“Mysupportsystemisledbyme” byJenniferStuck.

“Ever since I was four years old and my family found me being abused, when their normally loving faces turned cold, I thought that I had to hide what was happening to me. Even more than that, I thought I needed to hide who I was. I thought people only liked the fake me and the masks I put up, but not the real me underneath. It never occurred to me that I trusted in the wrong people and that there might be something wrong with them. I could only blame myself for not being good enough to be loved.”

“Not only was I clinging to the wrong people, I was making them my first and only support system, clinging to one unhealthy person at a time expecting them to fill all my emotional needs. By depending so much on other people I was setting myself up for disappointment. No one person could fill all of my needs, especially if I wasn’t filling my own first.”

“Now I’ve learned that I need a multi-person support system headed by myself. I am the first person I go to for comfort, I can make myself feel better, and I can have fun and laugh on my own. By depending on myself first, I eliminate the need to cling to unhealthy people. If I’m not desperate for love and support I can be choosier about who I invite into my life and I don’t need to look for love from unhealthy, abusive people. I can love myself.”

Stand-InorStar: TakingCenterStageinYourHealing by Bethany Ruck:

“A friend of mine used to be a stand-in on a network show. While the actors were in their trailers, he stood in front of the camera. He was examined from every angle while the crew perfected the lighting and worked out the camera positions before filming. But when the time came for the director to yell “action”, the real actors were brought in to perform.”

“He was the same height and build as the star he filled in for. He had the same hair color and skin tone as the actor. But he was no replacement for the talent. His only purpose was to help the crew prepare before the real work began.”

“Here at Overcoming Sexual Abuse, our writing team is like the stand-ins. Having a stand-in allows you to be able to see a situation on someone else before you try it on yourself. You can view it from different angles and see how the same might apply to your life. You have the opportunity to see if you identify with a story, a situation, or an emotion.”

“We have the unique dynamic of being a mother/daughter team. Many readers tend to label me as the child. Since my first post, messages have flooded my inbox. Some of them have been people who wanted support in their healing process, but the majority are survivors who offer to help or comfort me in my own healing.”

“You’re the star of your own healing journey. Healing requires you to allow the spotlight to be on you. Healing means sifting through your past, getting into the character of that inner child and reliving emotions that are dark and painful. Healing takes facing the lies you believed and seeing the truth. Being the star is hard work.  But the star gets the biggest pay-off. Your healing journey is unique to you. Let your healing take center stage instead of being upstaged by the stand-in.”

CrackingUpKeepsMeFromFallingApart: HowLaughterisPartofMyHealing by Nikki Stone.

“Hello, my name is Nikki Stone.  I am a Mental Health Advocate, Writer, Photographer, Artist, Domestic Engineer (a professional way of saying I am a housewife), Wife, Sister, Daughter, Friend, and ultimately a human being—at least that is what I have recently discovered.

I have Bipolar Disorder that I am in recovery with and I am also a survivor from sexual, mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical abuse.  I know the effects of abuse very deeply.  Three years ago I came to a total standstill in my life—actually I hit a huge brick wall and ended up having a nervous breakdown.”

“I lived in so much fear, anger, denial, shame, and guilt that I could not see any point in living.  To be honest, I would not let anyone help me.  Many tried, but I was in such a thick web of pain and lies that I could not see the truth about me or about my life.  I believed that I was evil, worthless, a waste of space and time.  This belief was built upon years and years of lies I chose to believe about myself.  I believed these lies so much that when someone would tell me the truth I didn’t believe them.”

“Though going through the nervous breakdown was a very dark time in my life, in a way I am kind of thankful it happened.  I know that may sound weird, however, it has been through the process of facing my worst fears and surviving them that I am now beginning to be the “REAL ME”.

“Until then, I was running on automatic. I was whatever people wanted me to be.  I was on a dead end road and I thought that death would solve my suffering.  However, I am glad that I made the choice to live.  I call my life now the gift of a second chance.  Now, I don’t have to be someone I am not just to be a person of value.  I am of value because I am a person.  It has been hard for me to realize this but there is so much truth to that.  I am on the road of healing, recovery, and ultimately living as a whole person and not a fragmented shell of a being.”

