The Responsibility Game

The Journey

“One day you finally knew

what you had to do, and began

though the voices around you

kept shouting

their bad advice—

though the whole house

began to tremble

and you felt the old tug

at your ankles.

“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.

But you didn’t stop.

You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers

at the very foundations

though their melancholy

was terrible.

It was already late

enough, and a wild night
and the road full of fallen

branches and stone.

But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,

the stars began to burn

through the sheets of clouds,

and there was a new voice

which you slowly

recognized as your own,

that kept you company

as you strode deeper and deeper

into the world,

determined to do

the only thing you could do—

determined to save

the only life you could save.”

Mary Oliver

 

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The Responsibility Game

Lynne Namka Ed. D. © 2008

People from all over the world write to me, mostly women but sometimes it’s a man, asking about what they can do to help their loved one or family member “control” his or her anger.  Or how they can help “diffuse” their partner’s anger.  They say that their partner is “such a good guy or a good woman” and the only flaw is the “anger problem.”  Or they feel so sorry for their out-of-control child or abusive parent who hurts others.  This well-meaning intention to help is good but it is misplaced as it enables the angry person to stay as he is.  The only person who can change their anger is the angry person. 

Feelings of pity and guilt over someone else’s inability to stop doing something harmful to themselves like drinking or drugging, getting angry or get their homework done or anything that the rest of the world is able to do but they can’t/won’t are a waste of energy.  Guilt and feeling sorry for someone is at the bottom of the codependency need to fix someone else as a defensive maneuver so that you don’t look at your own behavior. 

We get the relationships we are willing to put up with.  We were not able to choose the family of our childhood, and how they dealt with stressors.  Some caring partners accept the negative behaviors of others and never insist on change.  If you have felt helpless in your childhood with an angry parent, you may think that angry relationships are the way life is supposed to be.  Living with anger may be familiar to you, but it is not healthy.  One fifty-two-year-old woman described the freedom she felt when she finally learned to assertively say to her nit-picking husband, “Don’t go there.  Just don’t go there.”

Put “checks and balances” in the areas where your partner’s behavior gets out of control. Calmly calling your partner on his bad behavior may work if he has some voice of reason within and a willingness for fairness and justice.  A person whose behavior is continually disturbing to others needs feedback at a time when he is calm as to how he hurts others so he can evaluate the consequences of his actions.  Calling a person on the consequences of their behavior helps maintain the moral order of the relationship.  Loving firmness is the best way to talk to a person about his unacceptable behavior. Remind him that fair is fair and you expect him to be reasonable with his anger.  There are unspoken boundaries between couples that are played out with nonverbal and verbal snippets of control behaviors.  One man said, “I can’t talk to her directly about her nagging as she blows up as she’s too sensitive to hear any criticism.  So when it gets too bad, I glare and she backs off.  We’ve got this “Glare and back off contract that she isn’t even aware of!”

One way to maintain fairness is to insist on having a correction technique for all members of the household.  Correction is a behavioral technique where the person who messes up the environment is required to clean it up as an offer of restitution.  The correction procedure holds people responsible for their misbehavior by requiring them to undo, as much as possible, the damage they have done.  Correction of what has been disturbed in the environment gives practical penalties for disturbing the home and the people who have been affected.  With correction, the person who throws things must pick them up and return them to their proper place.  If he breaks things, he must replace them.  If he yells and screams, he must apologize to those he has disturbed.  Correction procedures should be installed with all members of the family. 

Just like two-year-olds, grownup temper tantrums last longer when a person has an audience.  You need not stay in the same room with a raging person.  Warn him that you will leave when he is yelling and go take care of yourself.  Don’t stick around and take the barrage of ugly words.  Take the children and leave quietly, saying that you are not running away but are giving him some space to cool off and you hope that the next time he will take his own time out.  Go to another room or get in the car and leave for a while.  If he gets angry because he is fearful of being alone, level with him to show that his anger will create his being left alone for awhile for both of you to cool off.  You are not abandoning him but you are removing yourself from his anger. 

A common myth is that people have no control over their feelings. That’s old thinking—now with all the techniques and anger management classes that we have available for anger release, blowing up in anger at others is a choice. Watch how you enable other people’s bad behavior.  Do you make excuses for him?  Do you tell the children that their dad can’t help it?  It is not your job to try to get anyone else to “diffuse” or “control” his anger.  It is the job of each angry person to take care of his anger and find appropriate ways to express it.  An angry person may not have the motivation to do so.  If you excuse him repeatedly for his outbursts without any consequences, why should he be expected to change?

Don’t be held hostage by other people’s feelings.  And while you are at it, take a look at your own anger responses.  You and only you are responsible for your thinking and the way you think creates the type of life that you will create.  No other person or thing has the ability to get inside your head and pushes a button marked anger.  Nobody pulls your chain, pulls your trigger or pushes your button.  Only you make yourself feel what you feel.  The bottom line is that you are always responsible for what you think, say and do. And you are responsible if you have allowed another person to treat you with disrespect!  

Positive Self-Talk Affirmations:

I am responsible for my thoughts, feelings and actions.

I am responsible for deciding what I will and will not stand for.

I am responsible for how I treat people and allow them to treat me.

I can only feel good about myself if I live in accordance with my positive values. 

I affirm that I am healthy and whole and I am worthy of being a happy person.

