Hello

A leading psychotherapist James Bugental (1965) suggested that the goal of therapy was to help someone discover his true nature, to become his most authentic self.  He focused on existential therapy and developed a theory and type of therapy that encouraged a type of personal transformation that entails letting go of specific patterns of relating with oneself and others.

Changing personal paradigms and personal expectations within oneself regarding how one is to feel, act, and interact with those in their environment is a difficult process as one take’s for granted the way in which he sees himself.  This sense of self feels like it is instinctive because it is second nature and an instantaneous reaction; indeed it’s just a habit.

The work in parenting is to remain connected to the authentic self, to decrease the unconscious habit reactions to the individual’s environment and to increase more instinctive, mindful, present moment responses to the environment.

The greater a parent’s ability to do this, the greater her positive effect upon her children to create this behavior as a way of being in the world.  This would result in present moment analysis of situations and interactions, mindful moment-to-moment decision-making.

Over the years those interested in discovering the authentic self have dabbled in Yoga, Qi gong, focused breathing, and meditation to increase their ability to remain in the present and let go of their attachment to specific outcomes to find their true, undiscovered, self.

The integration of Mindfulness and psychotherapy is a rapidly growing field as a way to address stress, anxiety, disease, and various negative coping strategies.  There is new evidence that these together can provide real benefit in these health arenas.

So what does it mean one’s true self, one’s authentic self?  This refers to a true inner nature that is covered by the roles and expectations layered over each of us as a result of living in society.  Unraveling and un-layering these to get to one’s authentic self requires focused, mindful attention and for many is one of the foci of therapy.

Of course if we could teach our children to not cover over their authentic self they could begin to develop it earlier;  find their right labor and right action in their lives before Jung’s Individuation period of the 40’s or Freud’s midlife crisis when one usually re-discovers what he has given up to meet the expectations of his environment.

They could directly develop it rather than have to re-discover it.

I encourage you to investigate these various mindful behaviors to see if you have an attraction to any of them:  meditation, focused breathing, yoga, Qi (chi) Gong,  or you can practice meditative walking, playing music, or singing.

Any focused ritual of quieting the mind to allow an empty space for information to present itself will provide an opportunity to rediscover or discover your authentic self.  We built a Native American style Medicine Wheel in our front yard and filled it with treasures from our walks in the mountains near our home.  At night we look for the patterns in the sky above as the constellations change, and sit in the moonlight and meditate on the problems of the day.  It’s a peaceful experience and my daughter has taken to it like a duck to water so to speak, especially when she feels out of sorts.

Often just paying attention to your senses in a mindful way; how things, taste, feel, sound, and smell can assist in developing a mindful approach to being in the world.

It’s the beginning of identifying our true nature.

See you tomorrow.

Beth

Hello

The Tower Card, how cataclysmic change can bring about transformational growth.

In the Tarot the Tower card represents cataclysmic change.  It is a symbol of something that happens in an instant, after which everything is changed forever.  I think of it as an aha experience, a powerful paradigm shift.

My first experience with the Tarot was in college.  My friend read my cards and predicted a horrible event.  She said that sometime in the next three years my boyfriend would be killed in a red car and that it was undecided but that I might suffer the same fate with him.  She went on to say that if it didn’t happen in the next 3 years then we had avoided the accident.  Pretty intense for an 18-year-old to hear.  I had no previous experience with psychics or Tarot.  I thought it was just a story; I owned a red car at the time which I traded in for a beige car the next year.

When I was 20 years old I had a profoundly difficult experience.

The man I saw as holding my future in his hands was killed in a car accident.  We had a fierce argument the night before he died.  Silly, ridiculous, unnecessary mean words with stomping off….  I left to visit a friend in another state the next day and was not with him when he went off-roading in his red truck that he had just bought several months before.  While away I had decided to take him up on his desire to get married and create our life together.  When I returned my Dean of Students told me he had been killed.  As you can imagine, I was in shock.

In one weekend I went from seeing my beautiful life in my imagination going on into infinity of joy and happiness to seeing nothing but eternal gray and all of that future falling off a cliff into nothingness; a powerful mini-internal cultural revolution.

