Backbone — a metaphor for courage. Your literal backbone keeps you upright. It keeps you standing. Your metaphorical backbone symbolizes your courage. I’ve met many people “slump” through life and stand for very little, people have been successfully filleted by themselves, by life’s trials, or by others. Spineless people are “easy meat” for high-maintenance, low functioning relationships. Access your backbone and shimmy up your spine. Love it. Strengthen it. Enjoy it. Deploy it.
2. Creative Brain
This is the part of your brain where you can think about thinking. It’s where you appreciate art and humor. It’s your realm of infinite possibilities. It’s your spiritual mind. It’s NOT your explosive or “fighting” brain or your “loves-me-loves-me-not” feeling brain.
Access your creative brain. Explore it and explore with it. Try to live with this part of your brain “driving” your behavior.
3. Voice
Your Voice and using your Voice embodies your willingness to speak your unique mind, to say what you see, think, and want, express what you think and want. It’s realizing that silence born of lack of courage or lack of confidence is seldom helpful to anyone. Many people have lost their voices in the name of love, submission, or in keeping peace. Access your Voice, deploy your voice, and persist with expressing the things that are important to you.
1+2+3=YOUR FORMIDABLE TRIANGLE
Once you embrace your Formidable Triangle you will be free to love yourself and others in ways that are healthy for all.
Over time, awareness of the three corners of your formidable triangle, and accessing each when necessary, will become “second nature” to you.
The corners will merge and form a firewall to protect you from draining relationships and exchanges. They will also merge and empower you to be your healthiest self under most circumstances.
To enjoy your Formidable Triangle ALL three corners are required.
Treasure and use your BACKBONE. Access your THINKING. Express yourself — your VOICE — loudly and clearly and you will attract healthy, high functioning adventures and relationships.
Call me whatever you like but placing a cell phone or electronic device in front of your child to keep your child quiet or occupied or “entertained” so you can do whatever you’re doing without interruption is probably going to come back to bite you.
The choice you think you’re making will soon be a demand your child will make.
You’re setting into motion a long term test of wills you are unlikely to win.
Your child’s electronic device — and I confess I don’t know you and so I may be very wrong — is probably far more interesting than you are and the day is already here when you cannot compete.
The reward of the seduction and the power of the small screen in your child’s hands will far outweigh the power of your warmth, your touch, your smile, your welcome.
Your human imprint – I’m sure sociologists have a more impressive term for it — is what your child needs far more than he or she needs to be kept quiet and controllable by a device whose creators have absolutely no warmth or care for your child.
Face-to-face time (even in restaurants) and walking hand in hand are the memories you probably really want for you and your child, none of which is available from an app — not yet, anyway.
When first cousins Grace and Mercy show up from within you (they live rent free without exception within us all) and reveal their natural beautiful ways, human encounters get an added touch of the divine.
The cousins are hard at work and always ready to assist any person who wants to participate in acts of unmerited kindness. They play a willing hand in every expression of goodness and delight in participating in all moments of empathy. Mercy and Grace become especially evident and empowering when you express even a smidgeon of desire to offer forgiveness and generosity as a way of life. When we want them to influence and become “a way of life” they dance a little jig of joy.
When you and I permit Grace and Mercy to do their thing within us — they are always ready for an opportunity — no matter what may be our proclaimed faith or the absence or even the denial of one, we come face-to-face with our divine imprint.
Grace and Mercy will steadily reveal what wonderful tenants they are and transform any willing host of their counter-culturally subversive, loving ways.
May the sisters dance and have their way.
They will make you even more beautiful than you already are.
Many adults struggle with maintaining good and healthy boundaries.
It’s part of the human condition.
Knowing where I “end” and where you “begin” is not always easy.
Knowing what is my responsibility, and what is not my responsibility is often fuzzy, sometimes ambiguous.
Knowing when and how to draw my “line in the sand” when it comes to loving others and parenting children is certainly not for the faint hearted.
Establishing and maintaining healthy boundaries – is a life-long challenge.
Another challenge, which seems less frequently addressed, and integral to having good boundaries, is the matter of also having good brakes.
It is important to know when to “apply the brakes,” when to slow down, and to know when to stop.
Knowing when “enough is enough” would save a lot of heartbreak.
Persons with fuzzy boundaries often seem to have no, or at least poor, brakes.
They tend to go overboard, to buy too much, to give too much, talk too much, to pursue too much.
Here is the challenge: work as always, on your boundaries. Then, sharpen your awareness of when it is time to apply the brakes. Resist over-giving, over-loving, indulging, chasing, buying, showering with attention — when it comes to those whom you say you love.
When it seems that things are coming at you from all sides….
Hold onto yourself.
Even if you are surrounded by supportive loved ones, you are all you’ve got.
You are your own constant companion and your relationship with yourself is the longest relationship you will ever have – so you might as well be best friends.
You might as well learn to enjoy yourself.
How you treat yourself is (already) the platform from which you see others and it forms the lens through which you see all things.
When under pressure, don’t talk to everyone about what you are facing.
It’s a hopeful myth that all talking is helpful.
It’s not.
Choose a few trusted people and talk only to them
Spewing – freely-recalling, random mumblings, blaming others, yelling, speaking from a place of confusion or anger – has limited and few benefits.
Holding onto yourself involves planning what you will and will not share.
You are allowed to keep things to yourself.
