A physical/emotional response

I just noticed a strange and revelatory response I had (have, I'm pretty sure; it felt familiar) to a frequent thought. I was setting aside a temptation to engage in an impure thought process that leads me to sin, partly because I just received prayer for this area last night in preparation for this weekend's Unbound seminar. It was the most subtly sublime moment of grace-filled, Spirit-driven self revelation, concerning a physio-emotional response that I have to temptation. As I decided to not engage in this thought process, I felt the muscles at the base of my skull contract, and I noticed that I thought of why I don't want to engage in that thought process right now, as if I was reserving it to return to at a later time.

As I say, this felt familiar, and I considered other recent times that I have felt this physical sensation. It turns out that it has never been so much a rejection as a postponement of my tempting thoughts, and it is a reason I have not been able to persevere in purity in this area. I then considered when else I have felt like this: it also turns out that this response was seared into me when I was being sexually abused. It is directly related to my resignation to my physical inability to ever force my way past my stepfather to escape from the room when I was a teenager. It became part of the inevitability of my submission to him sexually, and subsequently of my submission to sexual impurity in general.

Wow. This is exactly the sort of red flag I should have learned about in one of my rounds of therapy. It's a question I would now ask of anyone who shared that they struggle in a given area: go back to the beginning of the latest incident, and let's go through how your body physically responded before you realized you were responding. Then: when is the earliest time you remember feeling that way?

I'm not going to assume that the battle is over now. But I understand something about it that I never did before, a physical and emotional and thought process that ties in with the spiritual aspect that I've tried to invoke previously. Perhaps, now that I have all four pieces, I can have lasting victory in this area.

I think it would help to talk to a therapist

I'm in a bit of a quandary, though. For solo work, I'd want to see therapist #4, and the initial work this time will certainly be solo. But I could see it shifting to couple work before long, and that would mean #5, and trying to transition between them isn't the right approach.

But neither thing is likely to happen unless things get much worse, seeing as I just got chewed into last night for buying my first new pair of glasses in three years. "I have four doctor bills to pay," I was told (none of which are mine). I don't resent her health care needs, but I feel like I've been treading water.

Meanwhile, it is good for me to remember that I am not without recourse. I have some resources from my previous times in therapy that it might serve me well to revisit. Let me not overlook doing what I can just because it isn't what I think is the ideal course.

The Two Standards, part 1

When Jesus answers to Satan, “One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes forth from the mouth of God”, (Lk 4:4 and Mt 4:4, cf. Dt 8:3) it means that he chose to renounce the immediate gratification in order to follow what God’s will was for him. - The Two Standards meditation, 140-142. First Part: The Standard of Satan, the “values” he uses to deceive and seduce all of us

I am not so good at making this choice consistently. I do it pretty well for the bigger things, but there are areas of purity that I miss out on because I indulge in immediately gratifying thoughts instead.

The second temptation of Jesus is to let the power principle dominate his life. The search for power, personal prestige and status, the exploitation of others in order to gain these, and the allure of “honor” is so much widespread phenomenon that Alfred Adler in his “individual psychology” asserted it as the basic drive in life. Although a certain level of self-esteem is necessary for a healthy psyche, the temptation of the power drive misleads us to seek status and honor directly, and the price to pay for it is in destroyed relationships, falsity and deceit. - ibid.

There can be a tricky balance between setting appropriate boundaries for ourselves and trying to exercise power over the lives of others. Sometimes the people around us can feel that we are imposing boundaries or values on them when we are really only setting them for ourselves. It's an important distinction. To keep from being taken advantage of in an unhealthy way, I must sometimes prevent another from taking unhealthy advantage of me. That can feel to them as if I am trying to make a decision for them that they do not wish to make for themselves, when in truth I am truly only making a decision about what is healthy for me. It is important, when we are on the other side of such a decision, not to allow our own wishes to outweigh our respect for the other person by acting in a dishonest way in order to coerce a decision in line with our own wishes. This is especially hard when we feel that we need our lives to be different from how they actually are.

Viktor Frankl pointed out many times that there are several things, like joy and happiness that cannot be willed directly but should come as a by-product of one’s deeds. As the pursuit of happiness does not lead to its fulfillment so is it with the power drive. - ibid.

