January 2010

For some of us, there is an unwritten rule, a standard code of conduct, if you will, that prevents us from admitting when we are wrong. In the face of a question or accusation, usually our first instinct is to go on the defensive. Generally speaking, most conflicts we have with others occurs when we are both trying to be right. Following our unstated code of conduct, we defend our postitions even when to do so is not in our own best interest.

Our position can be one that makes us miserable and unhappy, but we cling to it because of our desperate need to be right. The cost of this behavior is pretty simple to identify. Our addiction to being right denies us joy, peace, contentment, happy relationships and fulfillment. That’s a hefty price to pay for unhappiness. But, for a brief moment, we get to feel self-righteous and superior, even if we are all alone.

What do you think would be possible if you could simply admit that you are wrong when you are? Would the sky fall? Would the world stop turning? Would you die? No, no and no.

Defending a position at all costs is a dead end road. But it is good for some things. It’s a safe bet that this behavior will lead you to indulgence in all of your favorite excuses and will keep you stuck.

An unwillingness to admit when we are wrong does not serve us if we want to grow and transform our lives. We use all of our valuable energy to hold onto this old behavior and have none left to cultivate new behaviors and perspectives that will set us free from a painful past.

Take time to notice what your need to be right costs you in terms of energy, relationships, peace of mind and happiness.  Think of something that you’ve been fighting to be right about and consider letting go. Be willing to see how you contributed to the situation and take responsibility for it.

After all, would you rather be right or be happy?

I’ve got a great way to create an instant shift in the way we experience life. Take the week off! I don’t mean being absent from work, family, friends or other aspects of our daily life.

What would be possible if for just one week, we stopped listening to our negative internal dialog? What if we took the week off from making ourselves and others wrong? What would be possible if everything going on around us is merely “interesting?”

Beating ourselves up mentally and emotionally is a habit that is seriously self-limiting. Often, the current of our internal dialog is so powerful that we give up on ourselves, others, life in general and we just exist in a fog of monotonous lack of self-awareness. We live a life of nothing special.

Take this week off! Here’s an assignment. Take a few quiet minutes and write down all of the negative things you can think of about yourself, all the ways you make yourself wrong, all the ways you feel like a failure. Then, look over the list in a detatched way. Take the “Hmm, this is interesting,” approach.

Next do two things. One,  reframe the negative as a positive, for example “I’m lazy” might be reframed as “I know how to relax.” Step two is to imagine yourself saying these internal judgements to your child. Think about it. Would you ever tell your child or anyone else’s that they are fat and lazy or stupid and clumsy?

The fact is that many of us would treat a stranger on the street more kindly than we treat ourselves. We would have more compasion and understanding at the very least. Yet, we treat ourselves in some very heartless ways.

Do it…take the week off!

I couldn’t sleep last night, so I turned on what I thought would be mind-numbing television. I landed on the program “intervention.” I’ve seen it before, but something about the people featured last night seemed all too familiar.  It was their pain, their deep emotional pain.

I’ve experienced deep emotional pain many times. Because of this, I often work with those who are in emotional pain. There is something in having lived the experience that helps me help others and that helps me.

What I’ve learned is that the pain we feel won’t kill us, but our strategies for coping and avoiding our pain has lethal potential. Drug and alcohol use and abuse are not uncommon strategies and we all know by now that drugs and alcohol can kill us, or if not, destroy our lifestyle and relationships to the point that we are at risk of no longer wanting to live.

But what if we choose a coping strategy that is intangible? What if we create default behaviors, beliefs and thoughts that may help us avoid experiencing pain directly,but actually keeps us in some other form of those feelings we are trying so hard to avoid?

Denial, arrogance, victimization or anger are just a few of the ways we can find to cope. If I had to choose one that I see most often and the one that causes the most suffering, I would have to say it is that of victimization. Once we become victims of anything or anyone, we have abdicated responsibility for our lives and give up all of our own power. Making ourselves a victim hurts and is guaranteed to keep us stuck in our own personal hell. There’s no other way to say it.

