questions To Ask Yourself Before You Start Looking For Love

    “Don’t rush into any kind of relationship. Work on yourself. Feel yourself, experience yourself and love yourself. Do this first and you will soon attract that special loving other.” ~Russ Von Hoelscher

    Being in love is awesome. Sharing your life with someone special who gets you, adores you, and loves you for who you are is amazing. Sometimes, though, we need to work on ourselves before we are ready to attract a true love like that.

    Rather than jumping into yet another romantic adventure without thinking, I encourage you to answer these few questions. I know, at the time of my love search, that they would have served me well.

    Instead, I spent ten years dating every jerk under the sun, getting my heart broken on more than a few occasions, and wasting tons of time. I did a lot of growing and learning too, but if you can avoid pain, why not?

    In the end, it was all worth it, but if you want to speed up the process and find the best way to the right person, then I believe these questions can help you.

    Here they are:

    1. Am I ready?

    Readiness is not simply about being ready to give up things like your freedom and independence and devoting yourself to nurturing your relationship and sharing your life with another person. Readiness is also very much about living a fulfilled life right now as a single person. It’s about not needing a partner, but wanting one.

    Readiness is free of desperation. Readiness is about living purposefully and passionately. Being ready means being okay with your life as it is right now. Being ready is not about filling the gap in your life with a romantic partner, but creating a life you love to live. When you are this kind of ready, you attract happy partners and create happy and lasting relationships.

    2. Am I happy?

    You need to be happy before you can find a happy partner and build a happy relationship with him or her.

    It took me years to dissolve the belief that I’d be happy once I met someone and take responsibility for my own happiness. I now know that happiness doesn’t magically show up the moment you meet the love of your life. Happiness has to already be there. Nobody is responsible for your happiness but you. You need to tap into the happiness within.

    How can you do that? To start, shift your perspective and appreciate what you have rather than focusing on what you would have if you were in a relationship. And my number one tool to tap into the happiness within is a regular meditation. This will help you be more present in your life so you can tune into all the many other reasons to be happy.

    The happier you are right now, as a single, the happier a relationship you will be able to create. And this might go without saying, but the happier you are, the more others will be drawn to you.

    3. Are my boundaries healthy?

    It’s nice to imagine that love has no boundaries, and once you have found that amazing person, life with them will be nice and easy. Sorry to burst your bubble, but that is a recipe for a disaster.

    Without strong boundaries, you will lose yourself in any relationship you find yourself in. You will lose yourself in pleasing, accommodating, and compromising to the point where you won’t remember who you are and what you need.

    Healthy boundaries help you build healthy relationships. Healthy boundaries help you maintain a crucial sense of self. Healthy boundaries let others know where they stand with you and what is expected of them. Healthy boundaries give others clarity and make things simple. You need them in dating, in relationships, and definitely in your marriage. You’d better set those boundaries now and stick to them!

    Here are a few examples of boundaries which will help you maintain your sense of self and honour your own needs:

    • Don’t give up things you love doing for your partner
    • Speak your mind and say “no” when it feels like a “no”
    • Regularly do things on your own or just with your own friends
    • Have your own goals and dreams
    • Have your passions and purpose
    • Respect your own values
    • Spend quality time only in your own company

    Sticking to these rules will make you feel more empowered in early stages of dating and relationships. You also get more respect from people because by having boundaries you communicate self-respect to them.

    4. Do I love myself?

    How much love you have for yourself will determine your romantic decisions. If you don’t feel worthy of love, then you will make compromises that could hurt you. If you don’t feel like you are the best thing that can ever happen to a guy, then I reckon you still need to work on self-love.

    Self-love is bold. Self-love is about owning your greatness and uniqueness. Self-love is about claiming your desires. Self-love is about knowing what you deserve and going for it without apologising. It’s only when you love yourself that you won’t sabotage your dating and romantic happiness.

    To go deeper with self-love and recognizing your own worth you can create a list of 100 things you love, admire, appreciate, and respect about yourself. The things which make you feel proud about who you are!

    Also, you can create a little self-love ritual. In the morning, you can say: I love you, so today I choose to… eat healthy food, have some fun, exercise, go to bed early, have a bath, read a book etc. And in the evening, before you fall asleep you can appreciate yourself and say: I love you because… you are an awesome person, you are very helpful, you are fun, you are hot, you dealt with this client at work amazingly well today, you’ve cleaned the whole flat and it looks amazing…etc.

    5. Do I know what I want from a relationship?

    It is not enough to know that you want a relationship. It is not enough to know that you’re done with being single. It is not enough to know that you miss the company of a significant other.

    You need to know what kind of person you want to share your life with. You need to know how you want to feel in your relationship. You need to know how you want to live your life once you are in a relationship. Most of all, you need to know the type of person you want to be in this relationship.

    Take a piece of paper and journal about it. Gain clarity and explore what kind of relationship you want to create, and don’t forget to determine your non-negotiables! Knowing this will help you navigate \dates and avoid painful mistakes with people who can’t give you what you want and need. And for that, you need to know what you want in the first place, right?

    Be honest with yourself while answering these questions, and don’t judge yourself for going after what you want. Knowing what you want can save you lots of heartache and time. If you want your next relationship to be with someone who’s right for you, so your love together can last and thrive, it’s important to spend time getting to know yourself first.

    If some of your answers indicate that you’re not ready for the love search yet, don’t be afraid to take time off to deepen your relationship with yourself. This will only serve you long term. It is an investment into your amazing relationship, and investments do take time.

  • Feeling Anxious? People-Pleasing Could Be to Blame

    Feeling Anxious? People-Pleasing Could Be to Blame

    “Living with anxiety is like being followed by a voice. It knows all your insecurities and uses them against you. It gets to the point when it’s the loudest voice in the room. The only one you can hear.” ~Unknown

    White lights flutter before your eyes. Your chest tightens, as if under the weight of a hundred ten-pound bricks. You wonder if your next breath will be your last. Emotions rip through you: fear, glooming dread, hopelessness. Without warning or clear cause, these feelings consume you.

    You start to wonder if you’re going crazy. It’s like you no longer have control over your own body, your own thoughts.

    This is the experience of chronic anxiety. And if you’ve ever encountered it, you know that the presence of it—and the absence of answers or solutions—can make you feel like you’re losing it. It can make everything that was once enjoyable feel like a struggle.

    I know this feeling all too well.

    I used to suffer from periodic anxiety attacks in my early twenties. They left me perplexed and afraid. I felt like I was being possessed. I felt out of control and believed I was dying all the time, with no evidence of a real illness.

    Anxiety stole parts of my life from me, until I decided I wouldn’t let it take away my hope for a better future. One day, embarrassed after having to pull over onto the side of the road in order to breathe, I decided to get help for my anxiety attacks.

    I realized then that people pleasing was causing me anxiety in two ways.

    First, I felt anxiety about being imperfect, making mistakes, and making choices that others didn’t approve of, especially in my family relationships. Then I felt more anxiety because I thought I shouldn’t feel this way. I thought if people knew I was suffering from anxiety that they would reject me.

    Life can be messy, strange, and hard sometimes. And it gets even harder when the faith you once had in yourself is bulldozed by your inability to take a deep breath and calm yourself down.

    It’s hard not to blame yourself. It’s hard to avoid feeling inadequate, like your issues are all your fault. It’s especially hard when you’re a people-pleaser.

    Chronic people-pleasers want to look presentable all the time, like we have it all together and our lives are perfect. Anxiety doesn’t fit into the perfect lives we’ve established for ourselves. So when it hits, we become our harshest and cruelest critics.

    We fail to realize that when we don’t accept our symptoms, we only exacerbate them. We forget that judging things never makes them better. We can’t help but get angry with ourselves.

    Stop Playing Pretend

    Anxiety had its most crippling effects on me when I was in college. I believed I needed to get all A’s on my report card in order to be a good student. I also believed that if I had to study to get good grades, I was somehow intellectually inferior.

    I studied a lot for tests—more than what I thought should be necessary. But when I talked to other people, I pretended like I’d barely studied at all. And whenever I received the occasional B, I beat myself up pretty harshly.

    I didn’t want anyone to know that I didn’t have the best report card. Little did I know at the time it made me appear pretentious and stuck up.

    After graduation, I interned at a university clinic, where I started to see clients. With each client, I was assigned a therapy room. This one time, I accidently used a room that wasn’t assigned to me. When the therapy was over, the clinical supervisor was not very happy with me and did not have trouble showing it.

    Not knowing how to handle disappointing someone, I cried to her and ran off because I could feel a panic attack coming on. Later I felt like a baby, and couldn’t understand why I had such a strong reaction to making a mistake.

    Later I realized I was always anxiously trying to please people because it was difficult for me to deal with disappointing others. I thought somehow making a mistake devalued me as a person, and that made me anxious to think about.

    I would assess my worth on how much I could do right, instead of realizing I had intrinsic worth regardless. This experience helped me understand that my urge to please was based on anxiety and fear more than anything else.

    I spent that time of my life hiding who I was and putting a fake smile on my face.

    In trying to appear perfect, I became rigid and lost my edge and my humor. I resisted my outgoing personality because I thought I would interrupt people too much. I thought I should always let others take center stage while I didn’t ruffle any feathers in the background.

    I pretended everything was great, but it wasn’t. I was suffering from crippling anxiety, feeling disconnected, and often misunderstood. I was hiding my pain, and my frustration with people who were acting rude and selfish.

    I gave advice and ran to the rescue of anyone in despair, and partook in activities that I didn’t necessarily enjoy. I hid my true self by hiding behind other people’s problems. I convinced myself that there was no room for me.

    Through my own experience, I learned that the greatest changes begin when we look at our problems with interest and respect, instead of judgment and denial. When we allow our true thoughts and feelings into awareness, we have the opportunity to learn from them instead of unconsciously reacting to them without knowing why.