I've been thinking about this lately. In fact, I have long been convinced that the single greatest obstacle to finding happiness is to pursue it directly. Matthew Kelly propounds that we maximize our happiness by becoming the best version of ourselves, by making physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually healthy choices rather than pursuing happiness for its own sake.

The third temptation of Jesus as Robert C. Leslie points out is to escape from personal responsibility, which is a manifestation of self-sufficiency and pride. Harder to recognize than the other two this temptation is permeating our culture on personal and societal level. It works through the dominance of psychological and sociological determinism. We can excuse our behavior endlessly by past traumas and by what others did or did not. - ibid.

There is so much in these few sentences. First of all, I'm pretty sure that I've never thought of the third temptation quite in these terms, but this makes perfect sense. Jesus is tempted to escape the consequences of a personal decision. The one thing that I am pleased about concerning my initial experience with therapy is that, while I needed to learn the effect that my childhood abuse had on my adulthood decision making, I recognized from the beginning that I was responsible for my choices. No matter how many men may have sexually abused me when I was a kid, I knew that I was responsible for my own adult actions. But this temptation remains so very present in how we respond to stimuli around us, as it is so easy to feel that we have been provoked into our choices.

In reality the future does not depend so much on past experiences as on our conscious decisions in the present. - ibid.

Yes!! Now, it is true that our past may have trained us to make decisions in a way that does not maximize our future growth, but we have the power to recognize that and learn to make our decisions in a different way. But let's say, for instance, that I recognize that I have a tendency to try to fix things for those around me. It does no good to recognize that trait in myself unless I recognize when I am doing that at the expense of others.

Responsibility is an indelible characteristic of human existence and it means that we ought to give a response or an answer for our acts in front of our conscience. In religious terms, we are created beings and we are not self-sufficient but our life is constant gift from God whose creative love we respond to with our existence, choices and acts. - ibid.

Yes, all of our life is our response to God's creative love, in one way or another. I must choose to respond in ways that draw me more deeply into that love, believing that God's plan for my life is more trustworthy than my own wishes, which are subtly tainted by the influence of the standard of Satan in my life and on the world around me.

Okay I haven't even started looking at the reflection on Jesus' standard, but there is just so much in here! The really should have made this initial meditation part of a longer step; one week was just not enough to cover this along with six individual session readings. On the other hand, they do revisit it twice in short order.

Applying the ABCs of CBT

(or Using the tools:)

This morning I'm grateful for the ability to recognize a pattern of thinking that dates back to my childhood as what it is, and to think and thereby act and feel differently.

Oh, yeah. How could I forget to mention THAT one?

In reflecting on tumultuous autumns at the end of this post the other day, I somehow forgot about that worst autumn of all, of my own making, as we were waiting to learn the extent of my consequences. It has taken eighteen years for that to start feeling at all like anything less than a terrifying thing I'd rather not have in my neural pathways anymore. It wasn't technically autumn when we got the word that we'd have to report it, just after getting back from Labor Day weekend in Maryland. The following weekend was wretched, as we knew I was in grave jeopardy. I'm glad Waterworld was so awful, because I'd hate to have such terrible memories associated with a movie I'd want to see again! That drive-in is gone, too.

Anyway, it would take another ten weeks to find out that I'd have to move out, another couple months thereafter to be evaluated and accepted into the treatment program, another two years before I was completely back home - a good deal of which delay ended up being outside of our control. I'm glad that I've learned that I don't have to be in control of everything, though I do still have to be reminded of that from time to time.

Whose hand is on the tiller . . . ?

Whose hand is on the tiller . . . ?

. . . and the sheets, for that matter?

A friend in a rough place recently shared about the importance of letting Jesus steer our boat, and how we frequently don't allow him to until we've steered ourselves into such dire straits that we've no other choice.  It caused me to reflect on my own experiences.  Of course, there are many aspects of our lives to which this analogy is applicable, but here I've taken some time to reflect on some pretty specific circumstances.