How I incorporated this experience into my worldview is what could be interpreted as transformational.  My innocent belief in the perfectness in the world changed into an understanding of my own strength to weather the im-perfectness of the world.

First, re-entering the world to develop a new view of my future required forgiveness of myself and my boyfriend. Forgiveness of myself for the things I said just before he died.  Forgiveness of him for dying and leaving me.

Second, I had to make sense out of this bizarre change in fate.  I incorporated the concept that life is connected.  Recognizing that the fight we had may have been what saved my life – I would have stayed and been in that truck if it had not happened.

Third, I had to understand the experience such that I could trust enough to love again without or at least through the fear of loss, with an understanding of the impermanence of life and the permanence of love.

I have written about how we should try to learn from joy and that suffering isn’t required for growth.  I have written about how we don’t need to look for adversity to teach strength to our children that adversity will find us regardless.  This is an example of adversity finding me and teaching strength.  It happens.

For me it was the connection to the joy and the desire to create positive meaning out of the experience that was transformational, not the horrible event.

How we choose to respond is what allows for the transformation – that is where the issue of choosing joy, and forgiveness, and seeing the figure/ground perspective is useful.  The transformation is to reconnect with a deeper connection to oneself and one’s internal strength with increased wisdom.

I read this and I sound like I am always going for the positive and it is true but don’t be fooled there is a place for aggressive protectiveness too.  It’s the focus on the positive within yourself that keeps you sufficiently connected to observe true evil that must be eradicated when identified.

I invite you to look at your own adverse experiences and see what wisdom you have derived from them.  If it is something that makes you less strong then look at how you can re-frame and reorganize how you incorporate the truth of that event.

It can help you to change your relationship with your own power so that you can change how you teach about power to your children.

See you tomorrow.

Beth

Hello

So my friend has been giving me a hard time about the words intention, attention, perspective, and perception.  She thinks it’s too many words to describe be present or pay attention. 

Here’s the thing, I think being mindful is like seeing in 3-D, seeing in several dimensions at once. 

When I first started to do injections into joints I had to learn all the anatomy of those joints.  When it came time to do the injection it was as if I was seeing in that 3-dimensional space in order to get the fluid exactly where I wanted it to go. 

When working as a therapist with families or couples seeing in 3-D is fundamental to being able to get the whole picture from the two (or more) skewed perspectives offered.  You have to be able to interpret what is and isn’t said as well as the energy and force of what matters to the various participants. 

And when I started taking pulses in my oriental medicine training, I was taught to feel depth, quality and speed of each of the 12 channels but I also felt the emotion that went with the pulse.  One of my teachers told me that wasn’t typical.  So this concept of seeing or receiving information in 3-D may be a natural one for me. 

I think seeing in 3-D is essential for real, full communication and right action.  And unless it’s natural it’s something that requires awareness about how to do it and lots of practice. 

The words intention, attention, perspective, and perception increase your awareness and focus you onto the space in a 3-dimensional way. 

Intention focuses you in on what you intend, what you want/desire or what the other intends, wants/desires. 

Attention focuses you in on the tone, loudness, word choice, meaning and emotion as well as whether you and the other have the same meaning for words and/or actions – it pulls you into the present. 

Perspective gets you into the figure/ground aspect of the interaction and allows for paradigm identification and paradigm shifting. 

And perception has aspects of all of the other three but in a more whole-istic fashion.  It allows for mindful understanding and mindful action.

It’s like looking at a situation, relationship, or problem from a 360 degree perspective, breadth as well as depth.

So when you are thinking about a situation or a relationship start to use these words as guide posts to increase your mindfulness awareness of yourself and the other(s) involved and see if you don’t get some surprising answers about what may be going on in those situations. 

You have to use your intuitive sense, your observations, questioning skills, and willingness to listen and act in a mindful present moment way.  Practice applying the whole picture to the situation.

See you tomorrow.

Beth

Hello

So what do you do when your intuition says hmm this doesn’t seem right but you can’t really prove your intuition instinct?