    We keep our negative feelings relaxed by not ignoring them, and we increase our awareness of reality by being willing to encounter our personal truths.

    After therapy, I learned that my panic attacks were a reminder that I was a human, not a perfect being. I needed to be acknowledged for who I was, instead of always putting others first or forcing myself to have it all together.

    I needed to know that my worth didn’t depend on what I did for others or what grades appeared on my report card.

    Our bodies have so much wisdom, and sometimes they know more than we realize. Sometimes our anxiety is merely a signal telling us to take a closer look within.

    Anxiety As A Symptom, Not The Disease

    When I first sought therapy for my panic attacks, I thought they were a sign of weakness that needed to be eliminated. What I came to understand is that we can choose to bury our unexpressed emotions and deep thoughts, but they’ll come back later, often in unpleasant ways.

    In my case, they came back as panic attacks. When aspects of ourselves are distanced, denied, or devalued, they’ll always try to make us listen by surfacing as unwanted symptoms.

    Think about what some aspects of your ignored self are trying to tell you. Maybe your symptoms are coming up as chronic anxiety, depression, muscle pain, headaches, feeling lost, etc.

    The analogy of the missing roommate, from Bill O’Hanlon and Bob Bertolino’s book Even from a Broken Web: Brief, Respectful Solution-Orientated Therapy for Sexual Abuse and Trauma, can help clarify the impact of ignoring our inner selves.

    The Missing Roommate

    Imagine that there are a bunch of people living together in a house, and they decide to kick out one of their roommate because they don’t like him. They lock him out and change the locks.

    He comes to the door and tries persistently to get back in, but the roommates tell each other to ignore him, thinking he will go away.

    After a while, he becomes exhausted and slumps against the door. They think he’s gone away and won’t cause any more trouble. For quite a while, it seems to have worked. But he’s really just sleeping outside the door.

    Eventually, something wakes him up, and he decides he wants to get back in the house. He pounds on the door again but gets no response and becomes tired again. Finally, he becomes desperate and crashes through the front window.

    That is what happens when parts of your true self are vanished, unexpectedly. The parts of you that went missing will want to show you who you’re meant to be. They’ll scream, “I want to come back! I am part of you! I will not be ignored!”

    This is how it happened for me. I got so caught up in trying to be who I thought I was supposed to be, I lost who I actually was.

    However, when we devalue parts of ourselves, they develop a mind of their own. They may go away for a while, at the expense of our wellbeing and relationships, but before long they’ll come crashing through the front window.

    We must realize that the experiences we have, even seemly negative ones, are here to teach us, challenge us, and allow us to grow.

    How you see yourself, your life, and your options is shaped by your mindset. If you live with the mindset of a people-pleaser, you’ll constantly feel pressure to fit in, make others happy, be liked, gain acceptance, and seem happy all the time. That’s a lot of pressure. No wonder you feel anxious!

    When I reached out for the help of a therapist, I thought there was something wrong with me because of how sick I’d gotten. I wasn’t able to see that even if I could benefit from making some changes, my anxiety wasn’t my fault. I needed to grow so I could learn to better manage my life and be okay with sometimes disappointing other people in order to take care of myself.

    It’s okay to make mistakes; it’s all right for people not to approve of all your choices; it’s fine to have the occasional issue. In fact, it’s through the pitfalls of life that you can learn and experience who you are.

    I’m thankful for my panic attacks. They allowed me to open my eyes and change my life. I started making myself a priority and embraced my imperfections with open arms.

    —

    Editor’s note: Ilene has generously offered to give away two free copies of her latest book, When It’s Never About You: The People-Pleaser’s Guide to Reclaiming Your Health, Happiness and Personal Freedom. To enter to win one of two free copies, leave a comment below. You don’t have to write anything specific—”Count me in” is sufficient! You can enter until midnight PST on Sunday, December 24th.

    Update: The winners have been chosen. They are Stephen Chavez and Julie.

  • An Improbable Story of Healing and a Girl with a Wand

    An Improbable Story of Healing and a Girl with a Wand

    “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” ~Maya Angelou

    It’s the worry, I think. The constant worry. Is she safe? Will she make the right choices? Will she find a young man that will cherish and support her? The worry is always there. It never leaves.

    She recently visited Los Angeles for the first time. A business trip. She had a few hours to kill. What to do? The Wizarding World Of Harry Potter! The girl is not shy. Flying solo would not be a problem.

    Later that night I get the call. The hot topic was how to properly pick out a wand. She even texted me a visual aid. And apparently, she’s a Ravenclaw. A “sorting hat” made that determination.

    I could have sworn she was Gryffindor!

    Yep. Two nerds. Later that evening, I get another text, “Goodnight, Old Man.” I respond with, “Goodnight, Dweeb.” Our banter always brings a big smile to my face.

    The thing that hit me so hard about that conversation was her innocence. She’s twenty-seven years of age and yet that precious part of her remains.

    My armor is old and unyielding. Well worn from decades of struggle. But with her, all that melts away.

    Her innocence brought tears to my eyes. Like a toddler falling for the first time. A primal flood of emotion. The kind you can’t run from.

    I was never supposed to have a twenty-seven-year-old in my life. It was never supposed to happen. Now what? I mean, okay, fine, feel the feels. But this went way beyond emotions. Feelings.

    I had become a role model. A guardian of sorts. This was never supposed to happen. Not to a guy like me. I was cut from a different cloth.

    My father’s version of parenting began with a right hook and ended with bruises. His rage, the look in his eyes, was terrifying. And my mom, in spite of her good heart, was an alcoholic nearing the end.

    She died of cancer when I was just twenty-eight. Ten years later, my father passed. I got the news from Google. A random search done on a whim. I had not seen him in over twenty years.

    This was my life. The only life I had ever known.

    Losing my mom was tough, for sure. But more than anything, it was a relief. I know that sounds horrible but it was. Even more so with my dad. I was finally free. The burden had been lifted. The darkness was no more.

    That was the cloth I inherited.

    So I had to go it alone.

    I would make my own luck. I would craft new DNA. Whatever the price, I was willing to pay it. Which helped me to break down walls. Healing? Not so much.

    By age thirty, I was making six figures without a degree. I’ve run ad agencies, been a top-tier management consultant. I’ve directed and produced two short films and a play.

    I rose above the right hook.

    I rose above the mother that was never there. I rose above the odds that predicted my doom. Which brings us back to the spirited young lady in my life.

    Brooke had wrapped up college and was about to enter the workforce. It was not going well. Friends suggested a trade agreement. Brooke’s legendary organizing skills for a few coaching sessions.

    No big deal. A little pro bono work.

    A few months in, her walls collapsed. All the pain and fear. Years of struggles. Tears running down her cheeks. There she was standing before me. All of her.

    It took me a few days to process everything. Being a caretaker? To a twenty-two-year-old girl? The Universe was clearly stoned. How else to explain it? I had no answers.

    But as each day passed, my resolve deepened.

    Someone had to stand up for this girl and that someone had to be me. Because, you know, an almost fifty-year-old single man, mentoring a single twenty-two-year-old girl, that doesn’t throw up any red flags!

    My life is rarely boring.

    I still believed this would be a no-brainer. Easy breezy. Provide some counsel. Buy an occasional lunch. Help Brooke on her journey.

    Like I said, no big deal.

    Our brokenness is always there, beneath the surface. Stirring. Churning. Waiting to heal. It just takes the right set of ingredients. The right circumstances.

    For me, that was a 5’4” twenty-seven-year-old with a Harry Potter wand in her hand.

    It’s actually kind of perfect, given the people involved. As the years passed, the trust between us grew. And she started opening up. The real stuff. Career. Boys. Life. Roommates. Money. Insecurities. We talked about everything. Still do.

    Which included calling her out when need be. That always felt odd. She’s not my spawn but at times, I seriously have to wonder.

    I took all the calls when her world collapsed. I occasionally cooked her breakfast, which included insane amounts of bacon. We started going to movies and just hanging out.

    And more of my armor fell. Piece by piece.

    And more her armor fell. Piece by piece.

    Then I noticed something. Several somethings, actually.

    She was doing a lot better. She was growing into a confident, successful young woman. And she would emulate me. Which was kind of crazy. And totally awesome.

    I had to be a legit role model. Holy crap!

    And then the check-in phone calls and texts started happening. She needed a comforting voice. My voice. I had become that voice. Wait! What? When did that happen? And wow, that happened?!

    It was all very humbling and beautiful.

    When the holidays rolled around last year, we decided to meet for breakfast and exchange gifts. Kerbey Lane, an Austin favorite. It was my turn to rip open presents.

    I knew it was a book. You always know when it’s a book. But this was no ordinary book, this was Tsugele’s Broom, a favorite from her childhood.

    And it came with very specific instructions.

    The book told the story of an independent young woman in search of a good man. Brooke’s instructions were simple. When I believed she had found such a man, I was to return the book.

    What the hell was happening? More tears welled up. Is it always like this?

    I was suddenly overcome by a profound need to immediately hug her. Unfortunately, that almost resulted in me knocking over our table. A gymnast, I am not.

    A few people looked up. I blushed. She had a good laugh.

    This young woman. This dweeb.

    I love her so very much. And I worry.

    Adulting. Right?

    Wow, that’s happening.

    The right-hook childhood. The dark trauma of my youth. All that stuff is slowly healing. Beneath the surface. The deep kind of healing. A soul scrub of sorts.

    And so it is with her.

    I get to watch that happen. I get to be a part of that process.

    Because as it turns out, I am cut from a cloth that can protect. I am cut from a cloth that can love and not abuse.

    That is the cloth I wear now.

    And it took a Ravenclaw for me to see it!