For me, letting Jesus steer meant allowing him to direct the complete healing of the brokenness that had led me to steer my boat so far astray in the first place. Long had I pleaded with him to heal me, never doubting that he had that power nor that he wanted me to be whole, yet growing increasingly frustrated with my pattern of failure. I didn't understand that I was to embrace a far different and more active role in his work of my healing than I could see. While I knew that God rarely does for us what he's calling us to do ourselves - or at least participate in - I didn't understand the nature of the help that he was providing for me, nor the nature of my need for it. He'd been calling me for years, with increasing clarity and urgency, to trust him enough to participate in therapeutic processes. These I resisted because they themselves seemed fraught with risks; eventually my very fears came to be fulfilled by my refusal to trust God, to submit control and allow him to guide me through the therapy that he'd been calling me into. Those fears' power to paralyze me, to keep my frozen grip upon the tiller and stubbornly keep steady my sails even as I progressed into greater peril, refused to fade until I ultimately had to contrast them against the storm I'd navigated myself and my family into.

Recognizing my old hurts, so that I could fully forgive those who had hurt me so deeply so long before, were but two important steps along my way to wholeness. They would not in themselves have completed God's desired plan for me. I also had to allow God (and a good therapist) to walk me through the full healing of those wounds, to recognize how they had formed me in unhealthy ways so that I could learn healthy ones in their stead, to be fully restored. God knew this all along, and had placed a stirring in my mind and heart that I should commit my vessel to the course he had in mind for me. Yet my fear was greater within me than my trust in the divine pilot, so I steered into other, far more perilous waters. I would have far less regret of it had I been the only soul in the boat. Yet he heals us of that guilt, too, as we allow him to navigate our craft, even from the danger into which we ourselves have navigated.

I'm not suggesting that God is steering anyone else onto a path similar to my own.  I'm just saying that, wherever he's leading you now, don't fear to follow.  As with Jonah, he has a way of reaching those who seek his will yet also resist it.

First take on Lance

First of all, it has been obvious to me for a long time that Lance Armstrong was guilty of doping.  I'm not one to paint people with a black-and-white palette, so I never concluded that makes him an evil person, but there was no question that he did some incredibly hurtful things in his attempts to cover up his actions.  In fact, even before the evidence became overwhelming, the things that he was saying in his desperation to bolster his image revealed important things about his character that undermined his efforts to appear innocent and terribly wronged.  Publicizing Greg LeMond's private revelation to him was probably the tipping point for me.  What could a truly innocent person have hoped to gain from that?  It was the act of someone whose thinking was muddled by their desperation to preserve their carefully crafted but increasingly tenuous illusion.

I haven't seen his interview yet - last night I had more important plans - so maybe I should withhold this opinion.  Still, there was an important lesson in my own therapy that I can't help considering as I read some of what he said: a person who really accepting responsibility for their own actions is doesn't talk about the harm they've done as a circumstance that "just happened."

So when Lance says of Betsy Andreu and her husband that they're not at peace, "because they've been hurt too badly," rather than "Because I hurt them too badly," it indicates that he's made progress, but isn't quite there yet.  Likewise, of Emma O'Reilly: "She's one of these people that got run over, got bullied,"  rather than, "one of those people I ran over and bullied."  Also, he's still justifying his initial decision to dope in the first place.

These may seem like small things, and probably only someone who has done that kind of work would ever notice them.  (Well, maybe not the justification; most people recognize that part.) I'm not being critical of him, though; none of us gets there in one giant leap.  It's good - for him, and in general - that he recognizes his actions as bullying, and that he is beginning to speak the truth.

Never really finished

There are some things in life that, if you do them right, you're never really finished with.  Even after our children grow into responsible adults and our relationship with them is transformed, we'll always be their parents, sharing our wisdom and experience with them as appropriate.  I'm convinced that a good marriage always needs tending and nurturing, that there's no point at which a spouse can just put it on autopilot and expect the love to just flow on its own.  And I'm certain that a person who spends time in therapy with the right attitude learns approaches, insights, and ways of considering their lives that they end up applying to new situations throughout the rest of their lives.

Taking my temperature

At the beginning of each group therapy session, we held hands as we "checked in" with our current feeling/emotion and requested the amount of time each of us expected we'd need to cover whatever agenda we'd prepared to discuss.  Even the therapists requested time at the start of the meeting for their agenda. Rarely was all of the session time fully accounted for, but if it was, we'd adjust as we thought we could to accommodate each other's agenda. One night after I'd been meeting with the group for a few weeks, and after I'd been briefly suspended over a misunderstanding of the program rules as they'd been communicated to me via two different channels, I was sitting next to one of the two therapists who ran the group sessions. After everyone had checked in, she observed that my hand was "really cold."