I’ve been talking about getting out of unconscious habit pattern reactions and focusing mindfully on the present and the whole picture – seeing the figure and the ground.  Developing your intuition, and trusting it, is key.

Intuition is that quiet voice that says bring the umbrella it’s going to rain when the skies are clear and blue.

My running partner is my dog.  We have been running together for a long time.  Then just before Christmas he hurt his knee and had to rest.  After three weeks of resting he went into what the vet called congestive heart failure.  Crazy, how does that happen, running everyday for 4 miles then boom congestive heart failure?  Well we knew he had a valve problem and a slightly enlarged heart so it’s understandable  from that perspective; and he is 15, so there’s that, but still it was surprising.

Many difficult interactions with various vets for a number of ridiculous reasons ensued.  His heart was triple enlarged with a slight degree of fluid in his lungs by ultrasound and x-ray; his pulse was between 150 -170 (120 being the high end of normal for dogs).  He had a serious mitral valve prolapse; he couldn’t get the blood to his brain and he was having syncope;  finally we’re at a specialist and she was following her statistics and numbers and based on these she wanted to put him on a high dose of lasix.

I sensed something was wrong with this medicine, because his kidneys were weak and I knew it could make his kidneys fail and he didn’t have that much fluid in his lungs.  I know a lot about alternative medicine for humans and I tried to get her to give me fuller information to help me decide the best course of action.  But she took the I’m the expert position and wouldn’t fully communicate with me.  I found that instead of her relating with me in a collegial way, my expertise was challenging to her.

When it came time to treat him I decided to trust my intuition that this medicine was the wrong medicine for my dog and I gave him 1/4 of what she suggested.  It turned out even that amount ended up creating a further destabilization for my dog.  Luckily, I found a much more amenable vet who seemed to understand the subtleties of intuition in treating patients.

But here’s the kicker- if I had ignored my intuitive sense of my dog then it would have killed him.

Intuition is a function of a mindful approach to living.

Knowing yourself, knowing the environment and acting on that knowing in a mindful, present moment way.

Even though the studies indicated it was a reasonable choice I had a bad feeling about the medicine.  And the vet was caught up in the ego of being the doctor and couldn’t compute the intuitive information that I brought to the circumstances.  I had a knowing that there was some piece of the puzzle that wasn’t being interpreted correctly – I didn’t now what that piece was – but I knew that the medicine was not the best medicine for him.

Intuition is some part knowledge from the universe like Jung’s collective unconscious, and some part observation of how something is out-of-place, and some part knowing.  It has an imprint quality and it comes in wholes – it is the answer with the picture and the explanation all at once.

It’s a knowing not a feeling.

Learning to trust your intuition requires a few things. First, you have to hear the quiet inner voice.  So if you’re good at ignoring those nagging voices/senses you have to shift that so you listen more acutely and more often.  Practicing some type of meditation or breathing exercise like Qi Gong, or Yoga is helpful to develop this.

Second, you have to be able to distinguish between fear/anxiety and intuition.  Fear/anxiety internal voices tend to have an intensity and loudness to them – they break through whatever is going on.  They push through to the front.  These are usually not intuition; these are unconscious habit patterns.  If you feel immediately triggered it is more likely that rather than any sense of intuition.

Intuition is quiet and not forceful and it usually doesn’t have an urgency or any other emotional imprint with it.  It’s like a quiet whispering that has substance and neutral certainty to it.  It can have a nagging quality to it.  I know I have used the statement I have a bad feeling about this as a reference to intuition but it isn’t really a feeling it’s a sense/knowing without emotion.  It’s a quiet certainty.

Practice listening for that quiet inner voice and taking action based on it.  And conversely practice not acting on those fearful/anxious impulses.  See how you change as a result.

See you tomorrow.

Beth

Hello

We want our children to be strong and have the will power to get through things and move toward their goals.

But I’ve noticed that parents tend to try to break willful behavior; this seems to have a more pejorative connotation.  And it may be in response to an expectation from the social group around them.  Society has a preference for perfect mannered children that don’t go against the grain.

If your goal is to develop internal strength, positive self- esteem, and resilience, I suggest this is not a good idea.