    Which is not to say that it’s all roses. There is still work to be done. And we’re finding those answers together. One moment at time. Two imperfect nerds finding their way.

    A middle-aged man. A twenty-seven year-old girl with a wand.

    In this life, I got to be an almost dad.

    Ya know?

    It’s kind of a big deal.

    In my final moments, whenever they may come, I’ll remember Brooke’s first tears. The tears that called me out. And the fact that I answered that call.

    There is so much more to you than you could ever realize. Seriously. It’s true. So answer the call. Whatever that may look like for you. Answer the call.

    Find the cloth you thought impossible to wear.

    Because it’s down there. Somewhere.

    Keep looking.

  • How to Move Let Go of the Fear of Judgment and Break the Silence of Shame

    How to Move Let Go of the Fear of Judgment and Break the Silence of Shame

    “If we can share our story with someone who responds with empathy and understanding, shame can’t survive.” ~Brené Brown

    Every time I think I’ve unloaded most of the pain from my past, something surfaces that tells me I have more work to do.

    A couple of weeks ago, my boyfriend and I were cuddling one morning. I’m not sure what the trigger was, but out of nowhere, my thoughts rolled down a hill and into a painful memory that I must have blocked out.

    Tears rolled down my cheeks as my whole body curled up into the fetal position. He asked me what was wrong and I slowly told him about a sexual trauma I had experienced.

    We are radically honest with one another. Sharing the not so beautiful has deepened our connection. I thought I had shared my darkest secrets that carry shame.

    I was wrong.

    I had minimized and buried this story. Maybe subconsciously, I was afraid he would see this situation as my fault. He absolutely didn’t, and sharing my experience with him made me feel like a heavy burden was lifted.

    This last part rang especially true the following week when the #metoo hashtag went viral. It was during that week of teasing through my feelings and thoughts that I realized just how much confusion shame can create.

    The word shame can evoke such discomfort that we often don’t see how it shows up in our lives.

    If there’s one emotion I see as most prevalent and most hidden in the work I do, it’s shame. Every time I lead a workshop or retreat, there’s a common theme that I witness in nearly everyone. As humans, we all tend to feel in some way that we’re unworthy.

    Yet, the last thing we want to do is acknowledge our shame and vulnerability.

    But if left buried, shame inevitably causes harm to ourselves and our relationships. In my experience, I’ve seen firsthand how understanding and shedding light on shame can hold the key to healing.

    Shame is the emotion that says, “I am bad. I am unworthy.”

    It’s not that we did something bad and feel remorseful. That’s guilt. Guilt says, “I did something bad.” But shame is the internalization of “I am bad.”

    Most of us, even if we had kind, loving parents, grew up feeling a bit like we had to censor our true feelings and experiences. We may have done this to avoid dismay, protect others, or keep the peace in our families.

    We’re conditioned from a young age to feel shame when we learn who we shouldn’t be in the world. But as we get older, we don’t need others to make us feel shame. Shame becomes easily internalized and lives in that voice that says, “It’s dangerous to let others hear my story,” or, “They won’t love me if I share this secret.”

    Who we are becomes fragmented so that we hide the parts of ourselves we want no one to see. We unconsciously employ defense mechanisms. While those defense mechanisms might help us to survive, they’re bound to stand in the way of having healthy relationships and growing a sense of self-love.

    When we’re afraid to share our vulnerable side because we believe it would render us flawed, dirty, weak, and so forth, we’re carrying shame.

    Shame is carried silently and secretly for fear of judgment; yet, it is the self-judgment that grows the longer we conceal our vulnerability.

    I refuse to keep painful secrets festering inside of me, as I know that will only keep me repressed and disempowered in the long run.

    All humans experience shame, and it presents in many ways. Here are a few examples I’ve noticed within myself that maybe you can relate to:

    • Being too sensitive and emotional
    • Not doing enough to “save” my mother from her death
    • Being too selfish to fully want to be a mother myself
    • Feeling I’m not ambitious or smart enough to live up to my potential
    • Struggling to communicate clearly when I have too much in my head
    • Feeling too “needy” with my partner at times
    • Believing I was somehow at fault for the sexual abuses I have experienced

    My personal list could go on… But what I noticed when writing this list is that while many of the original sources of shame might be specific people or society as a whole, the critic is still me.

    When we keep shame locked away inside, we get stuck in feelings of inadequacy. Shame may cause us to feel mentally or physically ill. Feelings of inadequacy can be accompanied by emotions such as anxiety, anger, and loneliness. And when we feel inadequate, we sometimes develop destructive ways of relating to others: avoidance, lying, blaming others, attempts to control others, and so forth.

    So how can we deal with this lurking self-critic that wants to keep our stories in the dark?

    1. Speak kindly to yourself.

    Most likely, at some point you’ve heard the phrase, “Shame on you,” or, “You should be ashamed.” It can easily become habit to talk similarly to ourselves and challenging to learn to speak kindly.

    A simple framework for healing I teach comes from an ancient Hawaiian tradition called H’oponopono. H’oponopono means “to make right,” and it’s rooted in the essence of reconciliation and compassion.

    H’oponopono consists of four phrases: I’m sorry. I forgive you. Thank you. I love you. You can use these phrases speaking to another person. And you can use them with yourself. Here’s a personal example of the latter:

    Melissa, I’m sorry for making you feel the trauma you experienced was your fault.

    Melissa, I forgive you for placing blame on yourself and carrying shame all these years.

    Melissa, thank you for your courage to shine light on your vulnerability and resilience.

    Melissa, I love you and I commit to treating you with lovingkindness.

    2. Self-soothe with movement and massage.

    Think about what happens to your body when you recall a memory that carries shame. Often our bodies slump sinking our heart into the back body. Our gaze drops and our brows furrow.

    Emotions, including shame, reside in the body. Much of what I practice and teach relates to physical ways to release stuck emotion for this reason.

    If we want to reduce the unworthy and unlovable feelings we carry, it can help to self-soothe your body through dynamic movement practices like yoga and dance. Self-massage, tapping, and comforting touch while speaking kindly to yourself can help to release shame.

    3. Share your story.

    The most uncomfortable, but perhaps most effective method I can offer you is to share.

    You don’t have to share your vulnerability with the whole world. Many of my friends shared courageous, deeply personal stories on Facebook in response to #metoo. For a moment, I thought I had to share this way as well, but then I did some reflection.

    There are times I share my vulnerability through my blog or when I hold space for a group. But I don’t always want to share everything with strangers. In those cases, my partner is my greatest witness because of his ability to hold space for me.

    Whether you share in a twelve-step program, with a loved one, or therapist, or in an article for the world to see, there’s immense healing power in this process. When our voices are heard and we’re seen just as we are, we open up the door to growing a new sense of self-love and self-worth.

  • Highs and Lows Are Part of Growth and It All Makes Us Stronger

    Highs and Lows Are Part of Growth and It All Makes Us Stronger

    “Just like a muscle needs to tear to grow stronger, sometimes we need to wade into our own darkness to find a brighter light.” ~Lori Deschene

    Sometimes we need to journey into the deepest, darkest, scariest, most painful places inside in order to reach the next level.

    This is what happened to me earlier this year.

    When I was younger, I was in an abusive relationship that created a lot of stories in my head. These stories became beliefs that I carried around for a long time. Beliefs like, “I’m not good enough,” “Relationships are painful,” “I don’t have a say,” “I need someone else to show me I’m worthy,” and “I need to be perfect to receive love” (just to name a few).

    As a conscious adult, I’ve done a lot of healing work and spiritual development around this, and am proud of the growth I’ve experienced between where I was then and where I am now. But even still, I have setbacks. We all do.

    None of us are immune to the fears and self-doubt that pop up when “life happens.” None of us are safe when the ground we’ve worked so hard to establish gets ripped out from us.

    After lots of self-development and work around relationships and love, I recently declared to the Universe that I was no longer afraid of being alone and that I was no longer afraid of being vulnerable and my “true self” in a future relationship. So, the Universe delivered. Big time.

    I met someone new. He wasn’t like the other men I’ve dated—men who are safe and stable, and who give me a sense of being in control of the situation. He was uncharted territory for me. Hard to read. Mysterious. Kept me guessing.

    He would surprise me with nice gestures like showing up with sunflowers, sending me unexpected notes about how beautiful I am, you know… the works. Not to mention the sex. THE SEX! For the first time, possibly in my whole life, I felt really seen, appreciated, valued and truly beautiful while having sex. There was nothing awkward or uncomfortable or weird or threatening about it. I had met Mr. Perfect… or so I thought.

    What I know now that I didn’t recognize then was that this guy was an assignment. The Universe heard me loud and clear when I announced that I was ready to be alone and/or in a vulnerable relationship (which is actually a very confusing declaration to make in the first place, so… no wonder stuff got weird!), and so I was sent this guy—let’s refer to him as Mr. Perfect from here on out—as a test.

    Mr. Perfect was an opportunity for me to put into practice all of the things I had learned about myself over the past twenty-five years.

    Let’s just say that I failed that test. Miserably.

    After an all-out eight-day binge on this guy, we were both like a couple of strung-out addicts, totally manipulative and controlling and hopeless about our futures, but pretending everything was just groovy. We were practically playing house together when we hadn’t even known about the other’s existence just a month earlier.

    Somewhere throughout the week with Mr. Perfect, my energy shifted. I went from this high-vibe, loving, independent, strong version of myself, to this weird, controlling, self-conscious, anxious, creepy version of me. I went from Jennifer Aniston status to that chick in Mean Girls who’s obsessed with Regina George way too quickly, and my old limiting beliefs started to take over.

    Suddenly, I was operating from that old, abusive relationship version of me.

    The version of me who thought that being vulnerable in a relationship meant getting hurt.