"That's a sign of fear, you know," she said matter-of-factly.  The feeling I'd checked in with is lost in the fog of the intervening years, but I certainly hadn't checked in with "afraid."  Maybe "calm."  At any rate, I was pretty sure I knew what I was feeling and that it wasn't fear.  In retrospect, I now recognize that I was always "nervous" (yes, this is one of the terms we use to make our fearful feelings more palatable) going to any of my therapy sessions at that point in my treatment.  An important role of the counseling team, indeed of the entire therapy group, was to challenge our misperceptions of reality, but a good therapist knows that there are effective and not-so-much ways of doing that for each patient.  Kate was about to give me a giant shove along my journey to emotional health.  I don't know how conscious she was of how important this moment would become for me, but I was completely unaware and, as always, utterly convinced of my "rightness."

"Nah, my hands are always cold," I answered dismissively, not realizing that something deeply transformative was about to begin for me.

Being right had been the most important thing in my life for as long as I can remember.  It was my defense against an adoptive father who never accepted my athletic shortcomings and a group of peers with whom I never fit in, and was the chief source of my self-image.  I was pretty sure that I knew myself, even though I couldn't yet begin to reconcile that self-concept with the reason that I was in this therapy group. I was confident that I was right now, too.  Kate was as cautiously non-confrontational as she could be, recognizing that my self-assuredness was more central to me than a mere tool in my arsenal to commit my offenses, yet was also the latter, and had to be dealt with.  

She turned slightly toward me. "When we experience fear," she began to explain, "our fight-or-flight reflex kicks in.  The body's natural response learned through ages of experience is to prepare for a possible injury to the vital organs, and more blood is directed to them, all located near the center of our bodies, leaving less blood available for our extremities.  As a result, our fingers and toes feel cold because of the reduced flow of warming blood to them."

She was as sure of herself as I was.

"But I've had cold hands for as long as I can remember, all the way back to my childhood," I protested, still feeling dismissive.  I couldn't figure out what point she was trying to make, nor understand for the life of me why she thought this was so important.

She turned to face me almost directly.  "Tom," she said, making sure she had my attention, and speaking with unmistakable sympathy, "I have no doubt that you've been afraid for as long as you can remember."

I still get chills, over sixteen years later, almost as strongly as I did that evening when I immediately recognized the truth of her words.  I remember little else from that session, but in that moment I knew something about myself that had always been true and that I had never recognized before.

And thus began my progress toward health.  Oh, the journey had started months before, and I'm certain that evening couldn't have happened without the groundwork that had preceded it.

Today I found myself thinking of this key milestone in therapy as I "checked in" with myself concerning an upcoming trip, looking for any physiological signs that I might be deceiving myself or others about my own intentions.  They are noticeably absent.

Revisiting a resolved issue

In early 2002, I went on retreat to the Abbey of Gethsemani in Trappist, Kentucky. This wonderful monastery is one of my favorite places in the world, and it has been entirely too long since I spent any time there. My mom had passed away just a few months before this visit.  It had been nearly seven years since my Darkest Day, and four since I'd finished with therapy, yet I still found myself grappling with the issue of my own acceptability among decent company.  I would continue to struggle with this for another seven years before making any real progress, after which I would discuss it further when I reentered therapy to work on some other issues.  Yet something that I was told that weekend proved to be both very helpful for me at the time and somewhat vexing over time.

The specific issue I was dealing with was this inward sense I had that I was being dishonest with everyone who considered themselves my friend without knowing my dark history.  I was raised to value integrity, and I was convinced that one of the worst violations of it was to present myself as a decent person knowing that I had not been, or to "pretend" I was close to someone who didn't know this dark chapter of my life.  I felt that I was accepting people's friendship under false pretenses, which I judged to be like stealing their affection.