“The truth is, being a human means that we have our strengths but we also have our weaknesses.  I am not ashamed to be who I am, because no one else can be me thus no one else can tell me that I am doing it all wrong by being me.”

CopingorCoppingOut by Patty Hite:

“I recently moved from Florida to Ohio. My husband and I thought it would be a great move. I was raised in Ohio, so I was ready and willing to move back. He is ill and wanted me to be around my family.”

“It was a hard move. The dream that it would be “greener on the other side of the fence” turned out to be untrue. We drove through snow and ice in a convoy of two U-Haul trucks. We arrived to find that the home we rented has a landlord from hell. Everyday has been a struggle to get things fixed. The weather is too drastic for my husband. We realized that we need to go back home—home to Florida.”

“The thought of going through another move caused many coping mechanisms to surface. I had to choose to succumb to them or to overcome them. Fear was rising within me—fear of having no control over the situation.”

“I’ve been healing from my abuse long enough to know what I need to do in order to feel empowered again, but the truth is, I didn’t want to deal with healing. I’ve already dealt with my past—the dysfunction of my family, the sexual abuse of my sister and me, the physical abuse from my ex-husband and the sexual abuse of my children by their father. I don’t have flashbacks, triggers or nightmares. Anxiety attacks are taken care of, behavior and boundaries are renewed and I love who I am. The past doesn’t hurt anymore. I can talk about it without pain and sometimes it feels like it happened to someone else.”

“But sometimes the patterns from the past, the old behaviors, try to invade my thoughts and try to rule and control my emotions. I am aware of them, I know what needs to be done and I know how to control them. But sometimes, I just don’t want to.”

“The first thing to surface was the desire to dissociate. I’ve dealt with this, especially over this past year. I know when I am being wooed to escape and I have learned to overcome it. This past week, it came in like a flood and all I needed to do was open the gates. Part of me knew that if I gave in, I could escape, but the other part of me knew that it would become my “sick” friend again. I knew that if I invited it in, it would fight to stay. Dissociation is like getting drunk. It feels good at the moment because it offers temporary relief, but I have to face the real world when I wake up.”

“Then I had thoughts of “Woe is me!” “This isn’t fair!” “No one understands what I have to go through in order to make this move!” “No one cares!“ I didn’t give any thought to what this is doing to my husband. He is the ill one, yet I wanted to be ill. I wanted all the attention and I wanted everyone to feel sorry for me. I hung onto that for a few days and made life impossible for everyone around me. There was nothing they could do to make me feel better and I rejected every great idea they had. “It’s not going to work.” “There is no way to make this happen.”

“Isolation was another thing trying to woo me. I didn’t want to talk to anyone. I wanted to be left alone to wallow in my self pity. When anyone talked to me, I pretended like I didn’t hear them or my answers were so sharp they cut like a knife. I imagined putting on my coat and boots and walking until I got lost. Then everyone would wonder where I was or else they wouldn’t care and be glad I was gone. Would anyone even miss me? I was becoming a stranger to them. They didn’t know who this crazy woman was anymore. Dang. I didn’t know who I was anymore.”

“I hate being isolated. Not only do I stay away, my family stays away. I put up my walls that they won’t cross. Then they feel unwanted and unloved. I understand this pattern since it was a close friend of mine. I always wondered why I wasn’t invited places and why people didn’t want to be around me. I stayed away from them, then they stayed away from me. Then I’d get angry because they stayed away.”

Read them and others at OvercomingSexualAbuse.

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Each of us has an inner guide to show us when we are off target. To sin is to miss the mark. Becoming a valued person takes patience and willingness to accept the responsibility of treating others with the same respect.

But love begins with loving and accepting ourselves. And paradoxically, that means accepting what Carl Jung called our shadow self. Jung believed (from Wikipedia):

“In Jungian psychology, the shadow or “shadow aspect” is a part of the unconscious mind consisting of repressed weaknesses, shortcomings, and instincts. It is one of the three most recognizable archetypes, the others being the anima and animus and the persona. “Everyone carries a shadow,” Jung wrote, “and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.”^[1] It may be (in part) one’s link to more primitive animal instincts,^[2] which are superseded during early childhood by the conscious mind.”