    The version of me who thought that the guy needs to control everything, and that I am not safe to speak up about what I really want, because you never know how he’s going to react.

    The version of me who felt uncomfortable in her own skin, so tried really hard to look pretty, say the right thing, and always do something more in an effort to be noticed.

    The version of me who thought that I needed a man to “save me,” or that he was the one answer to all of my problems in life.

    You can only race like that for so long until you crash.

    And so, eight days of passionate sex, cute notes, sleepless nights, hours of butterflies in my stomach, several dinners, one brunch, way too much tequila, and two bouquets of flowers later, we bottomed out. Both of us.

    Mr. Perfect and I took a crash course in “How to Not Date as Intentional, Conscious Human Beings 101.” Our worlds both went spinning—his, with a huge f*ck up at work, likely the result of us spending too much time together; mine, reversing to harmful coping behaviors that used to show up when I was younger.

    When I got the text from Mr. Perfect that started with “We need to talk,” I went into a downward spiral of emotion and drama. He wanted to end things. I wanted to die. I literally paced outside my apartment building for three hours trying my very best to not have a heart attack.

    I questioned everything. Was any of it real? Did I mean anything to him? How could I screw this up? How could I fix it? I needed to fix it. How could I mess up such a perfect thing?

    But suddenly, I had a beautiful recognition. I noticed that there was a shift. In my heart space, I could feel the presence of my Higher Self. The part of me that’s connected to something bigger. The part of me that knows these stories of not being good enough are complete BS.

    And just like that, I was no longer living in the stories that were sending me into a near panic attack. I was above that. I knew that I was better than that. That I deserve more. That it wasn’t my fault. That I didn’t do anything wrong. That I was still just as worthy as love and acceptance and beauty as anyone else on this planet.

    In that moment, I forgave myself.

    I forgave myself for the behavior that caused him to end things.

    I forgave myself for the fact that I let it get to the point where we even engaged in an eight-day binge on each other.

    And most importantly, I forgave myself for all the negative and self-doubting talk, limiting beliefs, and lame stories I told myself when it happened.

    I saw that the stories were keeping me stuck. I saw that they made me revert back to this old version of me that I no longer was. And I saw that I had the awareness and the power now to intentionally choose to believe a different story instead.

    I chose to believe that this story was no longer serving me, and that I could rise above it.

    That I actually didn’t need a man to “fix” me or to complete me, but that I had actually been doing that work on my own all along.

    I decided that I was done with this belief of not being good enough.

    I was soooo done.

    I decided then and there to stay committed to this path of personal growth and transcendence, because I see now how all of the pain and struggles that I’ve been through actually happened for me, not to me.

    All of it was for a reason.

    You can do the same. Everything that you’ve been through—every negative thought or limiting belief or fear that you’ve had that’s kept you from what you want the most in life—it’s all within your power to change. If you decide that you deserve it.

    Healing is not linear. There will be highs and lows, laughs and tears, moments of total bliss and moments of complete uncertainty and self-doubt. But your Higher Self is there through it all, and S/he wants to see you come out stronger through each and every assignment that the Universe throws your way.

    S/he is cheering you on from the sidelines and always there for support as your #1 fan, no matter what crazy stuff comes across your path. And that person, that part of you, needs you to show up to these assignments. To really face the fear head on, to feel the pain, and to move through it.

    Because on the other side of fear and pain and struggle and darkness lies your greatness.

    Looking back at it now, I don’t think I failed the test the Universe sent me. I think I passed it. Because I chose my Higher Self, I chose self-love, and I chose me.

    Maybe that was the lesson all along.

  • There Are Some People You Just Can’t Help

    There Are Some People You Just Can’t Help

    “Be there. Be open. Be honest. Be kind. Be willing to listen, understand, accept, support, and forgive. This is what it means to love.” ~Lori Deschene

    A few months ago, I was totally freaked out.

    I was having a cup of tea with a soul-sister friend, and we were in deep conversation. I was crying.

    I was explaining, between hiccupping sobs, about how there was someone in my life who was suffering deeply.

    Sitting at the café that day, I said to her, “There is this person in my life that I love so deeply, but he is suffering.”

    I told her about all the ways I was connected to this very special person, and told her about how I was committed to helping him.

    My friend was empathetically listening, and my story went on and on.

    “He’s so depressed. When I’m around him, I just suddenly feel so sad. I feel his pain. It’s so deep. I have tried to share my wisdom with him, to help him evolve out of his depressed rut, but he won’t listen. I know he can make a change, but he just won’t listen to me. It’s like his ears are closed to me. What do I do? How can I help him?”

    It was then that my dear friend replied in a way that I will never forget.

    She placed her hand on my shoulder, and looked deeply into my eyes.

    We sat in silence together for a moment.

    Finally, she spoke, with such a gentle tone in her voice. “Anya, your lesson is to learn in this situation is simple, yet difficult. Your lesson is that you cannot help this person. Sometimes, there are people that you just can’t help.”

    I gasped. Chills ran down my spine. Her words resonated through every cell of my body.

    It was all so simple.

    There are people in my life that I just can’t help.

    So simple, yet so profound. Why hadn’t I realized this before?

    And how had I somehow fallen into the trap of taking on someone else’s burden as my own? Why had I gotten trapped in suffering by trying to “fix” someone who was suffering?

    These traps are, unfortunately, all too common for those of us with big open hearts. They are quite common for those of us who are caregivers, lovers, amazing friends, healers, spiritual way showers, and all those who wish to use our lives in service to a higher good.

    Since that day at the café, I’ve been thinking a lot about my sweet friend’s advice. And I’ve come to a few insights of my own.

    First, in order to be helped, a person must first ask for help. A person must make themselves available, vulnerable, open, and humble.

    And this is not easy! It’s not easy to be open. It’s not easy to say, “I don’t know; please help me.”

    Second, in order for you to help someone with your words, that person must first resonate with the kind of wisdom you have to share.

    As a matter of fact, my depressed friend has a totally different worldview than I do, so it’s no wonder he wasn’t open to my words of advice.

    There are a thousand paths and a thousand ways to interpret the world.

    My way may not be your way, and your way may not your neighbor’s way. We are often so different in our concepts and language for interpreting this mysterious thing called life.

    In short, for a person to want your help, that person must be somewhat already aligned to your philosophical or spiritual worldview.

    Further, in order for a person to receive your help, they also must present themselves to you in the most perfect, synchronistic moment.

    Indeed, they must be standing before you in the most precise, delicate moment: the moment just before the blossoming, just before the great change occurs. It can be as small as a split second of opening.

    Timing is everything.

    In that moment of perfect timing, they will be not only ready but hungry for evolution, hungry for growth, hungry for truth, hungry for new ways of seeing the world beyond their limited old perspective!

    My dear friend who is suffering does not want to grow in the way I wish he would (consciously evolve out of suffering through spiritual practice)—at least, not at this time.

    He is suffering and he does not even want to admit that he is suffering. He believes he can achieve no higher or better state in this lifetime.

    Once I realized that there are some people I just can’t help, I felt a tremendous relief. A giant stone lifted from my heart, and I could suddenly breathe again.

    I realized that I had unwittingly taken on his suffering as my own, in a misguided attempt to figure out how to “fix” him. I had allowed my natural empathy to become a wound in my own energetic body.

    If a person you love is stuck in a place of denial to their own suffering or their own addictions or stuckness, then there is a strong possibility that what you say won’t make a bit of difference.

    Denial is an incredibly strong force. And if your worldview differs too much from theirs, then it may not be your place to plant any seeds of wisdom. It may be your place to step back from trying to speak at all.

    That’s a tough lesson of love, I know, but if you can remember it, it will save you a lot of heartache.

    Indeed, if someone is in denial to their own suffering, then that very denial may very well block them from truly hearing you speak.

    So, what do we do in these kinds of situations?

    Can we take any action at all?

    The answer is yes.

    When we deeply love someone and we are invested in them (such as a lover, a friend, a child, or a business partner), what we can do is simply radiate love.

    When we are in their presence, we can be as light, happy, and conscious as possible.

    This light, this presence, this subtle vibration, will subtly shift their energetic field. And though no words are spoken, they will feel a little bit more peace while they are near us (whether they consciously know it or not).

    And we can of course listen to them. When they need to talk, we can listen, and we can offer a hug or a gentle, reassuring smile.

    Indeed, sometimes, when we love someone, the best thing we can do is shut the heck up.

    The best thing we can do is simply be.

    Friends painting by Jerry Weiss

  • The Introvert’s Hate/Hate Relationship With Spontaneity

    The Introvert’s Hate/Hate Relationship With Spontaneity

    “The man who is prepared has his battle half fought.” ~Miguel De Cervantes

    They say you should live in the present, and “they” form a chorus of voices that is growing in number by the second. Everywhere you turn these days, the message is loud and clear: life is better when you live in the moment.

    I get it; I really do. I know that when I hit that flow state, regardless of what I’m immersed in, time passes in a heartbeat and I tend to really enjoy myself.

    It’s just that I would prefer it if I could plan those moments of flow some time in advance. I want—no I need—to prepare myself for the event of letting go. I need to be mentally ready so that I may jump into the river and let the current take me.

    If I’m not prepared, that river turns out to be less of a serene, meandering brook, and more a surge of cascading torrents that pummel my senses until I’m half-drowned and ready to give up.

    This is why I, the introvert, despise spontaneity in all its forms.

    The first few weeks of university really tested me. I lived on campus in a dorm where I shared a communal kitchen with eleven other people. It didn’t matter what night of the week it was, there were people heading out to a bar, restaurant, or club.

    I’d often get a knock at my bedroom door and an invitation to one of these nightly excursions: “Oh, hey, me, Johnny, and Mike are heading to {insert one of many different venues} for some beers. You wanna join us?”

