PICKY

I was once told that the reason I wasn’t in a relationship was because I was too picky.  I thought about that for a long time and even thought wow, maybe I should be less so.  And then it hit me.  THANK GOD I’m picky.  Why wouldn’t I be?

From what I see with people in relationships and circumstances in which they are incredibly unhappy or at the very least compromising their best selves, I would say that we are simply not picky enough.

And what does it mean to be picky? It doesn't mean you're arrogant, aloof and disengaged. It means you have values and you intend to stick to them.

RADICAL

Do you agree that women get more radical as they get older?

I know that as I age, I have less tolerance for the amount of crap (emotional or otherwise) I have in my life.  How about you?

Are you 50 or 50+ and do you feel more radical?  Are you ready for a change? Are you taking steps to making that change?  

Let me know by leaving a comment.

Distraction

By keeping us busy finding fault with ourselves they waste our time.  By advertising solutions to fixing those problems they squander our money.  Those who have the most to gain by keeping us distracted are the ones that fight the hardest to keep the status quo – women disempowered and squabbling amongst ourselves.

What if we woke up to this fact and stopped being manipulated?  What if rather than waste our time and squander our money we focused on doing work that helped us reclaim our voice so that we can have a say in how we live our lives and how we are treated?  

What if we did this by refusing to support organizations that objectify, denigrate and mistreat women?  These organizations are easy to find, just watch TV, read a magazine or troll the web.

What will it take for women and men to stand up and say enough is enough? 

Princess

You don't need saving!  Perhaps from yourself every now and then.  You may need a hand to take care of the kids, to manage your life, a bit of help would be great, but you don't need SAVING.

Women are much stronger than they think they are.  Psychologically and physically.

When I ask women to grab some weights in my fitness classes I am always amazed at the puny 2 lb or 5 lb weights they pick up.   When I tell them that they have lifted much, much heavier than that they shake their heads adamantly 'NO.'  

So I ask them, "Have you lifted your kids? Have you lifted grocery bags? Have you lifted the couch to vacuum under it?" And of course they nod their heads.  Well then.  

When you connect the dots you realize that lifting these weights is not about an isolated event called ‘things you do at the gym.’ Rather, lifting weights and getting strong is about your whole life that includes lifting 40 lb kids, lifting 25 lb grocery bags and lifting an 80 lb couch so you can vacuum under it.

So feel free to feel like a Princess and dress up and look in the mirror and be the fairest of them all, but PLEASE, do not be a Princess who thinks she needs saving.  It’s a myth, it’s a crock, it’s a lie that you disprove every single day.  

WHY?

Why are you here?  I mean on this planet.  Why were you born?

Don’t shrug your shoulders ‘dunno.’

Were you born just to occupy space on this planet? As small a space as possible? 

Were you born to serve someone else’s agenda?  And not make waves?

Were you born to not have an opinion, not have a need, not have a desire.

Were you born to affect no change for the better for yourself and others?

Because it took a multitude of myriad events to line up to ensure that you exist on this planet, you have an obligation, AN OBLIGATION, to live to your highest potential.

Don’t know what your highest potential is?  

Go and find out.

Competition

Competition doesn’t make you stronger, it makes you insecure because you’re constantly looking over your shoulder.  You’re so busy measuring and comparing that you never feel good enough.  At bottom, hyper competitive people are terribly unhappy and insecure because even though they may be ranked best, it does nothing to actually make them feel that way.

Paradigm Shift

Un-normal your normal.  Nothing biological or immutable about your normal, it’s a construct and can therefore be destroyed or deconstructed and rebuilt coming from a completely different paradigm.  This is the way to actually see change -- remember, you can’t solve a problem with the same thinking that created it.

Sphere of influence, 3

Here’s the paradox.  While your sphere of influence doesn’t exist in a vacuum, it in no way means that you can make people act the way you want them to.  You cannot control, for example, how people will react, the decisions they will make or the directions they will go.  You only have the power to control the energy that comes from you.  It's a lot of power that you can use to either spread calm or produce anxiety. The choice is yours so long as you're aware that ultimately you are responsible for the energy that comes back to you.

I am editing this retroactively: I don't think we're necessarily responsible for the energy that comes back at us so much as not being surprised at what comes back at us, especially if you've put hostile energy out, don't be surprised if you get hostile energy back.