In the course of the weekend, I was fortunate to have the opportunity to participate in the sacrament of reconciliation with Fr. Matthew Kelty.  Fr. Matthew spoke to the retreatants for five or ten minutes each evening after Compline, or night prayer.  This prayer service occurs at 7:30 most evenings, which works well for the monks who arise in time to participate in Vigils at 3:15 a.m., but to most retreatants seems a bit early to retire. Since retreats at the Abbey are mostly self-directed and filled with more silence than many of us are accustomed to on a regular basis, this short session would provide a bit of food for evening reflection if we were so inclined.  Fr. Matthew usually shared a couple of spiritual poems, then a reflection of his own, sometimes reading from one of his excellent books, such as My Song is of Mercy.  At any rate, I was so pleased to see him at confession, as he seemed like a straight shooter who would help me gain some clarity regarding the distance I felt from everyone who didn't know about the worst part of my past.

He had a very different take on this from what I expected.  While affirming my sense of integrity and honesty, and quite the opposite of minimizing the wrong I'd done, he suggested that keeping this part of myself from most people was an act of mercy.  It was a very difficult thing to accept, he acknowledged, and I was surrounded by people who would feel obliged to try to accept me anyway, and who would with great effort manage to arrive at a point with regard to their opinion of me very similar to where they already were before I shared with them.  It was a burden I shouldn't lay on most people, he said, in nearly those exact words.

In the short term, it was a great load off of me. Years before, my counselors had also suggested that I'd already told everyone I should feel obliged to share this with, yet the intervening years had left me still feeling cautiously distant from everyone who didn't know.  "How could you keep something like that from me?" I could imagine them accusing me.  Fr. Matthew's reassurance that I had a good reason not to share this readily helped me remove the false burden of obligation with which I'd been struggling.

In the long run, his answer proved problematic.  "You're right," he seemed to say, in way, "this is a really big deal."  It became an increasing concern for me over the next several years, as I heard friends weigh in with their opinions of people who made the news for things that seemed similar to what I had done.

Then a friend I wasn't expecting entered my life, and helped me learn to cut myself some slack. My subsequent stint in therapy helped with that, too.  I now seem to have a better sense of when I should share my past, not out of a sense of obligation or hidden self-judgment, but when sharing might do some tangible good.  I've given my testimony in front of a hundred people, and received reconciliation with estranged family members, and seem to know in an instant when I'm in a situation that calls for sharing this part of myself.

Now, after nearly three decades, I'm going to see a friend with whom I was once closer than anyone else in my life. She's the last person I can think of with whom I have a very strong sense of owing the sharing of my story.  I don't know that the opportunity will even arise.  I don't know that I will take advantage of the chance if it does, and I don't know that I really should.  I have so much else to be cautious with; I should never aspire for that "closer than anyone else" status again with her, and I can peacefully and honestly say that I don't.

I'm also trying not to borrow anxiety over this, but I think it will be good to be ready for however it plays out.

Defensiveness

I find that the most consistent indicator of my security (about anything) is my inner state when I encounter someone who disagrees with me.  If I feel defensive or dismissive, I'm probably not really so sure of myself, whereas if I feel peaceful I'm generally more comfortable with my own position.

I wish I could claim this was an original thought, or that an insight that I gained by careful self-observation.  This is almost universally true, and my long-ago counseling team was the first to successfully convict me of it.  It ended up being a breakthrough moment in therapy for me, and a lesson I've never forgotten.

I may not have finished with this counseling team, but I probably took my biggest strides with them.  There was one counselor in particular who seemed to be able to pose just the right question or make an insightful observation to pierce my defensiveness and help me to see a deeper truth that I'd been avoiding.

As a result of my experiences, I tend to think that those who are most vitriolic in their discourse are similarly insecure with regard to the positions they espouse.  This has the effect of pouring the fuel of false self-assuredness onto the fires of disagreement.

Very weird, and not quite fear

I know what fear and paranoia feel like.  I know their physical manifestations: the increased heart rate, the cold extremities, the physical edginess, the fight or flight posture.  My therapists made sure of that because so much of abuser's dynamics have their roots in deeply-seated fear and they can never really break their cycle without recognizing it so they can respond differently to it.