Remember in the early years it’s a lot about power, and how to manage it.  If we diminish their connection to their own desires and sense of power too early it’s really difficult to get that sense back.

It’s a matter of moderation.  It’s a negotiation of internal and external needs and developing a way to mediate between these two arenas – over-control leads to submissiveness and timidity and a truncated view of himself while under-control leads to a lack of empathy and an inability to work with others and an inflated view of himself.

We have to develop internal strength and external flexibility and I submit that it’s actually willfulness that is behind the push through behavior you see in athletes, leaders, and entrepreneurs.  The goal is to guide the willfulness behavior so that it serves to offer tenacity rather than diva behavior.

My parents sent me and my brothers to these great private colleges.  They wanted to raise leaders.  They wanted us to get the opportunity to learn how to think through problems on our own and make connections in ways that were innovative and creative.

It worked we each developed strong thinking skills and developed great leadership qualities – and we made choices they didn’t always agree with since we made decisions based on our own criteria.  It also meant that we didn’t just do what they said.  We didn’t take their advice without considering other options and coming to our own conclusions.  We argued with them and went on our own courses – which they sometimes perceived as dangerous and downright wrong.  This was very frustrating for them.

They wanted us to be strong and stand up for ourselves but not necessarily to them.

I’m sure an experience of be careful what you wish for…  but the reality is we do tend to want our children to do exactly what we say while simultaneously we want them to be strong in other situations – standing up for themselves and what they believe in.

The modeling we do about how we can tolerate their working through their power issues as they develop a sense of themselves is paramount for their success at being independent and interdependent in the outside world.  We have to offer the container and guide their willfulness in positive directions.

For internal strength, a sense of self and empowerment, innovation, creativity, and leadership willfulness and will power are required.

The non-pejorative, healthy aspect of will – fullness is being full of will.  Having one’s own ideas, and a plan for completing them.  Feeling strong and not wanting to give in – fighting for what you believe in and believing in yourself even when others don’t.  Being able to push through and persevere even when people who matter to you don’t agree with or believe in your plan.

It’s a description of inner strength.  We want to have that.  We want our children to have that.  But we may not see that we are actually diminishing their chance for that by squashing that willful behavior.

Here’s what I suggest, try figuring out how to guide that willfulness.

You can use the stop, look, and listen techniques I’ve written about to evaluate what may be underlying the aspect of the willfulness that is not serving then.  Then guide them to redirect that while aligning with their strength.  Get connected to what is driving it and when it is coming out.  Is it related to a talent that needs to be developed?  Is it something that has to do with their emotions and sensitivity?  Are they being over challenged or under challenged?  When they feel discounted does it flare or when they’re really excited about something?

The answers to these questions will give you a few clues to what the willfulness behavior is communicating.

Then once you figure that out reinterpret or reframe the willfulness as strength and start to teach how to use that strength in a growth promoting way by connecting it to whatever you discovered about what it’s communicating.

And try to keep your own reactions and expectations out of it.  By that I mean try to respond to their power issues from the figure/ground perspective.  Remembering it’s a sense of will and how they’re working through their power issues to define themselves.

Of course you can use this as a way to understand a willfulness aspect of yourself that you find has an underlying negative component that doesn’t serve you too.  Unlink the strength part from the negative component.  Remember to apply compassion and understanding toward your child (or yourself) as you work through this.

See you tomorrow.

Beth

Hello

I was at a conference recently, for therapists and teachers, and the lecturer really wanted to make a point that aggression is good.

It’s part of nature and therefore we should not get involved in the aggression between children.  By avoiding getting involved in their little struggles we’re allowing them to deal with adversity.  And adversity makes you stronger or the old adage what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger – or it builds character.

Okay, I guess I get his point.  But I think his points are accurate while his conclusion flawed.  Probably equally as flawed as the one he is reacting against – the overwhelming lack of allowing competition and going so far as to demonize children’s aggression.

My belief is happiness heals and it encourages growth.

We can’t control all aspects of the environment so that adversity doesn’t present itself in our child’s world.  But not acting so that we can make them stronger is a flawed approach.