Chocolate

Dana Small, assistant professor of neurology at Northwestern University Medical School, and colleagues found that different brain regions were activated selectively depending on whether subjects were eating chocolate when they were highly motivated to eat and rated the chocolate as "very pleasant" or whether they ate chocolate despite being satiated.

Small explained that studying the brain’s response to eating a highly rewarding food such as chocolate provides an effective "in-health" model of addiction. "The problem with studying addicts to understand addiction is that we don’t know what their brains were like before the addiction and we therefore can’t determine which brain functions have changed," Small said.

Small also noted that measuring brain responses in normal individuals who ate beyond satiety provided a measure against which the brain response to overeating in many people with eating disorders can be compared and thus serve as the basis for new research on eating disorders.

Small is a researcher in the Cognitive Brain Mapping Group at Northwestern University Medical School. Collaborating on this study were Robert J. Zatorre, Alain Dagher, Alan C. Evans and Marilyn Jones-Gotman, Montreal Neurological Institute, McGill University, Montreal, Canada.

http://www.chocolate.org/choclove/

LOVE

Much ink has been spilled on this topic so I’ll keep it brief.

VIOLENCE, WHETHER PHYSICAL OR PSYCHOLOGICAL, IS NEVER, NEVER, NEVER AN EXPRESSION OF LOVE.  EVER! UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCE.  PLEASE STOP RATIONALIZING IT. 

And yes I'm yelling!

Doing Nothing

Sometimes doing nothing is the most loving thing you can do for yourself.  We oftentimes forget that we have the choice of doing nothing, of pulling away to collect our thoughts, to touch base with what feels right for us before making a decision.  Or, you can defer making a decision until you can say with confidence which way it is you want to go.

If you are feeling pressured to make a decision, take that as a sign that you need to pull back and give it some space, give yourself some time to reflect, or get more information, or talk to a mentor.  If the person cares enough, they’ll wait.

Is honesty an aspect of love?

Sometimes we’re told an awful truth because the person doing the telling loves us and wants to be authentic and honest.  However, and here’s the BIG BUT:

“Honesty is an important part of authenticity. However, there's a distinct difference between being brutally honest and being truthful with others. 

In her 1994 book "The Dance of Deception," psychologist Dr. Harriet Lerner distinguishes between these concepts. She states that honesty can sometimes represent our uncensored thoughts and feelings, while truth requires tact, timing, kindness, and empathy with the other person.”

(Source: James Manktelow, MindTools.com, Authenticity Being True to Yourself)

I truly appreciate these two distinctions because sometimes people use brutal honesty as just another way of being passive aggressive, in other words, blurting out uncensored thoughts without tact, timing, kindness and empathy with the other person.

Fear and Loathing

A good friend of mine, an intelligent, kind, funny and beautiful woman had started hearing a ticking sound in her ear.  It was starting to worry her so she finally went to see a doctor and he told her, “Well honey, what do you expect, you’re not getting any younger.  The ticking of your biological clock is only going to get louder.  Better get a move on.”    

My friend then moved to crazy-town, into a nice cozy bungalow on Anxiety Lane, down the street from Hand-wringing Central and north of Twitchy-eye Heights.  She became a predator, engaging men just to apply inquisition like tactics to determine ‘husband and father’ potential -- she left a mutilated and bloody trail.

The last time I saw her she handed me a wedding invitation with one shaky hand while the other sank her nails into the arm of her fiancee.  Her vivid blue eyes, restlessly searched for something just over my shoulder.  Her deep red lips stretched across her face in an insincere smile, her body constantly in motion shadow boxing with a prevailing unease.

She was an intelligent, kind, funny and beautiful woman who bought the hype, who buckled under the pressure to conform, who became a stereotype, who thoroughly lost herself.  

So long as we continue to conform we will fear our ‘biological clock’ and loathe the creatures we become.

Let’s be clear: you are conforming when you feel you are betraying who you are and what you want just to please something (society/culture/traditions) or someone.

Your focus

People oftentimes apply laser-like focus (obsessive focus, some would say) on a wedding but completely neglect to do the work to understand what it takes to make a marriage.  If people would spend as much money, focus and effort on preparing for a marriage as they do on planning a wedding, my guess is that there would be fewer divorces.

