Hello

I wanted to write about character building from the perspective of victim versus thriving.

I have been thinking about this for many years now, ever since people started to talk about being a survivor.  At first, I loved the term a survivor because it was not feeling like a victim.  But then after a while I started to notice that people who defined themselves as survivors kept having to survive.  What I mean is they seemed to keep finding themselves in situations that required they stand up for themselves and survive.  It was as if they could only feel strong in this specific equation of surviving.

Then I started to look at various terms that were used in this way and I noticed there were six Victim Scenarios:  Protector, Survivor, Martyr, Victim, Perpetrator, and my personal favorite Savior.  Some of these have more negative connotations, but the thing they have in common is to exist they require a victim for definition.  These scenarios of being in the world require victimization  in order to be defined.

Can you see how that works?  Let’s look at the more positive scenarios:  protector, survivor, savior – in order to be these there has to be a victim in the picture either to save or protect or the situation has to be negative and you have to survive it.  So although these are focusing the energy in the correct direction away from the negative and with an increased sense of self-esteem – the scenario is still one of victimhood.

I think the thing that we need to be developing is a thriving mentality.

If we could avoid the feeling of victimization through this increased understanding that I’ve been writing about we could sidestep these victim scenarios and move straight to thriving.

Victim versus thriving:  feeling like a victim decreases strength and self-esteem and yes feeling like a survivor can increase strength and self-esteem but only for that situation.  What seems to happen is that it has to be re-done over and over to continue to feel strong.  The strength and self-esteem are tied to the action of surviving rather than as part of the person.

However as a thriver the sense that whatever comes your way you will learn, grow, and build on it, is a sense of thriving in life  – it is connected directly to the person as a generalized, increased self-esteem.

Moving from a victim scenario to a thriver is a paradigm shift.  You can learn to not react to things that don’t matter, and know what to get angry about and what isn’t an injury.  And you can teach this to your children.  Spend a few minutes if you can, thinking about how you define yourself, what victim scenario you may be using, and what you may want to do to change that perspective of yourself into a thriver.

I’ve been writing about how to do this and I have more to say on this in future blogs.  Stay tuned.

See you tomorrow,

Beth

Hello

What is resilience?

It has to do with elasticity, rebounding or springing back.

Resilience is important to character and self-esteem.  It is the basic element in surviving the ups and downs of life.

The thing is that we can’t actually make sure nothing bad happens.  All we can do is teach our children, and ourselves, how to bounce back from the bad things that inevitably do happen.

From an emotional perspective resilience is the behavior that pushes us forward through our fear, anger, pain, frustration, or sadness/depression 

When thinking about the important things we want to encourage in our children, resilience is high on the list.  It’s the ability to take things in stride, to get back on the horse after you’ve been thrown, and to keep trying when you feel you’ve failed. 

An important component of resilience is to not be immobilized by a failure, loss, or mistake.  It’s being able to push on in the face of something fearful or difficult, as well as remembering when you were successful in a similar activity and generalizing  that success to the task at hand. 

An example of using past successes to create a new success is to link learning a new skill with the success of having already learned a skill.  Remind your child when he or she previously was able to go through a set of events that were difficult at first and then became easier.  This is especially helpful with new motor and developmental skills like reading, writing, starting a new school, or a new physical activity – “remember when you started gymnastics you were afraid of the balance beam but now after practice you’re very good at it – it will be the same with skiing, you may fall a lot but after practice you will fall less and feel more confident.”  You’re linking the success of the other activity to the new activity and providing the path to success – reminding them they already have the tools to do the task at hand because they have already successfully used those tools.

Having compassion toward yourself and your own mistakes, role modeling how to rebound is the most effective way to teach resilience.  Because children incorporate into their set of behaviors what we say and do, the more we can model resiliency the better their chances are of developing that characteristic in themselves. 

For the next few days observe what you are modeling to your children.  Is it perseverance and resilience or is it something different?  You can use the same technique to remind yourself that you have the tools to get through whatever activity or task that is difficult for you right now.  And if what you are facing is something that you have never faced before, try to break down the components of the task to see if you can make connections to other successes in your life.

See you tomorrow.

Beth

Hello

Having compassion toward yourself is a good thing to keep in mind when trying to get congruent and/or deal with angry feelings.

This is especially applicable for individuals who are perfectionists or insecure and can get immobilized by their own mistakes.

