(Video) We’ve Forgotten How to Breathe

Today I am going to encourage everyone to take a deeeeeep breath and exhale long and slooooow. Let’s do it, just three times.  {Did you know statistics say that more than 80% of you will read that, but you won’t stop and take that deep breath?}

You don’t want to be a statistic, do you?

There’s so many things we can do to nurture and take care of ourselves. We “know” these things in our head {we know them in our hearts too!} but we don’t often do them. Why don’t we do them?

Why don’t you do them?

Just like you might not have taken that breath up there, statistics tell me that you probably won’t click “play” on that video either.

We’re being trained to live our life in sound bits, with our 8 second attention spans – we scan what we read and we click “next”.

We’re so “busy”, we don’t make time to watch something that might make our day, we can’t slow down to notice what’s working and we’ve got no time to turn what we know, into what we do.

Our brains are mighty consumers of information, but we’ve forgotten how to breathe.

PS/ The video above was created by  film maker, Andrea Dorfman, and poet/singer/songwriter, Tanya Davis. It’s one I have posted before because its lovely and it reminds us that a living a healthy, meaningful, wonderful life is not contingent on having anyone in particular join us.

I hope you watch it and I hope it creates a 4:34 space in your day to breathe.

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Your Point of Power

I’ve been paying attention to the emails and post comments following my last few posts and decided it was a good idea to write a post about power, our power.

Last week I wrote a post, The Hard Question: What do you really want? The post was about different kids of “support”, specifically the difference between “skinny support” {validation and commiseration, no questions asked}  or gutsy, juicy, genuine support of the sort that believes {straight from the heart, all the way believes} you deserve to move forward and experience health, healing, and happiness?

At the end of my post I asked, “What do you really want?” hoping to encourage my readers to consider the kind of support they look for and how they feel about the support the receive. However, as is often the way, the comments (and emails I’ve received) are tuning into something else, and are more about people’s heartfelt wishes in respect to estrangement (thank you all for sharing!)

          “I want to see everyone who has played a role in my own estranged family                            situation to take responsibility for his or her role in creating it…”

         “What I want most is to be accepted by my family.”

         “I want my son and grandkids in my life. I want my granddaughter in my life. I                  want  the brother, sister, and parents I grew up with in my life. Of course, all                        these things should be with the stipulation that they all like me and accept me                      again.”

“I want the rest of my family to see how manipulative my brother is.”

“i.d love to see my adult children.”

“I really want people to understand what I’ve been through and be more supportive.”

There’s nothing wrong with any of the desires that people have expressed, they are sincere and genuine. It is what it is.

Do I have the power?

What I want to encourage people to think about today, is their point of power. The things they can control and the things that they cannot control. Essentially the easiest way to look at this is, “does what I want depend on another person to think, feel, believe or do something different?” If the answer is “yes” – you’ve got a problem.

Back to my weight loss analogy from my post How Do You Heal? If someone tells me that the thing they most want is to lose 20 pounds and the way that they hope to lose those pounds is contingent on someone or something else changing, I am going to challenge that.

What would you think, for instance, if someone told you, “I want to lose 20 pounds so I am going to write letters to my member of parliament calling for a ban on all fast food restaurants?” How about if they said, “I want my sister/husband/father etc. to lose 40 pounds so I can lose my 20 pounds.” Or what if they said, “I want people to move my legs for an hour everyday so that I can burn extra calories.”

Of course these examples are a little absurd, but I hope they make a point. We wouldn’t be holding out much hope for that person to lose their 20 pounds if those are the sorts of things they planned to make it happen.

Control the things you can

If we want to move ourselves forward from our estrangement experience, we’re going to have to get real. We’re going to have to have a good look at the things we want and the ACTIONS that are most likely to create the results that we want. We’re going to have to ask ourselves, “What are the things I can do, all by myself, to move me closer to the way I want to think, feel and live?” 

If our success is dependent upon someone else doing something or changing something, we are essentially at the mercy of something we have no control over.

This is one of the biggest reasons why people who are estranged get stuck and stay stuck. The have valid desires, things they really want to see happen, and they can’t make them happen. They can’t force it. Their health, well-being and happiness are firmly held hostage by what other people do or don’t do.

The natural fall out of this is people feel powerless, hopeless, frustrated and angry because they want what they want, and they also have no way to make it happen.

Rather than looking at what they want and asking whether they can make it happen, all that emotional guck  {powerlessness, hopelessness, frustration and anger} is either projected outward to the people who aren’t doing what we want them to do. This has the unhappy follow on effect of often decreasing other people’s desire to do the things we want them to do and creating even more distance.

Or we internalize all the emotional guck and we feel terrible about ourselves, “What’s wrong with me?”, “Why don’t people love me and care about me?”, “I must be unworthy or unlovable”, “why can’t I make my family get along?”

Accept the things we cannot change

It’s difficult, I know. We have a vision, it seems like a good and healthy vision to us. We can’t understand why everyone doesn’t share our vision and give us what we want. We think everyone would be so much happier if they did.

Here’s some gutsy, juicy, genuine support for you.

You cannot control other people. Stop making your health, happiness and well-being be about what other people do or don’t do, say or don’t say, feel or don’t feel. You can’t win. You won’t reach the goal. Your life will be hijacked by things you have absolutely zero power over.

You can control you. You are your instrument of change. You are your hope and your future. You are mighty, you are vast, your power is of epic proportions – as long as you focus on yourself.

It’s time for courage

You’re going to need to get ruthless about your goals and the things that you want. You need to write them out where you can see them and then check and see whether they are something you can do something about. You are going to have to call on your inner wisdom and figure out the difference.

Make your time and effort count. Think carefully about what you want. What can you do? What can you change? What are the things you can control that would make a difference?

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How Do You Heal?