To say that trees are able to grow through the adversity of fire or that animals don’t get their feelings hurt when other animals are mean to them misses the basic issue.  Human’s brains are different in some ways than these other living entities and the strengthening power of adversity seems to be more of a hardening and pulling in energy rather than a growth promoting response to life.  It’s more survivalistic less empowering

Yes trees grow through fire, but they don’t grow bigger as a result of the adversity – they just grow.  And there is evidence that other mammals that are separated, isolated from their group show signs of stress just as humans do.  In fact many do not survive without their group when in environments stressed by social aggression and negative environmental factors.

It is more accurate that trees grow bigger with the things that nurture their growth – good soil/nutrition, water, sunlight, a supportive environment/not too crowded/space – the roots grow deeper and the branches larger and more full of leaves and fruit, with these perfect conditions of positivity.

Some plants actually have a set structure that they require a fire to cause new seed growth.  Just as necessity is the mother of invention, having to resolve an adverse situation for humans may allow for creative resolutions and new growth.

However, for optimal growth, things that really encourage growth are better at creating inner strength in our children.

Being given the best of happiness, love, support, guidance, opportunity, and safety does actually increase internal strength, self-confidence, curiosity, perseverance, creativity, and self- esteem.

Interestingly, the myths and all the stories of heroes are filled with children who have grown up with adversity – loss of parents, abuse, abandonment, persecution, with occasional support from strangers, teachers or far away fairy godmothers.

This doesn’t mean that adversity makes you stronger. The stories are meant to give strength to those who must work through deficits and adversity, recognizing that it is an eventual experience in life.

The best growth promotion remains happiness and joy, support and nurturing.

That’s why the more you focus on strengths and limitations, paradigm shifting, choosing joy, and responding to your children in the present moment from a wholistic (figure/ground) perspective – the more they grow bigger, stronger, and fuller.

Just notice what you see with yourself – its right there.

See you tomorrow.

Beth

Hello

There is a belief that suffering is required for growth.

If what we believe is what we see, then this is an equation that requires suffering for growth.

If the concept of energy is that we create what we attend to then learning through joy allows for more joyous experiences and is a paradigm shift that may allow for a change in our experience of suffering.

Choosing to learn through joy may result in less suffering – not that less bad things will happen to us, but rather that our experience of those bad things might be less dualistic.

Ok that sounds way too easy.  All this time we’ve been suffering to learn or just suffering and it turns out all we had to do was change our attitude.  No way that’s true – right?

Turns out it may be.

Think about paradigm shifting and all that stuff about intention, attention, perspective, and perception.  How we see the world is what we attend to, what our foundational beliefs are, and how/what we perceive others are trying to communicate, and whether we feel safe enough to remain in the present to really interact with the other.

Think about the child dealing with her peer’s power issues; she could feel victimized or she could respond by increasing her understanding of that individual and the relationship.  Maybe she would choose to hang out with someone else until the first girl could be more inclusive in her playing-style – not demonizing the girl or victimizing herself in perception.  She’s learning to be a thriver rather than learning to be a victim.  Learning through joy rather than suffering – her interpretation is to focus on internal strength rather than power over.

If we believe that we have to suffer in order to learn, that things of importance need to be difficult, and that we have to really get knocked out before we really learn – well then it stands to reason that that will be the life we will lead. 

We partially create our experiences by our habit reaction patterns and fear paradigm perceptions.  It’s only through being neutral we can then interpret data without bias.

Mostly it’s pretty difficult to keep bias out of the equation so I like to put that joyous spin on the whole thing – rather than feeling suffering as the teacher I suggest we may want to go for joy.

Most of our religions actually have a bias toward suffering as being the best teacher.  So it makes it difficult to make this internal shift, because our cultures have this suffering=learning imprint.

Even so, I encourage you to try this yourself.  Make a statement to yourself that you’re going to learn through joy and focus on the positive of situations as much as you can.  Look for where you connect with someone so you can feel less defensive in your interaction with them – you can still disagree and hold to your principles but you don’t have to feel you are in a negative position when trying to achieve what you feel is best.