Compassion is a sense of understanding.  Here I am using it as a mindful compassion; seeing the bigger picture of why, how and where things may have gone awry.

Applying compassion in a situation helps the anger or insecurity become less palpable and more easily assuaged.

The stop, look and listen blog  talked about a process to get into the moment and become mindful about what has happened (or is happening) and question whether the feeling of anger fits with the situation.  Using the same process of mindfulness toward yourself can increase your degree of personal compassion.  This doesn’t mean you aren’t going to be accountable for your actions; you are in fact more able to take responsibility for your actions, by having a better understanding of what occurred.

Consider the last time you had a negative interaction with your child or partner.  Just as you might ask what stress process your child might be dealing with consider your own stress level.  Perhaps you’re sleep deprived or overly worried about something or in pain from an injury – you have a lower threshold at which you will feel frustrated or lose your patience.

If you can feel yourself losing a sense of control, compassion toward yourself would allow you to not push yourself beyond your means.  Give yourself permission to be more flexible – perhaps this is not the time to strictly hold the line on a rule that you know you will not be able to enforce.  This is even better if you know in advance that you are going to be stressed; having compassion for yourself is when you say no I can’t do that rather than pushing yourself beyond your means.  And if things have gone awry having compassion toward yourself allows you to recover quickly with renewed strength and resilience.

Knowing when to hold the line and when to be flexible, understanding the positive power of habits and the need for mindfulness, and having compassion toward yourself, these are all forms of balance in action and thought.  Being balanced is a natural state.  The more we practice using the tools of mindfulness the more we can feel when we are out of balance and act to return to balance.

See you tomorrow.

Beth

Hello

My favorite phrase to help me get into the moment is Stop, Look, and Listen.

It’s simple, directive, and unambiguous. Perfect.  When you want to get into the moment to increase mindfulness this phrase works like a charm.  Stop –  multitasking, Look – pay attention, Listen – to your inner voice and what’s happening.  Focusing in on the situation in this way allows for the process of interchange to slow down so that you can make a choice about the best action.  It increases your chance to get into a mindful frame of mind.

This is especially helpful with anger.  Anger has the ability to really take us out of our body, mind, spirit connection and move us into a fight or flight reactive position.  Anger is like our emotional/sensing alarm system.  A distinctive element to surviving dangerous situations is to have an early warning system that allows you more time to respond.  This is built in to our instinctive patterns of survival.

Like an alarm system in a home that gets triggered and sets off blaring, the human early warning system is loud and gets the individual’s attention.  That’s the purpose of intense fear/anger reaction, the adrenaline mediated fight, flight, or freeze system.  It works well.  It helps us avoid car accidents, catch our child as she falls out of a high chair, and determine our best defense when attacked.  The problem happens when it gets stuck on.  This can occur due to the type of danger or the time it first gets tripped in our lives, or some combination.

Fear is the original driver, and anger is the secondary maintenance.  These get intermixed and hypervigilance, wariness, or increased awareness develop, almost as a second nature in the individual.  And over time this increased awareness may lead to increased subjectivity and increased personalization.  This keeps the warning system going.  Much like the blaring alarm of a home intrusion when no one is there to turn off the alarm, the noise and hyperawareness of the intrusion heightens the response so the police have to come and check on the home to determine safety issues.  At some point someone determines the home is again safe and turns off the alarm.

The way that triggers affect the human psyche is that the alarm doesn’t really get turned off, so the individual is charged to react to attack.  We get angry when we feel some boundary has been crossed, spiritual, physical and/or emotional.  This is what our emotional/sensing alarm system is supposed to be responding to – a breach in our boundary system.  But triggers are not always actual breaches but left over from an original breach that was never cleared on our software.

Anger is like fire, fast and intense.  A way to turn off that alarm is to use stop, look, and listen – much like checking our a house alarm.  First stop, stop going on with the fight, or the situation as it is; then Look at the situation to assess what is causing the alarm – the anger – did that person mean to do/say that….is my child acting like this on purpose to get back at me…really look at the situation to see the focus of the anger.  Then listen – what could be going on here, this is where you might assess some of the basic needs issues – am I, or my child, hungry/sleep deprived…. and listen to your own voice – often we don’t know when we’re yelling just when the other person is.  We can use this technique to get into the moment to assess the situation and manage the control system to our emotional/sensing alarm system.

