1. Has the support, trust, and the encouragement of the school community even when unpopular decisions become necessary.
2. Doesn’t have to combat or interpret an internal political minefield within the immediate leadership team, teachers and parent community in order to get meaningful work accomplished.
3. Is sufficiently aware and respectful of the school’s history yet does not allow it to compromise the school’s future.
4. Is not surrounded by “yes” men and women who have lost their capacity to think and who, in their blindness, can foster significant disruption in a school community.
5. Identifies the inevitable “lunatic fringe” existing in every parent community and can therefore effectively resist their agendas, ignore and expose their rumors while remaining aware of their proclivity to disrupt and damage learning communities.
6. Is not engulfed by manipulative parents who use money and status to implement their will or have their children recognized.
7. Is not too busy to have meaningful, daily contact with students.
8. Knows the most dissatisfied parents in a school community are usually those who are already unhappy at home.
9. Does not sacrifice family or personal life for the sake of the school, knowing that success at home and school are inextricably connected.
Empowered is the school principal who:
Useful Relationship Habits
Some of the following suggestions might seem overwhelming. Many people have found them useful in getting relationships into a healthier state:
1. Try to stop “engineering” relationships. Allow a natural flow to develop. Avoid restricting or restraining what has natural development. Try not to push what has no natural development. In other words, allow and trust natural process.
2. If a relationship has life it will grow without pushing. There is a difference between attending to a relationship (all relationships need attention) and forcing a relationship.
3. Allow others room to move toward, and away from you. Forced closeness is not closeness. Forced space is not space.
4. Cutting off from a person or a relationship is seldom helpful. A cut-off is still reactive behavior and the person from whom you have cut-off is still in a powerful and influential position in your life.
5. Offer forgiveness quickly and freely, before it is asked of you and even if it is not.
6. Tell people about the good feelings you have for them.
7. Thank people who positively impacted you.
8. Try to see the world through the eyes of others. Try to see the world through the eyes of your children.
9. Try to listen more than talk. Define yourself and not others.
10. Try not to do things for people they can do for themselves.
11. Try to develop an early detection mechanism and speak out clearly when you see things going awry in relationships. Remember that “big problems” play hide and seek with us before they arrive.
12. Try not to live from a platform of guilt. Recognize how guilt has found expression in your life and deal with it in more appropriate ways.
13. Try to remove “you need” and “you should” from all conversations. Assuming any person knows what someone else needs or should do is usually fundamentally disrespectful. Allow others to be free of your unsolicited advice. Relinquish any agenda for others, especially those closest to you. THIS DOES NOT APPLY TO PARENTS REARING YOUNG CHILDREN.
Copyright,1998 / Rod Smith, MSMFT
Desperate seekers of romance will probably not find a good thing
Desperation, hunting down romantic love as if it is the most important thing on Earth, makes you live bait for unhealthy attachment. It will propel you to seek love for all the wrong reasons and in all the wrong places. The person who is desperate for romantic love is unlikely to be able to identify healthy love and get it confused with one of love’s many counterfeits.
The desperate for romance ought to not go looking for it.
Desperation fuels unhealthy connection.
The anxious, hyper-aware vibe produced by your vigilant search will attract he or she whose attention you really don’t want.
Desperate people attract equally desperate people. Despite the whirlwind excitement and romance that might ensue, the relationship will self-destruct leaving both people worse off than before they met.
The desperate person is encouraged to immerse him or herself in a community of honest, healthy friends (and remain cautious about frequently verbalizing the pangs of his or her romantic dilemma for this can wear very thin). Then, having become less desperate about finding a partner, less anxious about being alone, less “need driven,” a healthy potential partner may walk through the door seeking little more than high quality friendship only to find your healthy disinterest very appealing.
Early signs of an unhealthy alliance – avoid intimate relationships with people who —
Letters consistently pour in from men and women in unhealthy relationships. I think often of how much pain could be avoided if people were simply willing to see the warning signs before marriage, before children, before hearts harden and before bitterness sets in. Here are some, of course not all, of the early warning signs that a relationship will sour short of a miracle. Although cumbersome, I have used “he/she” on each occasion for neither gender appears to be without guilt when it comes to distorting intimate relationships:
He/she does not respect his or her parents.
He/she lies about “little” things.
He/she is in debt at a young age.
He/she sees people as expendable.
He/she gets angry very quickly with waiters or servers of any kind.
He/she feels entitled to respect he or she has not earned.
He/she is financially, morally, and sexually unfaithful, and appears unconcerned about the importance of personal integrity in his/her life.
He/she opens your mail, snoops in your business, and thinks you should have no secrets between you.
He/she speaks for you and tells you how you “should” feel, think and speak.
He/she tells you that you are stupid and that he or she knows you better than you know yourself.
He/she believes most other people are idiots and often says so.
The saddest letter I have received in 5 years….
“Sorry to trouble you, I have been hurt so badly I have forgotten how to love. Can you help?” (Letter printed in full from a woman reader).
In several years of writing this column, and consequently receiving thousands of emails with all manner of situations described, your brief letter might be the saddest I have received.