“According to Jung, the shadow, in being instinctive and irrational, is prone to project: turning a personal inferiority into a perceived moral deficiency in someone else. Jung writes that if these projections are unrecognized “The projection-making factor (the Shadow archetype) then has a free hand and can realize its object–if it has one–or bring about some other situation characteristic of its power.” ^[3] These projections insulate and cripple individuals by forming an ever thicker fog of illusion between the ego and the real world.”

“Jung also believed that “in spite of its function as a reservoir for human darkness—or perhaps because of this—the shadow is the seat of creativity.”

I try very hard to not bad and good in my self-appraisal because I have made the decision to accept the job of making my emotional choices based on self-acceptance. That means loving others now that I have found how to love myself.

The following links offer different ideas about learning to value ourselves and others. From these feelings of value, empathy is born and grows.

Love thy neighbor

Social media marketing (not marketing: conversations

Social independence

Your money or your life–a summary of Chap. 11 from 50 Prosperity Classics: Attract It, Create It, Manage It, Share It (50 Classics)

Saving 200 runaway girls from prostitution

Coachology: Finally, the men place high value on personal life. Get on the bandwagon

Counter-intuitiveness comes of age

Affirmations are helping my mind

“The Serenity Prayer is the common name for an originally untitled prayer written by the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr in the 1930s or early 1940s.

Niebuhr seems to have written the prayer for use in a sermon, perhaps as early as 1934 (the date given in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, 16th edn., ed. Justin Kaplan, 1992, p. 684), perhaps in the early 1940s.

Elisabeth Sifton’s book The Serenity Prayer (2003) quotes this version as the authentic original:

“God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things that should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.”

The earliest verifiable printed texts so far discovered are an approximate version (apparently quoted from memory) in a query in the “Queries and Answers” column in The New York Times Book Review, July 12, 1942, p. 23, which asks for the author of the quotation; and a reply in the same column in the issue for August 2, 1942, p. 19, where the quotation is attributed to Niebuhr and an unidentified printed text is quoted as follows:

“O God and Heavenly Father,
Grant to us the serenity of mind to accept that which cannot be changed; the courage to change that which can be changed, and the wisdom to know the one from the other, through Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen.”

The prayer became widely known when it was adopted in modified form by Alcoholics Anonymous; an AA magazine, The AA Grapevine, identified Niebuhr as the author (January 1950, pp. 6-7), and the AA web site continues to identify Niebuhr as the author.”

Links for serenity:

1.  From Through an Al-Anon Filter: “Acceptance”:

“So, back to the train station of our minds – we can stand back from the platform’s edge, and watch the trains come in – where’s this one going?  High-speed train to anger and frustration, no stops along the way; think I’ll wait for a later one. Here comes a poky old steam train going to serenity and peace, with many stops to allow others to board, takes a scenic route - this train I’m going to ride.”

2, From Sober Nuggets: “affirmation”:

“ I know that for me, I must find peace and serenity (especially in the face of difficulties and challenges/opportunities).  I didn’t come to A.A. to be miserable, I came because I already was miserable.  If I were still miserable, I’d more than likely find myself drinking and drugging again.  It has been years (thank God) since I’ve come to meetings in order to avoid drinking or drugging.  Now I come to meetings to maintain some sense of balance and serenity in my life.”

“Today, I ask God for guidance in all I do, try to see His Grace in my life and then live it out.  I’ll ask again later and probably again after that because I am a “slow learner and a fast forgetter.”  Today I know God is with me, through the Holy Spirit, through the people I encounter and in the Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous.  I merely need to remain open to His will, willing to do it and honest about myself and my motives.”

3.  From Being Sober: “Sunday Morning Meeting”:

Brooklyn Bridge Waterfalls by Epicharamus

Every day we have choices to be happy. Everything we hold on to that is negativity saps our energy. This post includes several quotations about letting go. One of the best books that I’ve read about letting go was written by Hugh Prather.