Stop, look and listen brings one right into the moment; better for parenting, negotiating, communicating, creating goals, and addressing our habitual reaction patterns.  Try using this over the next week whenever you feel anger come up or frustration and see what you learn.

See you tomorrow.

Beth

Hello

Mindfulness, being present, letting go of habitual reaction patterns, and reframing – all concepts that are meant to get you on a path of Instinctive Health.  And along with flexibility, these tools help to keep you remaining in or returning to balance within – so that your actions can be balanced.

In my blog Create Balance Now I wrote about paying attention to the experience of intuition versus fear or habit reactions and how those experiences sound and feel different in your mind and body.  If you remember, fear or habit reactions are loud and push to the forefront of your brain and feel instantaneous, and intuition is quiet, sort of in the background of your brain and you can easily ignore these latter physical and cognitive experiences.

I suggested that you pay attention to the quiet intuitive experiences making real efforts to focus on these and follow through with them.  And I also suggested that you question the fearful, strong, loud, habit reactions – to try to get yourself into a more balanced perspective of yourself or of a specific situation.

Focusing on these quiet impulses and ignoring the loud habitual reaction patterns opens the possibility of finding balance within.

Balance is a spirit, mind, and body thing.  It’s an intra-relational experience.  I’m using intra – not inter because it’s happening within, not outside of you.  In Chinese Medicine energy follows in a certain way from the most insubstantial to the least insubstantial.  The most insubstantial is Shen or spirit, next is Qi – energy, then Xue or blood.

For our purposes, there is a relationship between spirit, mind, and body that is similar.  It is also intra-relational, there’s a  kind of feedback loop – and they can affect each other.  To find balance or return to balance you can go at this structure in a number of ways.

Medicine in general attends to imbalance predominantly from a physical point of view.  Psychology goes at it from a cognitive, belief system, mind point of view; and religion focuses on spiritual systems and imbalances.  I think they are all important.  Addressing any one of these alone, while useful will not bring about balance within the system.

In order to effect balance within all these must be addressed.

Using mindfulness, being present, flexibility, and letting go of the habitual reaction patterns we can review how we spend our days.  Then we can connect with our instinctive knowing and attraction to health and focus on renewing our physical, cognitive, and spiritual instincts, creating balance within our eating, sleeping, exercising, thinking, relating, working, and rejuvenating, patterns.

To begin to find the balance within, or return to balance, do a review of your own internal systems:  sleep/wake cycles,  nutrition, breath, exercise/rest, work/learn/rejuvenation, prayer/meditation, group/individual time, and creative endeavors.

What are your patterns in each of these areas?  Where do you put most of your energy?  Where is your passion and your responsibilities? Where are you overbundled and where do you feel deficient?   Where do you feel angry, sad, and happy?  Are you expecting of yourself actions that are out of balance or out of sync with your internal character needs?

You can even think to earlier times in your life when you felt more in balance  – what things are different now?  Perhaps you were an athlete but you aren’t allowing that to have a place in your life now – perhaps you were an artist but now you have to focus on making money, so you don’t have time to draw or paint.

Think of it like a treasure hunt – you’re going to get clues that you’ll have to interpret and these will help you move along the path until you find the treasure of balance within.

See you tomorrow.

Beth

Hello

I first started to use mindfulness in a purposeful way in the early 90s when I was facilitating two hospital outpatient, day treatment programs for individuals with eating disorders.  It was the best antidote to the automatic quality of the eating disorder process.  If a person could get into the present moment in their relationship with food then she could have more control over what action she took.  She could engage her own inner strength to see herself with fuller clarity, and make present moment-to moment choices about the feelings and habitual reaction patterns underlying her disordered eating.

My favorite author on this subject is a Vietnamese Zen master named Thich Nhat Hanh.  He has written and spoken about “the art of living mindfully” since the 60s.  My favorite book of his, Peace is Every Step, talks about how to live mindfully in everyday life.  I often suggest it for couples to read when they are attempting to increase their positive communication skills.  Each of his vignettes offer new perspectives on how to interact in the everyday world.

Mindfulness can have the enlightening effect of shifting one’s perspective.  Often by reframing how your look at a situation you can then change your action in the situaiton.  Re-framing is a great term to describe the process of paradigm shifting.  A paradigm is a frame, a way in which information is inputted or interpreted.  When one re-frames then the information is inputted or interpreted differently – that allows for a change in action in relation to a situation, and in my experience an increase in a compassionate interpretation and action.