So what the hell was last night?  I had none of those indicators going on.  I just thought there was an outside chance that infection would take hold of me in the night.  If I died, I was confident I'd be going home into God's loving arms, or if I'm wrong about that, have my consciousness utterly vanish and my body rot into worm food.  Still, I didn't want it to happen, was sure enough that it wasn't happening that I didn't think I needed to make a visit to the ER, but wanted to keep an eye on things to make sure they didn't deteriorate.  And I wanted to make sure I didn't leave any loose ends with the one on earth I'm closest to.  Geez, if I had actually died after a small argument over something so trivial, she'd have felt terrible!

Now, to get the new day going, and leave the weird emotional infection of the night behind.

utter failure

ok. you apparently can't serve as a resource for me in dealing with this, as much as my therapist almost insisted that you should, that you must, that we won't be a healthy couple until i can turn to you for your help with this. but i can see that it's always going to hit too close to home for you, that you're never going to believe that it isn't at all about you. i can understand why that's so hard; i'd probably feel the same way if this was your issue - i've always felt that way about your issue, in fact. at any rate, you can quit trying or pretending - whichever it is you've been doing by by asking me the question once every few months - to be helpful if you can't handle getting the answer you don't want occasionally. seriously, that's worse than no help at all. way.  no, you shouldn't have to deal with it. but at this point it's just an ugly habit, probably way less harmful than smoking would be. i can beat myself up for it without your help.  so if you can't just assume that it's still going to be a problem area that i'm always going to have to work on, and ask me about it with that mindset so that you're not hurt and disappointed if it still is, then just leave me alone with it. i'll try not to go down the rabbit hole, and i'll try to make sure that my local friend who keeps me in line knows that we have to talk about this regularly.


then maybe you can just deal with the issues that are yours to handle if you're going to become the best version of your self instead of acting as if i'm the only one who's screwed up, and i'll focus on trying to become the best version of my self and the husband you deserve, since i've obviously failed so miserably at that. again.

Focusing on what's useful

I clicked a link to a list of 12 ways to live a better life, that The Washington Post lifted from 30 Lessons for Living - Tried and True Advice from the Wisest Americans, by Karl Pillemer. I guess he collected the best insights he gleaned from over 1000 senior citizens and summarized them into this book. The first one stopped me dead in my tracks and focused my attention in a useless direction for a few minutes.

But in my last round of therapy I learned that we tend to evaluate our happiness based on things that are beyond our control rather than on the drivers of our happiness that we can influence.  I've learned not to dwell on what I can't change. I'm doing okay on the rest of the list, and I'm doing the best I can to make the best of this one item, too.

Feed my sheep

When those who are tending Christ’s flock wish that the sheep were theirs rather than his, they stand convicted of loving themselves, not Christ. And the Lord’s words are a repeated admonition to them and to all who, as Paul writes sadly, are seeking their own ends, not Christ’s.
 
Do you love me? Tend my sheep. Surely this means: “If you love me, your thoughts must focus on taking care of my sheep, not taking care of yourself. You must tend them as mine, not as yours; seek in them my glory, not yours; my sovereign rights, not yours; my gain, not yours. Otherwise you will find yourself among those who belong to the ‘times of peril,’ those who are guilty of self-love and the other sins that go with that beginning of evils.”

So the shepherds of Christ’s flock must never indulge in self-love; if they do they will be tending the sheep not as Christ’s but as their own. And of all vices this is the one that the shepherds must guard against most earnestly; seeking their own purposes instead of Christ’s, furthering their own desires by means of those persons for whom Christ shed his blood.

From a treatise on John by Saint Augustine, bishop

Although the audience of this writing appears to consist of pastors within the Church, this section from today's Office of Readings reminds me of an important and easily-forgotten truth. As a husband, I must think of myself primarily as shepherd of the flock entrusted to me: my family. It is far too easy to get wrapped up in what I think other family members should do and how their decisions affect me. It puts things in a very different light when I remember this other way of thinking of my loved ones and our roles in each others' lives.