“How you do anything is how you do everything.”
–  T. Harv Eker

I’m not trying to be clever with the question, “How do you heal?” It’s a really pragmatic question.

If you are trying to move forward from your estrangement experiences, how are you doing it?

Here’s a few things clients and readers have shared with me:

” I read your blog” (thanks!), “I see a therapist”, “I read books”, “I stay away from my family”, “I write in a journal”, “I talk to other people about estrangement, like friends and other family members”, “I leave doors open”.

No judgement here – whatever works. My question is: does it / is it really working? How do you know when you are moving forward? How do you know if you are getting to healing?

Evaluating progress

When we speak about moving our lives forward after estrangement, we don’t talk about measurement, but measurement is, in a sense, everything.

If you wanted to lose 20 pounds I’d ask, “What are you going to do to lose the weight?” People might tell me. “I’ll cut back on carbs” ,”I’ll exercise three days every week”, “I am ditching sugar” . Whatever their method of choice, I’d want to hear what they planned to do to achieve their goal.

When someone tells me their strategies to lose 20 pounds, we can evaluate their results, using those methods, week by week. Are you making any progress? It’s pretty clear cut: how are your clothes fitting, or hop on the scale, let’s see how you’re going.

But I’m not overweight, I’m estranged

Would it surprise you to know that moving forward from estrangement is not much different? In fact, it’s not different at all. We don’t use a bathroom scale to measure forward motion, but there are other ways we can determine whether what we do is working, or not working.

People who are estranged, who are sick and tired of being sick and tired of how estrangement hijacks their lives, need to have the same clarity. If you don’t want your life hijacked by estrangement, what are you doing, what are the ACTIONS, you are taking to change things?

What would you think if someone told you they were going to lose weight by reading a website or blog? Or by reading a book? Or even by seeing a therapist or coach?  I think we’d all agree that if someone wants to lose 20 pounds they are going to have to do something more concrete, more connected or aligned with their objectives and more ACTION oriented if they want to create that 20 pound weight loss result.

Encouragement is great. Support is wonderful. Inspiration is … well … inspirational! But encouragement, support and inspiration won’t create results by themselves – we create results, and we create them through ACTION.

Moving forward from estrangement is not a hit and miss exercise. There’s some well established, tried and true methods to help people move their lives forward, post estrangement. These methods are based on ACTION principles and they are the methods I used to move myself forward to find healing, and they are the methods I use to help my clients to do the same.

We have every right to live without chaos and pain. We may not think we have choices. But we do.

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The Hard Question: What do you really want?

Here’s what I want

As a therapist I make decisions all the time about which clients I will work with and which ones I will refer onward or decline to work with {I don’t actually work with just anyone}. All of us have people we work more effectively with – all of us make choices about the best, most effective use of our time. I do.

I choose to work with clients who are genuinely committed to their healing, who are ready, willing and able to move forward from estrangement, whether that means putting their energy into reconciliation, or choosing to  move forward without reconciliation. I’m supportive, I’m encouraging, I’m compassionate and I’m not interested in helping people wallow.

A lovely reader recently described my work as “encouraging and honest….no fluff….she keeps it real.” I loved that. That’s my mission. Help people heal. Keep it real.

What do you want?

What are you really looking for? Skinny support  {validation and commiseration, no questions asked}  or gutsy, juicy, genuine support of the sort that believes {straight from the heart, all the way believes} you deserve to move forward and experience health, healing, and happiness?

Can you take honest feedback or do you think it somehow diminishes your suffering? Do you seek out feedback? Do you use it to make decisions about what you are saying, thinking, feeling and doing?

You’re estranged. Everyone reading here is. What is it that you really want?

Think about it.

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Unhelpful Help

Does it help?

It’s nice to feel validated. It’s nice when people tell us that of course we are right. It’s nice when people support our feelings and thoughts.

It’s nice when people listen to our stories {it’s especially nice of them to listen to our stories when we tell them over, and over and over}.

It’s nice when they accept us, warts and all. It’s nice when they are “on our side” and it’s nice when they are outraged on our behalf. It’s nice when they hug us when we cry.

What’s not so nice is when we use support to validate our right not to move our lives forward. When we seek out support and vent just enough to reduce the emotional intensity, so that we can stay where we are, doing what we are doing. It’s not so nice when our supporters are unable or unwilling to give us clear feedback of the sort that makes us take a look at ourselves and encourage us to make life affirming choices rather than wallow in the mud choices.

Support is not so great if it keeps us reviewing our past; who said/did what without encouraging us to move forward and seek out better. Support is not so great when it is a giant bitch fest about what everyone else said and did. Support is not too useful when it makes us feel even more agitated, angry, hurt, sad, frustrated and alone. Support really sucks when it encourages us to be a victim.

Here’s something sad.

Many of us like “skinny support”. We like unconditional acceptance {no matter how much we are hurting ourselves in the process}. I talk about this in my post, Is Unconditional Regard and Acceptance A Little Over-rated? We don’t want to be challenged. We don’t want our story to be set aside {even when we are sick to death of telling it}. We don’t want to hear feedback, we don’t want to be encouraged to seek out better things for ourselves and we don’t want anyone telling us we need to change.  We want a free pass to stay stuck.

That’s not support. That’s enabling.

As a professional “supporter” I can tell you that providing real support is incredibly hard work. It’s challenging. It means that sometimes people you really care about and want to help, will not like the things that you say.

Support is not all commiseration and validation.

Sometimes it’s pointing out things people are really unwilling to hear. Sometimes they get angry, they cry, they stomp around and stomp out.  Many of them will run straight back for another dose of “skinny support” and they will stay stuck. It’s easier to wallow than it is to fly.

Some of those people, however, are ready for something different. Some of them are ready to fly.

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