Your growth will begin when you are ready to assess your role in your own hurt condition. Do not think I am blaming you for your own hurt. I am not.
Rather, I am challenging you to see that you did perhaps enter a relationship somewhat blindly. You probably offered too much, too soon, and you probably inappropriately trusted someone without sufficiently searching your own head and heart.
Troubled relationships almost always offer warnings along the way and avoiding these warning signs is often very costly. While you are indeed hurt, I’d suggest you are probably not too damaged to love again.
Before you embark on trying to love again, I’d suggest you take long-leave from intimate relationships for at least a year. In the meantime, send me much more information about what you have endured for it might be that everything I have said thus far, could prove to be totally incorrect.
All problems can become oportunities if we refuse to be victims…
“My daughter’s move several years ago from South Africa to Australia, although very difficult at the time, has done wonders for our family. I have had three visits to her. Her brothers and their families have been to see her, and the cousins are connected through photographs and memories and phone calls. As I was leaving for the airport for my most recent trip, my granddaughter (4), coached me about the plane, what to look for and what to do in when I got to Australia. I have seen that my family, although spread all over the world, have become citizens of the world. All the pain of the separation is worth it when we meet and do get to spend time together. Although many families are separated by oceans and by many miles and regret the distances and the moves, I decided to see it as an opportunity rather than a problem.” (A grandmother reflects in a conversation)
Encapsulated in the observations of this grandmother is the essence of moving beyond thinking and feeling like a victim. This woman has grasped the fact that, given time, reflection and courage, all mishaps, all problems, all family issues, can evolve into possibilities, into blessing and to the opening of doors.
My parents are critical of my husband…..
Reader: “My parents are very critical of the way my husband treats our children. I hear it (from them) all the time but they never say anything to him face to face. My husband is a strong and good father who doesn’t let our two children get away with laziness or without playing their part in the family. He is a really involved dad and we are very happily married. My mother tells me she thinks he is too strict and that the children will resent him when they are older. I don’t think this will be true. Please help.”
It is unlikely your children will resent their father if he is as you say he is. Tell your parents you will no longer participate in conversations about absent family members. Talking negatively (sometimes even “positively”) about someone who is not present (and therefore able to participate in the conversation) has a name: it is called gossip. Your account of your husband portrays a wonderful man, husband and father. Suggest to your parents that your husband be present for any conversations where his name is mentioned.
A friend gave me an invaluable gift….
An oil painting (right) of my youngest son and me…………..
Here I was closing my classroom for the day and getting ready to gather my children and walk home — and a mother of a lower school boy, Audrey Krause, comes up to me and places this beautiful painting in my hands.
Nathanael — almost 4 years old — so safe; his head on my shoulder.
I am a truly blessed man.
My boyfriend threatens to “smack” me…
QUERY: My boyfriend and I are engaged and live together. He is faithful and always helpful. He wants marriage and children. When angry, he is insulting, verbally abusive and has threatened to “smack’ me. He then calms down and asks for forgiveness for the hurtful things he says. Although I am established, confident, and have good friends, the accumulative insults make me feel worthless, and sometimes I feel he does mean what he says. I cannot take his moods and verbal abuse any more, regardless of how great he is when he is “good”. He has previously promised the problem would not happen again.
RESPONSE: Unless this person gets “outside” help his episodes of anger will only escalate. When they occur, believe everything he says, and act accordingly. Leave the home, get protection, and never blame yourself for his outbursts. If he says, during the “apology phase”, “You know I don’t really mean it,” you must say, “Then do not ever say it.”
Verbally abusive people try to change the language to suit themselves, and the victim is supposed to adjust accordingly. You appear to have a lot to lose if you leave this man. You have whole lot more to lose if you stay.
I get a lot of mail about affairs…….
In the search for intimacy an affair can be is very seductive. By seductive, I mean that the affair removes us from reality and appears to offer something the marriage does not appear to offer.
The best time to end an affair is immediately.
You are on dangerous ground if:
1. You have become isolated from everyone who was formerly close to you – even if those who are close to you do not know it.
2. You cannot believe you have gotten yourself into such a complicated mess or how “low” you have gone in the search of meaning. There are moments when you are filled with self-disgust.
3. You are tired of playing hide-and-seek with life, love, joy, friendships, and your emotions. There seem to be no “straight lines” anymore. Everything is more complicated because so much is under-cover.
4. You have times when you wish you could wipe out whole portions of your life: your “pre-affair life” sometimes and, at other times, your “affair life.” You are literally trapped between two worlds.
5. The rest of your life (when you are parted from you affair) feels as if it is “on hold” or is a bad dream.
6. The irrational nature of your affair has taken over your life and many parts of your former life (the open life you once knew) feel uncomfortable and unmanageable.
7. Memories of you past life (before the affair) haunt you through music, photos, conversations and inexplicable connections that pour over you from time to time.
8. You have lied about so much you cannot tell the difference between what is fabricated and what is not. Your own lies are believable even to you.
difficultrelationships.com 