    At this point I’d be searching every corner of my mind for a reasonable excuse, a Get Out Of Jail Free card that would save me the pain of just saying no. I knew that if I did just decline without justification, I’d get the inevitable looks of astonishment as if I were turning down the opportunity of a lifetime.

    “It’s Wednesday.” No, that won’t do.

    “I’m tired.” Not going to cut it.

    “I’ve just sat down to catch up on Friends.” Watch it another time, I’d be told.

    I wanted to tell them the truth, but can you imagine what they’d have said? “Oh, thanks for the invite guys, but I’m an introvert and I can’t stand being spontaneous. Maybe another time, assuming you give me seven days notice in writing.”

    Instead, I’d often just mumble something incoherent about how I’ve got a paper due the next day, or how I’m just on the phone with my parents. They usually got the message.

    I didn’t avoid nights out entirely; I can be quite a social character when I want to be. I just made sure that I was mentally prepared beforehand. I’d agree (with myself in advance) that I was going out on a particular night, and I made sure I spent plenty of time alone in the afternoon or early evening to recharge my batteries for the oncoming festivities.

    Eventually, I had a nice little routine going. I’d go out on Monday most weeks, Friday some weeks, Saturday almost every week, and the occasional Thursday. No other nights really got a look-in. And it tended to be the same set of places each time because of certain student promotions or theme nights.

    What’s more, my friends knew when I was and was not going to accept their invitations, so they stopped knocking when they knew it was a waste of their time.

    Somehow, I had managed to appear fairly sociable and outgoing while avoiding anything unexpected. I had planned my way out of spontaneity.

    Structure: An Introvert’s Best Friend

    My experiences as a student might not exactly mirror your situation, but as a fellow introvert, I’m sure you can relate to the need for structure and routine in your life.

    There are few things less enjoyable for an introvert than being coerced into some random activity at some unplanned time with unfamiliar people. It’s literally our Kryptonite.

    We simply cannot handle the unknowns: Where are we going? What is the place like? What will we be doing there? Who else is going? How are we getting there?

    Perhaps the uncertainty that scares us most is not knowing when it will end. Social activity drains us, but spontaneous social activity burns through our energy reserves in double-quick time because of how much we have to think, react, and absorb when we’re not mentally ready for it.

    If there’s no clear time at which things will draw to a close, we panic, knowing we’ll be utterly spent in the not-too-distant future.

    Put some structure in place—primarily in the form of plenty of warning—and we will be able to extract far more enjoyment out of the very same event or activity. When we know it’s coming, we have time to open ourselves up to the possibility of enjoying ourselves. We remove our shackles and move more freely, both physically and mentally.

    Be Confident In Your Boundaries

    The reason I found those early weeks of university so difficult was because I felt bad saying no to people. I wanted to make friends as much as the next person, and I always had this nagging feeling that my refusal to take part would see me labelled as boring.

    Somehow or another it all worked out, but I could have avoided plenty of insecurity had I just understood that putting personal boundaries in place is not a sign of weakness. I did say no to people, and I did it a lot. These days, I’m much more comfortable doing it, and it reduces the anxiety I feel around spontaneity itself.

    I know I can turn down anything I don’t feel like doing, and I don’t worry so much about what other people think. I’ve learnt that, actually, most spontaneous people care a lot less about receiving a no from introverts like you or me. Or rather, they get over the rejection quickly because they’re too busy just getting on with whatever spontaneous act it is they are doing.

    In these situations, it’s the introverts who tend to overthink everything. You may dwell on the exchange for hours after it happened, considering all of the possible ways you could have handled it better or the consequences of your refusal. The big deal exists almost entirely in your head. So it’s in your head that the battle must be won.

    The challenge is to know your boundaries intimately and to build them strong and sturdy so that you are able to confidently say no to offers and invitations that you either have not planned for or do not think you’d enjoy. No is not a dirty word and you shouldn’t be afraid of using it.

    Take The Reins Yourself

    There is a relatively simple way to avoid spontaneous requests from others: get in there first. You want a plan in place, right? You crave structure in your life. Then create the plan and add the structure yourself.

    Don’t wait for your friends to suggest you meet up that night, or the next night for dinner. Suggest a date and a time that feels comfortable for you. A few days time, next week, in a fortnight; it doesn’t matter as long as it gives you enough time to prepare mentally.

    And if you know that these events tend to happen naturally every couple of months, keep this in mind and put a note on your calendar to start suggesting dates well in advance. This also has the added benefit of making you seem like the sociable one because you’re doing much of the organizing.

    Yes, you may be an introvert, but that doesn’t mean you don’t ever want to see anyone. We introverts can enjoy ourselves as much as anyone else, but having some forewarning will only serve to make the whole process more compatible with your needs and wishes.

  • What to Say (and Not to Say) to Someone Who’s Grieving

    What to Say (and Not to Say) to Someone Who’s Grieving

    “Remember that there is no magic wand that can take away the pain and grief. The best any of us can do is to be there and be supportive.” ~Marilyn Mendoza

    My mother, an articulate and highly accomplished writer, began to lose much of what she valued a few years ago. Her eyesight was compromised by macular degeneration, her hallmark youthful vigor was replaced with exhaustion, and many of her friends began to die. Finally, and cruelest of all, her memory began to go, slowly at first, and then with increasing speed.

    Her struggle and her suffering in the last two years of life were excruciating to watch, and I was helpless to stop what felt like an avalanche of cruel losses.

    Sometimes in that last year, she would call me several times a day with distress and confusion. When she finally died, after five ambulance trips to the hospital in six weeks, my first response was thankfulness that she was out of the struggle and, to my surprise, relief. I had been grieving the mother I had known for the last year of her life, and she had already been gone a long time.

    It would be another month before I found my grief, and I suspect that it will be there forever; but my immediate feeling was not sadness.

    People feel so many things at so many different times about the death of a loved one: loss, anger, devastation, confusion, guilt, and fear, to name a few. If we assume anything about how they are experiencing their loss, we can make them feel worse. Here are a few suggestions about how to reach out, starting with what not to do.

    Don’t assume you know what I am going through.

    I was surprised by how many people came up to me and said, “I know just what you’re going through.” Even worse, they would tell me, “This will be the saddest thing that will ever happen to you,” or “You won’t know who you are for years after this.”

    We all know that losing a mother is a major life event and it changes many things. What we don’t know is how. It is different for each person; we cannot overlay our own experience on someone else’s and assume it’s the same. For me, whose first feelings were that her death was that of a reprieve, it caused me to doubt the validity of my response.

    Don’t use religious clichés about this life or another. 

    Religious clichés such as “Jesus called her home,” “God needed another angel,” or “it’s in the hands of the Lord,” were infuriating. For one thing, my mother was not a Christian, nor am I. I love the Jesus story, but it doesn’t resonate for me as the only true story, and it sure doesn’t help me feel better about my mothers’ death.

    Don’t say “there is a reason for everything.” 

    Then the cards began to come filled with familiar clichés: the worst was “there is a reason for everything.”

    That feels to me like a way to do a “wrap up” on something that is fragile, personal, and unknown. How do you know there is “a reason for everything?” It insults grief by trying to dilute it into a rational cosmic plan.

    You cannot explain, rationalize, or sum up my loss in a tidy little cliché. My reaction to those messages was not to feel more comforted, but to feel more isolated.

    Don’t talk about her “passing.”

    Talking about people who have “passed” feels like minimizing what happened and avoiding the word “death.” It is a tough word, it is final and irreversible and filled with loss. But it is a true word. It is what we have to manage, and the hugeness of the word, death, in its finality and brutality is what allows us to find our necessary grief.

    There were people who said things that did comfort me.

    1. I wish I had the right words, just know I care.

    2. I don’t know how you feel, but I am here to help in any way I can.

    3. Would you like me to bring you some enchiladas on Tuesday?

    4. What was this like for you? I’d love to listen if you would like to talk about it.

    Here is the most important thing for you to know.

    Each of our relationships has a bubble around it. Within that bubble is the history of what we have shared. Grief is a part of the human experience, and we grieve not just for the person who has died, but also for the part of our history they take with them.

    Losing a mother is a major life change regardless of what the relationship was like. But we don’t know what that is like for anyone but ourselves. When we assume we do, we belittle their experience and lose a chance to know them better.

    Although we may intend to connect with the other person, sometimes the opposite happens and what we say makes them feel worse. When we invite them to share their own experience, we help to break down the isolating walls of loss and inspire a true connection.

  • How to Enjoy the Holidays When Grieving the Loss of a Loved One

    How to Enjoy the Holidays When Grieving the Loss of a Loved One

    This post contains an excerpt from GETTING GRIEF RIGHT: Finding Your Story of Love in the Sorrow of Loss, by Patrick O’Malley, PhD with Tim Madigan.

    It was spring 1980 when my wife, Nancy, and I received some of the best news of our lives—she was pregnant with our first child.

    On a Tuesday morning that September, we found ourselves sitting in her obstetrician’s office. Nancy, not due to deliver for three months, had been awakened the night before by a strange physical sensation.

    She had wanted to get checked out, just to be safe. But after the examination that morning, her doctor said we needed t0 get to the hospital. Labor had begun. I remember how Nancy’s voice trembled.

    “Can a baby this premature live?” she asked.

    “I don’t know,” the doctor said. “We will try to buy time. He will be a pipsqueak of a kid.”

    Thirty-six hours later, on September 3, 1980, Ryan Palmer O’Malley was born, weighing a little over two pounds. You couldn’t have imagined a more fragile looking creature. He had been far from ready to leave his mother’s womb, yet there he was.

    In the first few moments of his life, I was aware of the great risk of loving my son, but I was powerless to resist. From the first glimpse of Ryan, I knew he would have a place in my heart forever.