To Do

If you lower your standards enough, you’ll be surprised at how many things you can check off that list.

Consent

Only you can give it.  It doesn’t just apply to the external it also applies to the approval or agreement that you give your internal voice, that primal brain.  How much of it are you agreeing with?  Are you questioning what it’s telling you or do you give it automatic consent to dictate what you will think and how you will feel?

So with Valentines Day around the corner is your primal brain unearthing old hurts and insecurities because you don’t have a valentine, or is it stirring up dissatisfaction because you don’t have a more exciting valentine, more handsome valentine, more than one valentine?  

If that’s the case, you’ve given your primal brain consent to hurl you down that slippery slope at the bottom of which you helplessly beat your chest and gnash your teeth at the rotten life you’re leading.

It’s not true - it’s a matter of consent - refuse to give it.    

It bears repeating...

So long as you continue to believe that the determining factor of how lovable you are exists outside of yourself, you will continue to feel that there’s something inherently wrong with you.

“Oh me” and other tales of martyrdom

Have I ever said, “Oh me” and felt sorry for myself?  I’d be lying if I said I didn’t.  We have all leveraged our sense of self-esteem against how much suffering we can endure.  We have all misinterpreted our hurts as purely inflicted by others and seen ourselves as blameless.  At some point though, most of us snap out of it, take responsibility for our part and make better decisions next time.  

To have the pathology of a martyr though is to live, every day, in the morass of denial that precludes you from being able to see the part you play in the hurts or difficulties that manifest in your life.   To live the life of a martyr is to live in perpetual consternation at the state of your life. To live the life of a martyr is to get up every morning and strap on your blinders so that you cannot see the overwhelming amount of choices that surround you. To live the life of a martyr is to deny that alternatives exist and be convinced that you are helpless in the hands of fate.

In a relationship when someone is the martyr it is interpreted by both sides as an expression of love:

“You must really love him to put up with so much.”

“I know she loves me because she keeps coming back.”

“He really cares about me because he never complains.”

 It’s not love.  It’s sickness.

Relationships, an odd irony

There is a ‘reverse' stigma associated with being in a relationship - a stigma connotes a bad sign, so I propose that a reverse stigma is something that connotes a good sign. Following this logic, when a person is in a relationship it’s viewed as a a sign of health, a sign of getting along, it communicates to society that you are ‘normal.”  As an aside, when reviewing case studies of psychopaths, you hear profilers say ‘he appeared normal, he was married/had a girlfriend.‘   We of course know that being in a relationship is oftentimes far from being an indication of health or wellbeing*.  

Ironically the ‘real’ stigma (the bad sign) associated with being unattached tells us that it’s an indication that there is something wrong with a person, that they must be antisocial, they must have a disease, they are surely undesirable and certainly unlovable.  This is an irony whose very wrong but yet powerful message keeps us tethered to toxic people and embroiled in dysfunctional relationships by nothing but a big fat lie.

What’s even sadder is that many unattached individuals internalize this message of being less than if unattached and make themselves crazy trying to find a partner, at all costs: at the cost of their pride, their self-esteem, their spirit and sometimes their lives.  Start looking for the runway now.  Go.  Don’t buy this sham for another minute.

*(A 2005 study reported that 7% of partnered Canadian women experienced violence at the hands of a spouse between 1999 and 2004. Of these battered women, nearly one-quarter (23%) reported being beaten, choked, or threatened with a knife or gun. (Family Violence in Canada: A Statistical Profile, 2005))

Love: Borderliners and Narcissists

I couldn’t have said it better myself...

“Real intimacy has to do with trust, understanding, and feeling understood. People who are intimate--and I'm not talking about sex--reveal vulnerabilities without fear that what we share will be used against them. Intimacy relies on safety, patience, mutuality, respect, constance, and no secrets. Without healthy self-disclosure at the right time, there can be no intimacy. And that takes honesty about who we are and how we feel. The more intimate you are, the safer you feel and the more worthwhile the relationship.”

Randi Kreger is the co-author of Stop Walking on Eggshells.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/stop-walking-eggshells/201202/problems-emotional-intimacy-typical-borderliners-and-narcissists