The good news is the victim mentality truly is “all in our head” and we have the power and responsibility to change our minds any time we want to do so. There is no master manipulator who is placing disempowering thoughts in our minds. We do this to ourselves.

Being a victim is also a great excuse to never try, to never take personal responsibility for the condition we find ourselves in. As long as “it” is someone else’s fault, we can simmer in our own self-righteousness until we cook our own goose, to use an old phrase. We remain, poor us…if only…

It’s not a crime or shameful to experience dark emotions such as grief, sadness, vulnerability, shame, anger or hopelessness. These are all a part of our human experience. We, alone, to the best of my knowledge, are the only creatures who are imbued with the unique ability to experience emotions. We may not like feeling them, but it is inherent to our species. We will feel pain, we can count on it. It may be uncomfortable, but we will not die.

When a moment of darkness falls over me, I like to close my eyes and visualize floating in the ocean, just off shore, just beyond the break water. The waves come, but as I relax and do not resist them, they raise me up on the backs of their swells and roll beneath me on their way to shore.

There will always be the rise and fall of our emotions. That’s what it means to be human. It’s what we do with them that determines the lives we live. We have emotions, but we are NOT our emotions. Intervene on your own behalf the next time you feel about to be over-taken by your emotions. Close your eyes and surrender to your experience. Trust me, you’ll live to talk about it.

In life, we all find ourselves in situations that we’d probably choose to avoid if we could. We think things that are unthinkable. We resist our reality, deny that we have any choice over the life we find ourselves living and we totally deny the parts of ourselves that we reject, instead, projecting them onto others in the form of judgment and blame.  When ever we can look at someone and say, for example, “My mother is selfish, insensitive, arrogant and ignorant,” we are passing a judgment and projecting.

Following Jung’s theory of the Shadow, this indicates aspects of our own persality that we just can’t accept. We possess these qualities, but we make them wrong and deny them, using incredible amounts of energy to resist them and keep them hidden away from ourselves and others. The problem with resistance is that it virtually guarantees that we will create more of whatever it is that we resist. It’s like a universal law of some kind. It’s something we should all be taught in third grade, like multiplication. I didn’t coin the phrase, “What you resist, persists,” or “What you can’t be with won’t let you be,” but they sum it up in an annoyingly trite but true way.

I was crocheting some baby socks for my newest granddaughter a few days ago and working with very fine, delicate and twisted yarn. I’d pull and untangle a little at a time, enough to make the next few rows. Then, I’d get to the knots again, and push and pull here and there, trying to loosen the knot just enough to keep crocheting a few more rows. It was difficult to discern which fragile string I should pull to loosen the knot. Push, pull and wiggle this one, wiggle that one…maddening! The more I pulled on the knot, the tighter it became. The tighter it became, the more stuck I was in the process. I repeated this process over several days, even thinking about starting at the loose end of the yarn and winding into a ball, in other words dealing with it, but, of course I didn’t do that! That would be actually dealing with the dang thing.

Eventually, I had to admit that the more I pulled on or resisted the fact that there was a knot in my yarn the more it drove me crazy and kept me from moving forward with something I actually enjoy doing, creating something for someone I love. I finally accepted the fact that I was going to have to stop trying to push past this knot and deal with it. As long as I resisted it, it existed and really annoyed me. As long as I couldn’t be with it and deal with it, it wouldn’t let me be. And with all the power of my humanity, I managed to project onto the yarn! It was stupid, flimsy, stubborn, stuck, hard to work with….hmmmmm.

It was a process to loosen the knots and look at the problem through the eyes of acceptance, but there would be no forward motion until I did. As I worked through the tedium of the process, I realized that this knot was actually a gift. It gave me the inspiration for this blog and what I think is a great analogy.

We always have the choice to let go of our resistance and embrace the unembracable. Now, that’s a thought worth thinking.