As an example, Thich Nhat Hanh’s vignette about “Hope” .  He writes that hope is important, because it can make the present moment less difficult to bear.  If we believe that tomorrow will be better, we can bear a hardship today.  But that is the most that hope can do for us- to make some hardship lighter……he goes on to discuss the tragic nature of hope…..since we cling to our hope in the future, we do not focus our energies and capabilities on the present moment.  We use hope to believe something better will happen in the future…..Hope becomes a kind of obstacle. (pg 41 in Peace is every step).  He reframes the concept of hope so that rather than helping to create the change, hope becomes an obstacle to our actual opportunities, capacities and actions for change in the present moment.

The thing is that we can only change what we can identify; and we can only use the tools presently available to us.  By taking ourselves out of the present moment (hoping) we put ourselves into the future (hope for something better to come) where we have no actual power.  Our only power over the future is in the present and what we do in the present.  How we act in the present can change the future but waiting for change (living in the future) puts us into a passive, unempowered role.

Living mindfully is the most empowering tool available to us for actual change.  Seeing our world for what it is and taking action with the strengths we actually have increase our empowerment.

So try this.  Try to figure out what thinking, or doing you currently accept as “truth” (a belief system – Like:  I am not smart, or I need this person to survive) that doesn’t actually describe you or your situation- and see if you can reframe how you look at that “truth” so that it allows present moment information, for real empowerment in your life.  Hint: it will be something that’s been around a long time, it may be something that you feel defines you, and you will be surprised.

See you tomorrow.

Beth

Hello

So lets look at this idea of mindfulness.

Being present and the release of habitual reaction patterns focuses us on being our best self by utilizing our 6 senses.  Have any of you picked up on the fact I keep saying 6 senses?  We have hearing, seeing, touching, tasting, and smelling.  I am suggesting that we come into being with a sixth sense of intuition similar to what Malcolm Gladwell tried to illustrate in his book Blink. We get gut feelings, hunches and intuitions about people, places, and even goals.

Hunches can actually begin to move us out of stuck working and living routines or situations.  They may at first seem like daydreams or fantasies.   Follow the information and a clarity appears that we need to change paths.  When something doesn’t feel right that’s a type of intuition – it is a sense, a feeling similar to the information gathered from our other senses.  This information is less available to us for analysis because of it’s right-brained nature.  It’s like a knowing but it doesn’t have the left- brained concreteness, language, and proof.  So much of the time most people ignore these feelings, until later when the “proof” presents itself, like the unexpected cold-front that requires a sweater left at home.

Being present and focusing on releasing habitual reaction patterns are ways to increase clarity.  To access the information coming in from our senses.  This information directs us.  In some ways we recognize this – if we touch something hot that sense directs us to remove our hand from that hot space.  When we sense that something isn’t right in our lives or in a specific situation that sense also can direct our action.  These are the nagging feelings that we are not happy at work or in a relationship or that something isn’t right with our child.  These nagging feelings, and inner knowings, when ignored can develop into depression, a sense of disconnect, and lack of focus.  In fact the lack of attention to the intuitive sense can at times force the development of the very habitual reaction patterns that we need to dissolve.

Getting on the path of mindfulness, of paying attention to and also acting on all your sense related information including your intuitive information requires a relaxed focus.  An increase in one’s awareness is necessary.  Just listening to the intuitive voice, the quiet voice in the background of your mind and then taking action that is a beginning.  I talked about the difference in the intuitive voice and the voice of fear a few days ago in the January 9th blog, Create Balance Now.

Sometimes the sense needs to be fine tuned or trained.   A great way to do just that is to get a magazine or several.  Browse through them.  As you are browsing notice what draws your attention.  Cut out the pictures that are attractive, and try to not put a lot of thought into the exercise – be open, and allow the different feelings.  Cut these out and create a collage.  Leave the completed collage in  a space where you can look at it each day and jot down in a journal feelings and thoughts that develop in relation to it.  This can give you a picture of what is going on in your unconscious.  It’s a conversation with yourself about yourself.  If you choose to do this with a focus in mind, a problem that you may want to resolve,  then it can be a way of clarifying a problem, and a solution will present itself in the collage.  This can be a fun way to access more tangible information.

Talk to you tomorrow.

Beth