And as Steven Covey of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People would say go for win-win or no deal.  His book is for managers and business negotiation but I use it all the time in marriage counseling because he sets up a set of principles for negotiation that serve all parties involved – and it results in a reduction in resentment at the end of a negotiation and an increase in true connection between parties.

His perception is that compromise is always a function of one individual or group giving away something that matters to them.  That is not true negotiation.

Figure out what matters to you and don’t compromise that away – then you will always feel win-win or no deal.  Back to the example of the young girl – she chooses no deal – to play with someone else until the power relationship is not power over with the first girl.  This is neutral and doesn’t lead to victim scenarios.

See you tomorrow.

Beth

Hello

When I was in junior high school I had a positive experience of connection and community.  I was involved in the student council, music, and worked on the newspaper.  I had very positive relationships with several of my teachers and had a nice group of friends at school.  I participated in a competitive athletic focus outside of school which provided me with a sense of security not connected to the school environment.

This was a time that is one of those positive memories set into my harddrive to remind me about how to re-direct my life toward success when I am in a less hospitable environment.

High school for me was just that –  an inhospitable environment!

I had a number of painful experiences of bullying by a clique of popular girls who used their power to isolate and mislabel me  – strangely this was significantly nuanced so that I was also seen as a popular girl by those outside the clique, even while their misrepresentations of me were held as truth.  In addition to these relational bullying experiences I had several physically bullying and abusive experiences which I endured without assistance from family or friends.

Having been victimized I felt the only positive course of action was to be a survivor.  It seemed the most powerful response I could have developed in reaction to these experiences.

Overtime, I have discovered the effect of survivor scenarios not only in my patients and clients, but also within myself.  It is better than feeling victimized.  It allows for an increased sense of power but it remains related to the action of surviving so keeps a person stagnant.  It is less than feeling like a thriver.  Thriving is where true growth happens.

Surviving mentality keeps you treading water, which Is CLEARLY better than drowning, but after a while it seems you’re stuck in the same place.  Much like the action of treading water you stay afloat but in the same place.

This is where the issue of power over versus empowerment becomes more tangible.  The survivor is fighting the control of the power over.  The thriver feels empowered and therefore can focus his efforts on getting out of the scenario toward a better situation.  In the treading water metaphor, thrivers swim away to shore with spaces of treading water to catch their breath and regroup their energies.

So the need to survive is necessary but the focus is on thriving – moving away from the situation and transforming it toward growth.  A certain degree of internal strength and power is required for this action – what I call resilience.

There is a really great book called Odd Girl Out by Rachel Simmons that talks about the kind of relational bullying that goes on among girls beginning in preschool and intensified in high school.  It gives a lot of examples of different types of bullying and the effects.  And in subsequent writing she has discussed some of the ways to help de-emphasize this issue in various environments.

According to the theory of what helps people be thrivers instead of victims, I had a number of great things in my life to help me move through and away from the bullying experience.  I had a very close relationship with my brother that helped me to feel connected and supported even though I couldn’t talk to him about my experiences.  I enjoyed school and learning and felt successful intellectually.  I had a connection outside of school – athletic- which allowed me to feel successful and powerful.  I had a spiritual connection which drove my perception of other people’s actions.  And I had a previously successful school experience including positive relationships with teachers so that I could repeat that if I made efforts to do so.  And I had a generally optimistic personality style – just how I came into the world.

Even with these I felt traumatized by these experiences and had a number of things to work out around power issues in the years that followed high school.  But the important point is that I had resilience and was therefore able to work out these issues.

The important things to bring to your child’s life (or your school, or healing experience if you are an educator or counselor) are a sense of community.  Make sure that people stand with the individual who feels victimized to decrease that sense of isolation, intention. So pay attention to the social aspects of learning not just the academic.  And remember that bullying behavior in the beginning is a style of developing a personal relationship with power so help guide that development without demonizing the early bullying person, intention.

Normalize difference – yes you’re smaller, yes you’re younger – what’s cool about that (they can usually tell you what isn’t cool about it) – reframing the perspective (paradigm shifting) of these and creating internal strength – especially starting with preschool and grade school age kids but throughout their  learning years. Increase an internal understanding of her limitations and her strengths, seeing this as a whole experience.