A thought or two is also called for regarding self-love. St. Augustine is obviously using the term very differently from how we have come to embrace it today. We are seeing great emphasis on how important it is to accept that I'm a flawed human being and not hate myself for that. There is also a popular approach that suggests that I  must look to my own needs ahead of those of others. I have seen both of these perspectives applied appropriately and also misused. Living a life of healthy balance between my needs and others means that I will draw appropriate boundaries for both my benefit and the good of those I love, and an inner conviction of my lack of worth can drive me to many unhealthy types of decisions, both consciously and otherwise. Yet it's also possible to exalt myself, using self-love as a rationale for justifying my viewpoint in conflict with others. Augustine is obviously using the term self-love to refer to this type of self-indulgence by which the pastor places his own well-being over the needs of the flock, or his desire for personal glory above his striving to glorify Christ.

The importance of applying these ideas appropriately should be obvious, but I'm going to speak to them anyway. I must not interpret and respond to my family members' behaviors and needs primarily based on their effect on me. It's easy to think that it's all about me, when it really isn't at all. Yet this becomes a self-perpetuating thought-feeling-behavior habit that interferes with living and loving as we're called. It isn't that my family members are pulling my chain, or that they're inconsiderate. Yes, we may have some conflicts to resolve, but it's way easier to do that - to want to address them in the first place, and then to approach the situation in a helpful way - when I apply the proper perspective to my own thinking.

It is our underlying beliefs about ourselves and those around us that form the context in which we understand and respond to everything. These are the chief driver of our personal happiness (or lack), and the single area most directly under our control, as opposed to the circumstances to which we most often attribute it. Yes, our situations have very real repercussions on our emotional state, but these are often beyond our control and don't play as deep and lasting a role as our underlying beliefs do. When we focus on our happiness - the "outflow," to apply a concept from Oswald Chambers in a slightly different context - and on the way that others' actions directly and outwardly affect us, we fail to address our own foundational thoughts and attitudes, which most basically and profoundly effect our satisfaction with life and provide us the tools we need to deal with others' actions and our circumstances most effectively.

It's a bit like a sports team that focuses on winning to the exclusion of preparing to execute the actions that produce the greatest chance for victory.

Another thought on happiness

A follow-up thought on an old post, grown out of subsequent work and discussions in therapy:

There's another thing that interferes with out ability to experience happiness, joy, or any other positive emotion, in addition to making it our goal rather than experiencing it naturally in the course of what we're really about.  Many of us attribute our joy or lack of it to factors outside ourselves.  Certainly, our circumstances affect our emotions.  But there is something else to consider: in very similar conditions, different people have very different emotional responses.

This is because the greatest drivers of our emotions are internal rather than from outside us.

Don't reinvent the pothole

It feels like a good time to remind myself of things I know, that I've worked through both on my own and in therapy, before I head down an angsty road that I just don't need to traverse any more . . .

A therapy lesson revisited

One thing I learned in my latest round of therapy is that it's really important what thoughts we give free rein to.  We encounter all sorts of situations that are challenging in many ways, and some ways of thinking about those challenges are helpful while others can be a hindrance, or even downright destructive.

I'm feeling a bit paralyzed over my resume and job search.  I am not, really; I'm just acting like I am.  No, yesterday there was no time, but that doesn't mean there never is.  Likewise other things that I know help me be the person I'm supposed to be.

Writing this was a better choice than other things I could have done with this couple of minutes.  So is this: thank you, Lord, for your many gifts, most especially the loved ones who are visiting us this week!  And thank you for sustaining all of us during very challenging times.  Help me to think always of your love and your constant presence with us, the strength you give us which is immeasurably greater than our own!  Help me put aside my pride to lean on you; help me to overcome my feeling of not knowing how to lean on you; help me to just give myself over to you even  as I acknowledge that I don't know how.  And help the people I love do the same.

Good news, bad news

The positive, the really, really positive, is that I've gotten healthier.  My historical patterns and ways of numbing myself against negative emotions or difficult circumstances don't seem to appeal to me any longer.  This is a very good thing.

The flip side is that now I get to simply experience them.

It has been an odd sort of week, between the weather, the power outage, and Teri's travel travails.  It looks as if things may be heading to a more normal status, as our house was warming up after the power was restored at lunch time, and Teri will be coming home tomorrow instead of Friday.  I'll be really glad to have her home.

It has been a good week for me, though, a week of progress and growth, of applying the skills I'm learning in the ways I planned and adapting them to slightly different circumstances.  Growth is good!

Have I mentioned that I'll be really glad to have Teri home?