You are allowed to plan and decide how you will behave, who you will be.
All this, and more, is all part of learning to hold onto yourself.
When you hold onto yourself, some will tell you are being selfish.
Self-awareness and selfishness are poles apart.
[I will be in Durban in February and April — not March — and would love to speak at your church, school, or fundraising event — make contact by email or private message.]
From a recent lunch in Cuba — note the hat and cigar. This vegetarian did not partake!
Listen to your conversations, yes, eavesdrop on yourself.
I try to do this and I am often embarrassed how regularly I’m on auto-play. I hear the same stuff – the same stories and one-liners – coming out of me over and over again.
It is as if I am bored with myself and those who are part of the “conversation.”
I don’t like this about me and I don’t particularly like it when I’m caught in someone else’s well-worn loop.
Sometimes I hear traces of contempt and sarcasm in my conversations.
I am very careful about avoiding swearing and blasphemy, yet there are times I am apparently okay with using words as clubs and bullying others with snarky sarcasm. These verbal habits are surely at least as toxic as possessing a foul mouth.
The gift of thoughtful conversations, where people listen without waiting to talk and people hear what is really being said is something to which I deeply aspire despite what sometimes comes out of my mouth.
By the way, I am heading to Duban during much of February.
I would be delighted to speak at your school, church, business, or club – and I promise to watch my mouth.
Drop me an email if you are interested.
Let’s see what time permits.
Two new pieces in our home — picked up in Lome, Togo and framed locally.
• You backseat drive (car or no car). No matter where you sit in the vehicle (the office, school, hospital) your attention is on the driver (the leader) and the driving (management, leadership). You probably think you know the best way to any destination (even places new to you).
• You do things for people they can do for themselves (even if you don’t believe it). If challenged, you may name it “serving others” or “acts of humility” or “if you want something done, do it yourself.” Truth is you are trying to manage or ease your anxiety and really cannot stop yourself.
There is a downside of being in a family or organization with people who over function: those who tend to underfunction seldom get to grow and can become lazy or entitled.
The downsides for those who over function is their self-created indispensability leads to exhaustion with accompanying doses of martyrdom for which there is never enough expressed thanks.
Please, do not use this column to point fingers. Those who have a tendency to over function already know it. Truth is they will be even more beautiful than they already are when they focus only on their unique responsibilities and allow all others to take care of their own responsibilities.
No matter how good or qualified your therapist — therapy will be of no help:
If you’re seeking help with your intimate relationship but you’re living with your mind made up, bags packed, and a heart full of blame and complaints.
It’s therapy, not arm-wrestling.
If you’re having an extramarital affair and you want to improve your relationship with your spouse so your divorce can be cordial.
It’s therapy, not help with deception and manipulation.
If you’re coming to change or influence a relationship you’re not directly a part of, for instance, you want to fix your son’s marriage or you want you husband to call his mom more often.
It’s therapy, not human chess.
If you’re committed to treating your adult sons and daughters as if they’re children and wonder why they resist visiting or phoning you.
It’s therapy, not guilt-tripping.
If you’re hoping for help to change the political views of people with whom you do not agree.
It’s therapy, not magic.
If you want the lazy to be hardworking, the harsh to be gentle, the stingy to be generous, and the unforgiving to find mercy.
Men and women who discover such radical transformation do so because they grow tired of their selfish, rigid, alienating and arrogant ways, and, in humility, find the courage for change.
It’s not therapy, it’s when desperation meets the Divine.
Your body is more important than your brain therefore focus on your body, not your brain. Your body will get you further than your brain. Your body is bait. Use it well for a fine catch (riches, status – things you can’t get alone). Other people are more important than you. You are on Earth to serve, particularly all males.
Once a husband finds you, your greatest calling is to be a mother. If you have other ambitions you will compromise your mothering. Your only worthwhile ideas pertain to cooking, cleaning, and childcare; leave thinking about sciences, technology, and mathematics to males.
Once you are in love you will give up yourself for your husband and your children. This is what love is. You are a half. When you meet a man and marry you will become whole. If you suffer in silence and allow others to use you God will reward you.
Having addressed female audiences in the USA, Southern Africa, and in three Asian countries, I perceive these covert and overt messages to girls remain consistent. Perhaps saddest is that when girls find faith, they often expect God to be the ultimate male, issuing similar messages, demands, and expectations.
Hemingway (statue) depicted in his apparently famous spot.
Listening, no matter how skilled you are, cannot be faked.
You may be a skilled multitasker but even you can’t listen and, at the same time, do other things.
Even if you’re one of those people who can “spin a lot of plates at one time” or whatever the metaphor is, even you can’t do other things and listen and really hear the person talking to you.
Listening takes more than both ears. It takes both ears, both eyes, a closed mouth, and your whole focused body.
Even thinking about or wanting to check your phone, let alone the shifty reptile-like quick glances you give it and think no one notices, upsets your capacity to hear and it disturbs the speaker’s ease in talking to you.
Another thing that really upsets listening is your own unresolved stuff with other people, living or dead. As soon as any person “goes deep,” the millisecond he or she approaches anything close to something unresolved in your life, even if it’s from years ago, it’ll set you off inside, close your ears, or start you talking.
That’s how we ward off stuff, manage triggers, fight to keep things buried.
To listen is to love.
It’s often the only thing someone may want from you.
difficultrelationships.com 