    His early life was a succession of seemingly endless days and nights. We hovered over the side of his crib in the hospital, looking down at our boy who was hooked up to all this noisy equipment. His life was measured in minutes and hours. On several terrifying occasions, Ryan stopped breathing, and his medical team would rush in to resuscitate.

    All this time, Nancy and I yearned to hold him, but his frailty and the equipment made that impossible. The most we could do was touch a tiny finger, rub a tiny arm.

    Instead of cooing, the sounds around my son were the mechanical beeping of intensive care machines. Instead of that wonderful new baby smell, there was the pungent scent of antiseptic soap we had to use to scrub up before seeing him. Despite not being able to hold him, despite all the machines between him and us, we loved him deeply.

    Early fall turned to Thanksgiving and then to Christmas. Our son gradually grew stronger. One day in January his doctor weaned him from the respirator. We could now hold him without the tangle of tubes and wires.

    On March 9, 1981, our seventh wedding anniversary, we were finally able to bring our baby home to hold him, bathe him, kiss him, dance with him, feed him, and rock him. He smiled for the first time in those days. Though he was still fragile and underweight, we allowed ourselves to start imagining Ryan’s future. No parents loved a son more.

    And then he was gone.

    On Saturday night, May 16, 1981, we were treating him for a cold but not particularly concerned. We had been through much worse. But early Sunday morning our precious son suddenly stopped breathing.

    I started CPR. Ryan’s doctor and an ambulance were at our house within minutes. His doctor administered a shot of adrenalin to his heart as the medical technicians continued CPR. Nancy and I silently prayed as we followed the speeding ambulance to the hospital.

    The next several hours are a series of snapshots forever imprinted in my mind.

    • His physician coming into the waiting room with tears in his eyes, saying, “I could not save him.”
    • Holding Ryan’s body
    • Returning home without him
    • The heartbreak of our family and friends as we broke the news of his death
    • The dream-like, adrenalin-fueled rituals of visitation and funeral
    • The faces of all those who filled the church
    • The sight of his tiny casket by the altar
    • Seeing construction workers removing their hard hats as the funeral procession drove by
    • Leaving the cemetery on that sunny spring day

    I have taken off work on the anniversary of Ryan’s death every year since that first year. I go to the cemetery to think about him and the years now behind me. Powerful feelings rise each time I see my son’s name on the grave marker: RYAN PALMER O’MALLEY. It grounds me in the hard reality—this really happened.

    In my experience as both a grief therapist and bereaved father, the holiday season can be one of the most difficult times of the year for those grieving.

    Many who have experienced the death of a loved one wish they could lie down for a nap on October 30 and awake again on January 2. This season can be challenging when the shadow of loss is present.

    The collision between the cultural expectations of happiness and the personal reality of grief can create stress, confusion, and an increase in emotional pain for those who mourn. The gatherings of family and friends during this season may shine a brighter light on the absence of the one who has died.

    If this is the first holiday season after the death of a loved one, there can often be a buildup of anxiety, anticipating how it will feel to be without the one who is gone. And, even if the loss occurred many years ago like mine, the holidays are always a reminder of what was and what might have been.

    Confusion, yearning, exhaustion, sorrow, and all the other feelings that come with grief are absolutely normal during this time. Difficult but normal. Painful but normal. Grief is not a psychological abnormality or an illness to cure. Grief is about love. We grieve because we loved. Holidays may be a strong emotional connection to special times of remembering that love.

    Here are eight ideas to help you enjoy the holidays while also honoring your loss.

    Both And 

    Enter into this season in a state of mind of “both and” rather than “either or.” Sorrow does not exclude all joy, and celebration does not eliminate all sorrow. Yet, it can be confusing to experience opposing emotions at the same time or feel your mood vacillate between light and dark.

    Joy may transition into sadness in the blink of an eye. Contentment may suddenly shift into yearning. Both experiences have value because both are part of your grief story.

    Be present to the moments of enjoyment, and at the same time, respect your feelings of loss.

    Sights, Sounds, and Scents

    Most who grieve prepare themselves emotionally for those significant moments during the holidays, such as sitting down for a holiday meal and attending parties; yet, some triggering experiences can occur when you least expect it.

    A sight, sound, or smell may zip right past your defenses and cause an intense surge of sorrow. And sometimes, that surge may happen in public. To this day, certain Christmas carols I hear while shopping elicits a sudden sense of melancholy because of the strong identification they have for me with the first and only holiday season my son was alive.

    We knew our loved one in a shared environment that is full of these sensory experiences that can provoke feelings of loss in an instant because of this connection created from past holiday seasons. This is perfectly normal and doesn’t mean that you’re going backward in your grief. Value these moments as important connections to the one who has died.

    Social Splitting

    The transition back into your work setting and your social groups after a loss can create a strain because you may have to act better than you feel in order to appear socially appropriate. This social splitting can be exhausting. Add to that the cultural expectation of being “up” for the holidays, and the exhaustion may be compounded.

    This type of fatigue is normal. Monitor your energy, and be willing to moderate your social engagements, if needed. To recharge yourself from the drain of social splitting, spend ample time with those with whom you can fully be yourself and who will support you without judgment.

    Approach and Avoid

    Our most basic nature is to approach pleasure and avoid pain. Our more evolved nature can approach pain if we know there is an ultimate benefit in doing so. Our natural resistance to the pain of grief can create more pain.

    Be intentional about scheduling time during this hectic season to approach your pain. Create rituals that represent the unique relationship you had to the one who died, such as listening to his or her favorite music or reading a favorite poem.

    Light a candle or ring a bell to mark this special time of remembering and reflecting. Visit the cemetery or mausoleum if that provides a connection for you.

    I’m grateful to our Japanese daughter-in-law who requests each holiday season that we participate in the Japanese custom of taking food to the gravesites where our son and other family members are buried. Her ritual has now become ours.

    Seek Heathy Distractions

    In a season fraught with overindulgences, be aware of the risk of numbing the feelings of loss through unhealthy escape behaviors. Also, know that it’s not possible to stay in the emotional intensity of grief without some relief, so give yourself permission to engage in healthy distractions.

    The key to a healthy distraction is a behavior that allows you to pause your feelings for a moment so that you may come back, and be truly present to them later. My ritual of watching comedy holiday movies has served me well through the years.

    Reach out to a trusted friend if you’re concerned about harmful escape behaviors during the holidays. Ask if you can be accountable to them for these behaviors and if they will participate with you in heathier activities that provide you with some respite from your grief.

    Tell Your Story 

    My professional training taught me that grief is a series of steps and stages to work through, which will lead to a conclusion called closure. My experience as a grieving dad did not at all match up with this psychological model.

    Through my own grief and by working with so many who mourn, I came to understand that grief is an ongoing narrative of love, not an emotional finish line to be crossed.

    Stories help us stay connected to those who have died and help us create meaning about what we have experienced. Finding a place for that story to be received is an important part of the grief journey.

    Tell the story of your loved one as it relates to the holiday season to someone who listens well. Or spend some time writing specific memories related to your loved one and the holidays.

    Acknowledge Someone Else’s Loss

    Those who grieve want their loss and their loved one remembered, so consider making contact with someone who is grieving, as well. It doesn’t matter how long ago that loss may have been. Offer the compassion to others you desire for yourself.

    Compassion literally means to suffer with and calls us to enter into the pain of another. Listen with gentle curiosity and an open heart. Consider making a donation to a cause that is relevant to the person who is grieving.

    Be Forgiving 

    Let self-compassion replace any self-criticism as you do your best to balance holiday enjoyment with your grief. Be forgiving of well-meaning others who may try to help you with your grief by “cheering you up.”

    How you measure what’s significant and what’s trivial may have changed as you grieve. Patience may be needed when you’re in the midst of others during the holidays who experience the trivial as significant.

    As you reflect on your loss, you may also benefit from reviewing your history with the loved one who has died, and offering and accepting forgiveness for the human flaws you each had that affected your relationship.

    Remember always, you grieve because you loved. May you have peace and light as you embrace your story of love and loss this holiday season.

    Adapted excerpt from GETTING GRIEF RIGHT: Finding Your Story of Love in the Sorrow of Loss, by Patrick O’Malley, PhD with Tim Madigan. Sounds True, July 2017. Reprinted with permission.

  • Why I Was Addicted to Attention, Lies, and Drama

    Why I Was Addicted to Attention, Lies, and Drama

    I’ve done a lot of things for attention that I’m not proud of. I’ve created drama. I’ve bragged. I’ve exaggerated. I’ve hurt people. I’ve hurt myself. I’ve lied and lied and lied.

    No one wants to be labeled as an “attention seeker.” When people say, “She’s just doing it for attention,” they don’t mean it as a compliment. I knew this. And I knew that people said these things about me.

    And still, I couldn’t stop.

    I spend a lot of time around animals, especially cats. It’s easy to see which ones have experienced starvation. They have constant anxiety about food. They meow and meow when it’s feeding time. They scarf their portions down without breathing. If the bowl is left full, they’ll eat whatever’s there—even if it’s a week’s worth of food!

    I was that cat with attention. I could never get enough.

    But compulsive behaviors aren’t about what we’re consuming. Attention seeking isn’t about attention. Food addiction isn’t about food. Really, it’s about control.

    When you’ve been starved of something, you develop a fear of losing it. You begin to cling to every morsel of what you’re desperately afraid to live without. Survival mode.

    That’s what it was like for me: constant survival mode. I felt like, at any moment, I was going to be abandoned, left alone, forgotten. I fought to be noticed. Fought to be heard. Fought to be “loved.”

    But despite my constant attention-seeking efforts, I never got what I truly wanted. I never felt loved for exactly who I was because I never showed her to anyone! I showed the world the person I thought it wanted to see, and I used other people as characters in my personal drama.