The Little Book of Letting Go: A Revolutionary 30-day Program to Cleanse Your Mind, Lift Your Spirit and Replenish Your Soul

Hugh Prather

ISBN 157324-503-8

Amazon link

In a review of this book, “the contents for letting go include problems, fear of letting go, worry, our first reaction, motivation through crisis, money anxiety and travel worries, anticipated and unanticipated emotions, victim-perception, word magic, stories, neglect, fear of happiness, t-thoughts; I, me, and mine; outcomes, relationship battles you aren’t having, useless blocks to relationship, sticky thoughts, gloom, rigid responses and limited answers, “turning it over”, scattered thinking, blame and damage, body thoughts, t-thoughts, spiritual attainment, “higher” path, “spiritual” laws of success, our personal struggle.”

“Live riotously. It is foolish to sit around waiting for the collector when the collector may be late. Baseball coach Yogi Berra taught us that “It’s not over till it’s over.” And if… the New Testament, Buddha, and the Koran are right, it may not be over even then. You’ll either be with your pals in paradise or you won’t feel a thing.”   David Brown

“The most important words in midlife are—Let Go. Let it happen to you. Let it happen to your partner. Let the feelings. Let the changes…You are moving out of roles and into the self…It would be surprising if we didn’t experience some pain as we leave the familiarity of one adult stage for the uncertainty of the next. But the willingness to move through each passage is equivalent to the willingness to live abundantly. If we don’t change; we don’t grow. If we don’t grow, we are not really living.”   Gail Sheehy

“Surrender means, by definition, giving up attachment to results. When we have an attachment to results, we tend to have a hard time giving up control.”   Marianne Williamson

A good resource for healing schools contains all types of schools and degrees in the healing arts. It includes lists by states and then by cities in the states.

The Healing Arts Online has sections on spirituality, emotional healing, nutrition, energy healing, self healing and breathing.

Podcasts help keep many of us in positivity and order and away from the confusion of the rambling, negative mind. We all have one but we can learn to direct that energy in a positive direction. A great source for positive podcasts is Religious Podcasts.

The mission statement for beliefnet.com states the following:

“Our mission is to help people like you find, and walk, a spiritual path that will bring comfort, hope, clarity, strength, and happiness.”

”Whether you’re exploring your own faith or other spiritual traditions, we provide you inspiring devotional tools, access to the best spiritual teachers and clergy in the world, thought-provoking commentary, and a supportive community.”

”Beliefnet is the largest spiritual web site. We are independent and not affiliated with any spiritual organization or movement. Our only agenda is to help you meet your spiritual needs.”

January, 2012  will be the beginning of my 35th year of experiencing being captured by the God of my understanding. The first year, I didn’t have any labels for it. If you are a mystic, you generally have to be told by someone else that you are a mystic and find out for yourself what that means. It was only after I read William James’s book, The Varieties of Religious Experience that I had a label of “radical conversion”. Soon after this, someone asked me if I knew what mysticism was and I was able to add another label. I am a Christian but have gained much insight from studying all religions and incorporating other practices into my spiritual experiences.

Mystics are found in all faiths and/or religions. Beginning the mystic journey, each pilgrim has an individual journey yet all will have some common ground with other mystics. For my 35th-year journey, I have let go of most of my earthly ties to family and friends. I felt an extreme urgency to experience and study my inner experience. So, although God’s gift is free, it isn’t cheap. I have lived without most of my family for most of the 35 year experience. I have never made a lot of money or taken the time to climb the ladder. I have driven cheap cars and owned very little materially. But I did what I wanted to do–follow the God of my understanding as best I could. My reward has been Heaven on earth–the peace, love, joy, contentment, fun is amazing. And I look forward to life’s greatest adventure–giving up this bodily burden.

Some of the spiritual techniques that my help for your spiritual journey are:

(1) centering prepares us for the Presence of God;

(2) deep breathing helps us to quiet our mind because we can only think one thought at a time–when we are counting our breaths in and out, our mind is focused on one thought relieving our anxiety;

(3) meditation and prayer;

(4) mindfulness.