Offering connections in several communities:  school, athletics, music, art, religious or spiritual communities, perception.  This allows for him to see that he can make good connections and allows for successes in various environments.

Point out and help them create positive memories of successful problem solving experiences, so they have an internal foundation of resilience – a history of having gotten through something difficult with success, perception.

And support the optimistic personality style.  This is something that seems to be hardwired into our personalities so if you have someone who tends to be pessimistic it will be harder to increase their resilience – however the above tools will help.

And be present and available to your child.  Try to keep your power issues OUT of the equation so they don’t develop problems through osmosis.

Ok, so that’s a lot of information.  See if you can incorporate some of these tools in your world.

See you tomorrow.

Beth

Hello

When thinking of power I distinguish between power over and empowerment.

I think empowerment is our only true power.  Sure power over seems strong, it even feels strong, but it is based in an interior weakness.  It’s  the kind of power that is only connected to the other; without the other to control there is nothing.

I think the only real power we have is the power over ourselves – empowerment.  It feels like stability and inner strength, resilience, something that you can depend on when there is no one else around.

I like to think about this from the perspectives of intention, attention, perspective (paradigm), and perception.

When I wrote about the issue of bullies to buddies and treating someone who is bullying you like a friend – I noticed the people who worked with humans in certain kinds of groups, like therapists, teachers, and leaders, found the concept accessible and useful to access.  But those who worked in competitive groups found my suggestions unacceptable.

My focus is on increasing personal power so that others cannot have control over you – in such circumstances for the most part that keeps you out of dangerous, life threatening situations.  And gives you the inner strength to think fast on your feet to get out of dangerous situations that come upon you.

Then there are the situations where the constant debilitating effect of bullying breaks down an otherwise strong person – like we might see in school, or groups or between domestic partners where there is an isolation of the victim from the group.  In this instance it is the isolation in conjunction with the constant bullying that breaks down the individual’s ability to see himself powerful or able to protect himself.

This bullying may or may not be physical but regardless it has a powerfully negative effect on the person’s self-esteem and therefore on his empowerment.  In this situation simply standing with the person being bullied will actually change the energy and the outcome effect of the bullying, both on the group and on the individual.

By shifting the isolation component you are shifting intention, attention, perspective, and perception for the aspects of the group witnessing the bullying, the bullied person, and those moving to stand with the bullied person.

Then there is the situation where bullying is a form of control but from the perspective of keeping the group in order or the order of the group sustained.  That’s what we see in corporate organizations and high school cliques and politics to some degree.  This also uses a type of isolation or labeling to control the group-mind to be against the identified outsider.  This is used to control the group power so that there isn’t room to question the behavior.

In this latter instance the whole group may need to break down in order for a real sustainable change to occur in the bullying style.  Here I find that an eye for an eye or reacting defensively because you’re being attacked really feels like the right thing to do but doesn’t usually result in the desired outcome.  I find that changing the game works better – not arguing the position of the bullying person but shifting the discussion.

It is here that the issue of hate is so strong.  Hate doesn’t actually overcome hate – education, understanding, acceptance and love – these things can transform hate over time.  Treating your enemy like your friend is a metaphor for understanding how you have to change the interaction and the response in order to get a changed response from the person who is bullying.

Again it is a function of intention, attention, perspective, and perception.  These are paradigm shifts and mindful action in the now so that action or inaction make statements about the problem of bullying as a form of power over another to increase your power over VS  empowerment as a sense of internal power- the ability to protect and support yourself under various conditions.

Changing our intention, attention, perspective, and perception of this problem includes understanding that it is a form of developing a personal relationship with power.  If we could attend to this early and help our children develop inner strength and resilience – we can also help them relate to the world and their feelings in a different manner.

So I suggest thinking about a situation where you feel powerless and use a paradigm shift to evaluate how you can shift your relationship to your power in that situation.  Or if it is another that you see being bullied just try standing next to them – see if a change in the environment changes the energy.

See you tomorrow.

Beth