    So that is the biggest irony: because I was so desperately hungry for love, I couldn’t have it. Because I so deeply craved attention, I repelled people away from me. Then, these experiences reaffirmed my biggest fear: there wasn’t enough. I wasn’t enough. So I’d grasp more, cling more, lie more.

    Too often, people talk about attention seeking like it’s a character flaw. I see it as an addiction.

    When we’re trying to fill a love-sized hole, it doesn’t matter what we’re trying to stuff into it: drugs, money, alcohol, approval, sex. If it’s not love, it won’t truly satisfy us. We’ll keep wanting more and more.

    My journey of healing my attention-seeking patterns has been long and painful. One of the most painful things has been realizing that most people weren’t reacting to me the way I thought they were.

    I used to brag loudly in public, imagining people around me admiring and envying me. Now, I realize that most of them were either ignoring me or annoyed by my antics.

    I used to stretch every accomplishment, imagining people respecting me. If it was two, I’d say five. If it was 100, I’d say 300. If it was one minute, I’d say an hour. Now, I realize that most people either didn’t believe me or used my lies to reinforce their own insecurities.

    I used to make a tragedy out of every pain and a drama out of every inconvenience, imagining people pitying me. Now, I know that most people either felt stuck in the cloud of toxicity that surrounded me (because of their own unhealed traumas), or they avoided that cloud like the plague.

    The world, I’ve discovered, isn’t quite the place I thought it was.

    I was so busy talking and talking, lying and lying, that I never sat down just to listen. And that is what helped me heal: looking within myself, looking around me, and embracing reality.

    Attention seeking, for me, was a kind of self-protection. On my journey of healing myself, I’ve found that self-love and self-protection aren’t the same thing. I had to remove my armor and my mask. I had to face the truth.

    Beneath my defense mechanisms, I found a fragile, wounded part of me that was traumatized by childhood experiences—by emotional starvation. But this part of me wasn’t fragile because of the wounds I incurred as a kid. It was fragile because I tried to protect it.

    After I got hurt, I tried to hide myself away. I tried to create an elaborate fantasy world to protect myself from rejection and abandonment. I piled layers and layers of bandages on top of my wounds, but wounds need air to heal. I tried to keep myself safe, but I ended up suffocating myself instead.

    I wasn’t lying and creating drama “just for attention.” I was doing it to survive. I was grasping for scraps of approval to replace my desperate hunger for real love, for authenticity, for happiness.

    On the outside, it seemed like I wanted other people’s attention. That’s what I thought I needed too. But what I really needed was to pay attention—to be able to just exist in each moment without struggling. To be able to look at myself without running away. To look at people without being afraid of them. To have peace of mind.

    Maybe you know someone who’s stuck in these patterns. Maybe that someone is you. However this applies to you, I hope to communicate one important thing: attention seeking is a symptom of a bigger cause.

    It’s not something to be dismissed. It’s also not something to be judged and criticized. It’s something to be accepted, understood, unraveled, and forgiven.

    Healing these patterns takes time. Every step along the way, it’s been difficult for me to invite reality to replace my delusions. It’s been hard to allow myself to be raw and open instead of trying to protect myself from pain.

    But this healing journey has also allowed me to enjoy real affection: from myself and from others. And that has been worth all the hard work.

  • We All Make Mistakes, So Let’s Try to Remember the Good

    We All Make Mistakes, So Let’s Try to Remember the Good

    Julius Caesar has long been my favorite work of William Shakespeare. I am drawn to the political intrigue, the betrayal, the powerful words of Marc Antony.

    One line from the play has always remained lodged in my mind:

    “The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.”

    The line often pops into my head when I feel unjustly persecuted or blamed. Shakespeare understood hundreds of years ago that human nature causes us to feel self-centered and unjustly targeted.

    While I recognize I am not now nor was I ever a perfect mother, I do know I was not a terrible mother. I never missed a school event. I made the dioramas. I read with my kids every night. I helped them prepare for no fewer than three competitive spelling bees.

    I ran school carnival booths. I made the calls to the principals and superintendents when unjust policies were implemented.

    My house was the spot where my son’s friends always came to hang out.

    I gave an epic Jackass themed birthday party when my son turned thirteen that remains legendary among his friends.

    While my ex-husbandwouldn’t often get up early on Saturdays, I never missed one of my daughter’s soccer games. I made sure I stayed involved in tennis, soccer, and swimming.

    I sharpened two pencils for my son every morning and set them out before he left for school. I put a sticky note of encouragement in my daughter’s lunch each day.

    I fought for them against abstinence-only education, ministers eating lunch in school without parental permission, and any other unjust issue my kids needed me to fight against.

    I worked on every college scholarship application with my daughter. I attended every college visit with her.

    She and I have been to dozens of Broadway shows together.

    I do not recount those events to receive accolades or praise. Millions of mothers do the same activities daily.

    Those memories are just some of my strongest as a mother. That is the reason for my recounting those memories. I remember the good about motherhood. The carnivals, the laughter, the vacations.

    No doubt my kids remember the bad more strongly. Because of my problems with alcohol, I remember a humiliating event where I chased my son trying to get him to try a drink in front of his cousin and friends. I know I got drunk the first day of my daughter’s freshman year and passed out that afternoon.

    I am sure they have multiple other negative stories about me. I began drinking in a dysfunctional manner off and on at age twenty-eight. I take responsibility for it. I’ve stupidly driven drunk. I’ve experienced the ire of both of my children in response to my drinking. I’ve spent years sober and spent months in relapses.

    Addiction appears in the DSM-V as a disease. I will fight it for the rest of my life, but I live in fear that the evil overtakes the good in the memories of those I love.

    The evil I’ve done lives on; the good remains buried. I recognize that is probably my own shame and self-pity surfacing, but I continue to feel the good remains buried.

    I experienced a similar childhood and understand now that I react to my mother in an equally unfair manner.

    My mom was the “cool mom.” She was the first one who would stand up for me or any other underdog. She was funny, edgy… My friends all loved her.

    Monetarily, I never wanted for anything. I grew up in suburban America. We went on vacations—nothing fancy: Tennessee, Arkansas, New Mexico. I had new school clothes and shoes every year. My mother never missed any event in which I participated.

    I remember the silly songs my mother would sing to me. I sentimentally keep a list of them on my phone. I remember my mother’s laugh. I am remembering the good. I want the good to live on.

    Like my own children, I will admit that it’s the “evil” I tend to remember more easily. I continue to fight that urge.

    My mother too battled with alcohol. She would get off work at 5:00 p.m. and disappear. I memorized the phone number of every regular bar she visited, every jail, and every hospital in the area. I called so frequently looking for my mother that I knew every phone number by heart.

    She drove drunk, picking up a friend and me from the movie theater, drunkenly yelling out the window. Meanwhile the grease she’d put on the stove to cook chicken at home had caught on fire.

    She passed out half-naked in my room when I was thirteen and a friend was spending the night. We had to try to drag her to bed. This event occurred after a special night of her hurling pornographic obscenities at a Craig T. Nelson character and a Jim McMahon commercial while watching television with us.

    She ran into a dumpster while driving home one night. She called us, but was so drunk she could not explain where she was.

    I am now conscious of the fact that I am guilty of that same Julius Caesar line regarding my mother. The good that she has done remains interred. The evil tends to run unfairly on repeat in my mind.

    My mother was a good mother. She was flawed, as I am, as we all are, but she was my biggest ally when I was a child.

    I am going to make a commitment to remember the good. I do not want it interred with her bones. I owe her the same that I hope for myself. Let my kids remember the good. Let that be my legacy. I owe it to my mother for the good that she has done to be her legacy.

    I cannot ever take back the hurt I’ve caused for my children, but I also know that I can strive to be better. That’s all any of us can do. We’re all only human. We all make mistakes. And we all have the choice to honor each other by remembering the best moments instead of focusing on the worst.

  • Don’t Lose Sight of the Big Picture: Spend Time with People You Truly Enjoy

    Don’t Lose Sight of the Big Picture: Spend Time with People You Truly Enjoy

    friends in the fall

    “Even if you are on the right track you’ll get run over if you just sit there.” ~Will Rogers

     How is this happening again?

    Lying in bed watching The Mentalist at 8 P.M. on a Saturday night, my mind begins to wander.

    A year ago I was so happy. I spent almost every night hanging out with amazing friends and now I’m here, alone watching TV.

    As my heart sank into my stomach, I shook my head, suppressed my feelings, and pushed play to start the next episode.

    A few years earlier I moved to Santa Fe, NM, a state I had never even visited before. Excited to start a new journey, I set out to meet new people and create a life full of amazing friends.

    Although that’s exactly what happened, the first few months were extremely difficult. I spent a lot of time trying to make new friends while having zero success. After a couple months, this went from frustrating to depressing.

    Luckily, I was able to solve the problem and learned how to make new friends from scratch. It was amazing. I was having some of the best times of my life.

    Every week I had friends inviting me to birthday parties, barbecues, camping trips, river rafting excursions, and typical nights out on the town. And when I invited people to places, like my New Year’s Eve party, people showed up.

    It was a high I’ll never forget.

    After an exhilarating two years in Santa Fe, I moved back to Huntington Beach, CA, the city I was born and raised in.

    I was excited for yet another new page in my life. Huntington is a beautiful city with great weather (and waves!). My family, best friend, and other great friends live here.

    Kim, my girlfriend at the time (now my wife), and I decided to have a long-distance relationship and I chose to save some money by living with my parents.

    The next year was a disaster.

    It might not have looked terrible from the outside, but I was eating myself alive on the inside.

    Even though I had friends in the area, I was only hanging out with them about once every two months. And about just as often, Kim and I would travel to see each other.

    But that was it. The only other people I hung out with were family members. And as much as I love them, this was not healthy for me.