According to Carl McColman, who writes The Website of Unknowing, a soul friend is a friend who provides others with coaching, support and guidance as they progress along the path toward fulfilling their spiritual and mystical potential.

“Of Mystics and Activists”  by Peter J. Leithart

‘The Challenge of Understanding Mysticism” by Richard D. Engle

“Understanding Mysticism” by Matthew Bingley

Mysticism: General Information

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2 People Beach Shadows by mikebaird

“When two codependents enter a relationship, they often overtly or covertly try to manipulate the partner to provide the love and approval needed to fill what John Bradshaw calls the “hole in the soul”. Both partners attach themselves to the other for a sense of completeness, a strategy that stunts personal growth and development. By surrendering responsibility for our happiness to other people, we create power struggles, arguments, and ultimately broken promises, expectations, and hearts. We can break out of the codependent trap….by working through the pain of our unmet childhood needs and by cultivating an inner life.”       Ronald S. Miller

Because I am in the middle of a divorce, I am determined to find my unmet childhood needs in order to grow more completely. One pattern I have seen is that I don’t feel that I deserve affection from a man. My father was very self-absorbed. Being the oldest child of three girls, I must have learned very young that he didn’t have much to give me or anyone. Instead I apparently decided that I needed to parent him. Actually, I guess I became the parent for both of my parents at a very young age.

I know now that my husband and I have paid a high emotional price for each other. It is amazing how clear it is to me now and how I never realized it sooner. Maybe because his leaving was so traumatic, I was able to see my anger for what it was. Instead of trying to work through our trouble with each other, we chose to attack and criticize. We were on a collusion course for disaster. I know that I need to heal and to mourn.

While I’m healing, I am continuing to read Getting the Love You Want: A Guide for Couples. The author, Harville Hendrix , and his wife, Helen Lakelly Hunt, continue to help healing couples. This book was originally written in 1988 and has been updated. I am reading it very slowly and am hoping that I will be learning with my heart and not just with my head.

I am pondering this selection now: From “Becoming a Lover”–”We all have an understandable desire to live life as children. We don’t want to go to the trouble of raising a cow and milking it; we want to sit down at the table and have someone hand us a cool glass of milk….This wishful thinking finds its ultimate expression in relationships. We don’t want to accept responsibility for getting our needs met; we want to “fall in love” with a superhuman mate and live happily ever after. The psychological term for this tendency to put our frustrations and the solutions to our problems outside ourselves is “externalization,” and is the cause of much of the world’s unhappiness.”

So each day I focus on being a happy person. It really is a daily choice I have. To accept what is and to be grateful for it sometimes takes me several start-overs for the day but it is getting easier.

I learned early in my recovery that if I was betrayed by someone that God could still make it OK for me. My acceptance of the betrayal eased the way for Him to work with me to trust others.

I recognize my trust level from a song of Steve Winwood’s. The words I identify with are: “When there’s no one left to leave you, and even you can’t quite believe, that’s when nothing can deceive you.”

Ultimately, I know that everyone pretty much decides for himself/herself whatever he/she wants to believe about me. I like that slogan that whatever you think of me is none of my business.

I’ve also learned to accept that people change their minds about me. The dynamics in relationships are fluid and rarely fixed. So if I keep my trust in the God of my understanding, I have nothing to fear about trusting others.

Will my trusted ones betray me? Possibly, but what hurts worse is that I may betray them also. We never reach perfection in this life. But I am getting better.

Some certain posts about trust include the following:

Ask Maddisen–How to Build Strong Trust Muscles

Word of God Speak

The Teacher Has Arrived…..

Should You be a Tour Guide or an Expedition Leader?

Tangled With a Porcupine

Connecting With Your Heart

Lessons From a Blue-Collar Millionaire

Betrayed by the Office Gossip Girl

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Most of the sites listed under alcohol, drug addiction are from treatment centers. I believe that treatment centers as well as twelve step groups can help addicts.

My problem with treatment centers is the cost and the medical model they use which means someone has to be “sick”. I believe in the self-discovery model which is the reason I wrote the Changemaker Test. Anyone with compassion can take the Changemaker Test and get a group together and begin learning about themselves.

