The Mercury – January 1, 2015
Ways to think about the New Year that will lead you into new dimensions of living that you design for yourself:
All behavior has meaning. Assess your behavior – your responses, your attitudes.
Try to see the behavior of others (good or bad) as none of your business.
Draw. Using stick figures of various shapes and sizes, draw your family according to the influence you perceive them to have.
Think about your patterns. Diagram your relationship traps and triangles.
Chart your position: how it’s changed over the years and how you’d like to see it modified in the future.
Use colors.
Give the colors meaning. Track the information-flow.
Until you become your own Chief Executive Officer and Human Resource representative in your own family you will not see the changes you’d prefer. While you are not in charge of you, someone else will be.
Keep your drawing private. You are looking for change, not an argument.
Everyone sees his or her family differently because we all live in different families – EVEN if we are siblings.
Allow yourself, and everyone else, the kind of grace you’d like shoveled your way. This is partly what it means to accommodate homeostasis (yesterday’s column). Allow for some degree of regression and failure on all of your parts.
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