    I may have seemed happy, but I was faking it. I was hurting. Instead of fixing it, I kept going with the status-quo.

    This feeling was very similar to the one I had when I moved to Santa Fe. A feeling of sadness, hurt, and longing that comes from a lack of spending time with people who make you feel alive.

    But this time was different. I knew I could make friends if I wanted to and I already had friends living here. I just didn’t make the relationships a priority like I should have.

    My laziness was striking me down and I got stuck in a comfort zone of my own making.

    It was easy to say yes and go out with friends when I was living by myself in Santa Fe. But living with my parents made it a little less appealing, which was enough to prevent me from doing it. I’d think to myself:

    I’ve already showered and I’m in my comfy clothes. I can hang out here with my parents, have a couple drinks, and watch this movie, or I can get ready again and meet up with my friends. Ah, I think I’ll just stay here tonight.

    That’s literally how many of my nights played out. And it was similar for the day time too. I’d decline an invite to go surfing because I already showered or because I was about to go to breakfast with my parents, something I easily could have skipped.

    When we finally moved Kim out here to Huntington, I thought my problem would be fixed. Instead, it was more of the same. Mexican food with my parents, cooking chicken piccata with Kim, staying home watching Prison Break, and trail running by myself in the wetlands.

    As much as I love hanging out with Kim and my family, I need that outside energy with friends who share some of my deepest interests and passions. So finally, after way too long, I made this realization:

    I need to spend more time with people who make me feel truly alive.

    My parents and Kim do fill a big part of that need. But I need other friends to fill the rest.

    I started making changes to my life that helped me meet new people and spend more time with existing and past friends.

    I joined a music production class. Kim and I played on a beach volleyball team with her coworkers and a separate flag football team with strangers. I also joined a soccer team.

    I started hanging out with my friends more. I’d text my buddy during the week and say, “Hey, wanna grab sushi Friday night?” I’d send another text to my surfing friends and say, “Surf’s supposed to be good Saturday. Who’s down?”

    On top of that, I’ve been reaching out to people I lost touch with. I recently hit up a friend who I hadn’t talked to in years and said, “Long time no see. Miss you dude. Hope all is awesome. You still running?”

    That text conversation ended with my wife and I scheduling a San Diego day trip and a twelve-mile running adventure for my buddy and me.

    I’ve even been getting together with friends I haven’t hung out with since high school!

    Ever since I put more focus and effort into spending time with my good friends, while still maintaining healthy relationships within my family, my life has improved drastically. I’m happier and more enjoyable to be around. Even better, I’m back to being my old, goofy self again.

    What steps can you take to make sure you don’t fall into the same trap I did?

    If you’re not careful, the same thing can happen to you. In the moment, it’s easy to stay home and watch Netflix because that’s easier and more comfortable. However, in the long-term that can be detrimental.

    Here are three steps you can take to get you on the right track:

    First, determine whether you have the right people in your life to keep you happy. Do you feel like you can be yourself around them? Do you feel free and alive when you hang out with them?

    Second, figure out if they are willing and able to spend enough time with you. Invite them to hang out and see if you can fill the free time you set aside for hanging out with friends.

    If you haven’t spoken to the person for a while, try pinging them first. Shoot them a text, a Facebook message, or even just comment on one of their posts. The main things you want to get across are that you miss them, you hope all is well, you’re curious how they’re doing, and you were thinking about them and wanted to say, “Hi.”

    If you’ve been in touch with them lately, just shoot them a message and say, “Hey, let’s get together soon. I was thinking of hiking El Morro this weekend. Interested?”

    It’s good to invite them to do something specific that you know they would enjoy. If you just ask to hang out, it might be hard for them to imagine what you would do together, which can make them less likely to accept. And if they do want to hang out but can’t or don’t want to do the original activity you proposed, they’ll likely respond with a different idea, still giving you a chance to hang out.

    Third, if your friends don’t have the time or you’d rather hang out with different people, it’s time to consider meeting new people. Join a photography class, sign up for a kickball team, find a book club, or attend a young professional’s social mixer.

    Go out into the world and meet new people. If you can find people while doing activities you already enjoy, even better.

    Once you understand how important your friendships are, you’ve cleared the first hurdle.

    From there, it’s on you to stay proactive to create and nourish the relationships that are so vital to your well-being.

    It might take a little more effort to pick up the phone, text your friend and schedule a hangout, or get outside and join that soccer team, but when you look back on your life you’ll be thankful you did.

  • Self-Love Means Never Saying “You Complete Me”

    Self-Love Means Never Saying “You Complete Me”

    “You can search throughout the entire universe for someone who is more deserving of your love and affection than you are yourself, and that person is not to be found anywhere. You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe deserve your love and affection.” ~Buddha

    A popular topic in the glossy magazines, learning to “love yourself” always seemed to me to be a self-indulgent first-world pastime.

    It seemed obvious that the commonly-repeated mantra “love yourself first” was just a sign of the times in a world where something like half of all marriages end in divorce. When I dug a little deeper I often found either a list of new spa treatments or a litany of new age catchphrases.

    All meaningless—that is until a series of failed relationships taught me the hard way why you have to love yourself first.

    I had always walked into relationships from the standpoint of something I needed or wanted. I wanted to feel valued and loved. I needed to feel that my struggles had meaning, and I found this in external validation. I craved for someone to stand by me and tell me that I was worth it.

    In my extremely busy and fast-paced life, I was surrounded by people so very lonely, starved of meaningful connections in a world of transactional relationships. Always the alpha-male, I craved a safe space where I could lower my defenses and be affectionate. A relationship became my way of getting what I thought I needed.

    For a decade of my life, this didn’t go well, and it certainly didn’t end well. It ended with me on the floor of my living room surrounded by pills and full of suicidal thoughts. But, after I picked myself up, this and many other truths revealed themselves to me.

    A need arises from something we find missing in ourselves.

    We need someone to tell us we’re important because we don’t feel worthy to begin with.

    We feel lonely because our lives aren’t full, and we’re waiting for someone to fill them up.

    We so crave those affectionate and reassuring words from someone we care about because we don’t feel pretty, smart, promoted—or whatever—enough. If he or she is a good mate, our need is satiated. This is why “you complete me” became such a widely expressed notion of the power of love. Unfortunately, that sort of thinking leads to dangerous places.

    We aren’t “complete” to begin with because of the very thing(s) we feel we’re lacking, or the inadequacy of our being.

    We make ourselves as attractive, accommodating, or desirable as we can to cover up these faults and fool an eligible partner into looking past our shortcomings. Eventually, we win, and then the prize is ours. And they both lived happily ever after. Except that rarely happens because that void always needs to be filled.

    We’ve told ourselves the story of our lives and convinced ourselves of the short (or long) list of things our partner can give us that will make us happy at last. But somehow it’s never enough, and when we get it, we want more of it, or something else entirely. Our demands to be listened to or supported or valued somehow seem to increase over time.

    And maybe we even become resentful. After all, we need to keep our partner fooled into continuing to see past our inadequacies, so we “hustle” for love.

    We have put so much effort into making ourselves attractive to begin with, and it’s very difficult to ever let the mask slip, lest he or she find the truth and see us for who we are. It all takes so much effort, and maybe we begin to think “It’s his fault I feel this way.”

    This is where coming into love from a place of inadequacy leads. But, when we accept ourselves for who we are, when we recognize our flaws but do not doubt our worth, we don’t seek wholeness in another person. Perhaps we even work on our perceived flaws, but we recognize these as suboptimal behaviors, not something wrong with us.  We do bad, but we are not bad.

    It’s still totally natural and healthy to have a set of desirable characteristics when we seek out that someone and boundaries for acceptable behavior, but this is a matter of choice, not need.

    When we enter a relationship from a place of worthiness and self-acceptance, we don’t hold our partner accountable for our shortcomings or expect her to fix us. We can focus on joy—which is happiness from within—rather than expecting or demanding that the other person supply it from without.

    After all, when we expect our partner to supply stuff to us in order to make us happy, crudely put, he or she becomes our dealer. Though of course it’s a bit more emotionally complicated than that, we are in a sense using the other person to fulfill our own ends, and guess what? He or she is probably doing the same to us. It somehow works!

    And what does it mean to accept yourself wholly, warts and all? What is it to say: “Maybe I let my jealousy get the better of me sometimes, but my heart is in the right place, and I don’t need anyone to prove that to me”?

    How is it that someone can say, “I’m responsible for my own happiness, and I want so very much to share that with another person”? That is loving yourself first, and that love has to stem from a deep place of worthiness.

    Love is many things, but one of them is total acceptance with no barriers. If we can’t feel that way toward ourselves, then how can we feel that way with someone else? What we do not accept about ourselves, we do not reveal to someone else.

    Love is also the most highly evolved, pristine form of connection, and connection is what gives meaning to people’s lives. This then leads to the false assumption that we need to be given love by other people in order to feel whole.

    In fact, the reverse is true. When we feel whole, we are able to love other people, and that is how we connect.

    This took so many years and so much heartache for me to figure out. When I looked back on all those failed relationships, though I typically still felt justified in some of the grievances I had, I took responsibility for the fact that it never would have worked out as long as I was seeking validation from another person.

    It would be nice and neat for me to say that now, possessed of this understanding, I found the one and am in the midst of my happily-ever-after. That’s actually far from the case! But, what I can say is that I’ve been in a couple of relationships since, and although their endings hurt, they in no way destroyed me or shook me to my core the way they had previously.

    Never again did I doubt if I was worthy of that kind of happiness or having those kinds of boundaries of self-respect. The grieving process happened, but it ended, and I remained who I was.

    To love myself first is to never have to say “you complete me” again, because I am complete just the way I am. It is to stop hustling for love and allowing myself to be loved. Far from being self-indulgent, it is such a humbling feeling, and it will set you free.