Of course, I also believe that the AA method of tearing someone down in order to rebuild them loses too many new addicts. It works for the military because the recruits have to stay or go to jail for desertion. Having been sober for 28 years and having been a substance abuse counselor who worked in profit and non-profit centers gives me a unique viewpoint. Someone with an experience is never at the mercy of someone with an argument.

How do you know that someone–regardless of age–is spiritual? Certainly not because they say they are. The best evaluation is to see the fruits of the Spirit manifested by them. The fruits of the Spirit are love, joy, peace, kindness, self-control, patience, faithfulness, goodness, longsuffering and gentleness as listed in Galatians 5:22-23.

When You Find the Buddha in the Middle of the Road–Kill Him is the wise title of a good book by Sidney Kopp. No one knows what is better for anyone than that person. We each have our own answers. Even those of us trained in counseling techniques can only see what is revealed. Tendencies may be seen and certainly personality indicators will be there. But the work of change is a person’s individual choice.

The opposite of love isn’t hate. The opposite is indifference. When you no longer have feelings for someone, you have no reaction to them. When you feel hate, there is still emotion for that person there. This is the reason abusers can hold on to the abused. Anger may be covering hurt or feelings of entitlement.

Generally, unless the abuser has a spiritual experience, the abused must move either emotionally and/or physically away from the abuser. No real reform comes except from a contrite heart. Separation while recovery is taking place can bring quicker results as this leaves both parties more opportunity for self-reflection.

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Sesame Chicken Macro by stevedepoto

Learning to savor the food we eat can help us to learn a new, reflective experience with our food. Emiliya Zhivotovskaya writes about how her first experience with recovery from her eating habits was to eat one meal in complete silence while learning to savor each bite.

She writes:

“I went on to use what Bryant and Veroff call anticipatory savoring, basking, and thanksgiving. I turned gratitude into a meditation tracing the origin of my meal down to its roots. I expressed gratitude to my mother for preparing the meal… to the grocery store for offering the ingredients… to the vendor that sold the produce to the grocery store… to the people and machinery that picked the produce in the field… to the earth that gave rise to the produce… and to the sun for making the growth possible.”

I have been using this technique for awhile and it has helped me learn to pay attention to the food I am eating. Mindfulness teaches us to learn how to stay in the moment and savor what life is giving us every moment of our lives.

For help with mindfulness and eating:

TCME is the center for mindful eating and includes these components:

• (1)  Learning to make choices in beginning or ending a meal based on awareness of hunger and satiety cues;
• (2)  Learning to identify personal triggers for mindless eating, such as emotions, social pressures, or certain foods;
• (3)  Valuing quality over quantity of what you’re eating;
• (4)  Appreciating the sensual, as well as the nourishing, capacity of food;
• (5)  Feeling deep gratitude that may come from appreciating and experiencing food

Mastering the Mindful Meal by Stephanie Vangsness begins with the following:

“Eating while multitasking, whether working through lunch or watching TV while eating dinner, often leads us to eat more. On the other hand, eating “mindfully,” savoring every mouthful, enhances the experience of eating and keeps us aware of how much we take in.”

“Our fast-food culture is one where meals have become yet another task we squeeze in during the day. It is all too common to hear of people grabbing breakfast on the run or attending a lunch meeting, where business is front and center and food is merely the bait to get people there.”

Regular yoga practice is associated with mindful eating is a study led by researchers at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. The study found that people who used yoga practice with mindful eating were less likely to be obese.

“The researchers found that people who ate mindfully – those were aware of why they ate and stopped eating when full – weighed less than those who ate mindlessly, who ate when not hungry or in response to anxiety or depression. The researchers also found a strong association between yoga practice and mindful eating but found no association between other types of physical activity, such as walking or running, and mindful eating.”

Mindful eating links:

The Center for Mindful Eating

The CAMP System: The Joy of Mindful Eating

Mindful Eating

Mindful Eating: Get Out of Autopilot

Emindful: Live Interactive Online Classes