Be gentle with yourself; you are learning to be more honest with yourself to break into habits of a lifetime. If you slip up and revert back to a behavior you dislike, analyze what went wrong. Tell yourself that you made a slip and you will be more careful next time. You will get better over time. You are responsible for how you act in the future.  Forgive yourself for doing what you have learned and vow to be different.   If you do an Energy Psychology technique about your behavior and the beliefs that lie underneath it, you will be less likely to slip in the future.

A client recently said to me, “I am willing to do whatever I need to do to become whole.  That includes challenging my defense mechanisms over and over.”  Wow!  What courage that took to be willing to confront the unhealthy behaviors that other threw at her.  

Peace and joy,

Lynne

This article is taken from my book, Your Quick Anger Makeover: Plus Twenty Other Cutting-edge Techniques to Release Anger!

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Most of all, let love guide your life.

 Colossians 3:14

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Learned helplessness

Learned helplessness

The American psychologist Martin Seligman’s foundational experiments and theory of learned helplessness began at University of Pennsylvania in 1967, as an extension of his interest in depression.

A person should be able to walk away from an abusive relationship, for example, or voluntarily quit a stressful job.
A psychological condition known as learned helplessness, however, can cause a person to feel completely powerless to change his or her circumstances for the better.
The result of learned helplessness is often severe depression and extremely low self-esteem.

Learned helplessness can be seen as a mechanism some people employ in order to survive difficult or abusive circumstances.
An abused child or spouse may eventually learn to remain passive and compliant at the hands of his or her abuser, since efforts to fight back or escape appear futile.

Learned helplessness results from being trained to be locked into a system. The system may be a family, a community, a culture, a tradition, a profession or an institution.

Initially, a system develops for a specific purpose. But as a system evolves, it increasingly tends to organize around beliefs, perspectives, activities and taboos that serve the continuation of the system. Awareness of the original purpose fades and the system starts to function automatically. It calcifies.

Some experts suggest learned helplessness can be passed on through observation, as in the case of a daughter watching her abused mother passively obey her husband’s commands.
The daughter may begin to associate passivity and low self-esteem with the “normal” demands of married life, leading to a perpetuation of the learned helplessness cycle.

Child abuse by neglect can be a manifestation of learned helplessness: when parents believe they are incapable of stopping an infant’s crying, they may simply give up trying to do anything for the child.

Another example of learned helplessness in social settings involves loneliness and shyness. Those who are extremely shy, passive, anxious and depressed may learn helplessness to offer stable explanations for unpleasant social experiences.

A third example is aging, with the elderly learning to be helpless and concluding that they have no control over losing their friends and family members, losing their jobs and incomes, getting old, weak and so on.

Paulo Coelho

http://paulocoelhoblog.com/

Develop Your Mental Strength - SAY NO!

Develop Your Mental Strength - SAY NO!
Gus Moonfoot

Mental strength is a quality that most people vaguely aspire to. Not many people think about what it is clearly, though. When we do think about it, we mistakenly think it is just 'will-power.' Mental strength, however, is so much more than forgoing a second chocolate brownie. Mental strength is what enables you to not just to make the difficult choices in life, but to see where the difficult choices lie in the first place. It is a quality that without which we go through life as helpless as a leaf upon a fast-moving stream. You don't want to be a helpless leaf, do you?

How do you develop mental strength? The good news is that we are surrounded by opportunities to do this twenty-four hours a day. Our modern, free society means that not only are we free to make our own decisions, but everyone else is free to bombard us with advertising, marketing, and social pressures as well. The techniques to influence our decisions are so sophisticated now we are often not even aware it is happening. Even a film shown without commercials will be full of subtle product placements that are nearly impossible to register. We are manipulated into spending, eating and consuming more than we want or need. The result, unsurprisingly, is that we are left mentally (as well as perhaps physically) weak and exhausted.

If you are normal, and you spend, eat and consume more than you want or need, here is the first step to recovery: abstain! Not from everything, of course. Start small. Choose one thing. It doesn't really matter what it is. For one person it might mean giving up sugar. For someone else it might mean only having the one slice of cake. Find something appropriate for you, something you would normally indulge in, and then resist. You will find this easiest, and perhaps derive the most benefit, if you chose something that you don't really enjoy much in the first place. You know, that sitcom that you watch that isn't funny, or that fried food you eat that really isn't very tasty. Our lives are full of luxuries we don't actually enjoy, but that we consume only because we are used to consuming them. These are the easiest, and most important things to stop right away!

How is abstaining going to increase your mental strength? Remember, this is more than just an exercise in will-power. This is you making a small, but important, stand against the constant barrage of instructions your brain receives to consume. Choosing to drink Coke over Pepsi is not an act of individualism - it is obeying one marketing message instead of another. Choosing to drink neither is you proving to yourself that you retain the ability to make your own decisions.

Here are some dos and don'ts: Don't abstain to lose weight! Do abstain to prove to yourself that you chose what and when to eat. Don't abstain to make a statement to the world about the excesses of capitalism, consumerism, materialism, etc. You can have those beliefs, but that's not what this is about. This is about making a statement to yourself for yourself. And while I'm on the subject, DON'T TELL ANYONE!! Once you tell someone else, whether you mean to or not, you involve them. You look for their approval, or feel their disapproval. You want them to support you or feel disappointed when they don't. Going down this road will dilute all of the benefit you could receive. Don't think of this as being secretive. This is just a private matter for you alone.

Here's what you will gain: a quiet satisfaction that in at least one small part of your life you are in total control. If developed further, you will find yourself in a much stronger position the next time life throws you one of its inevitable curve balls. Eventually you should be able to enter a dialogue with yourself (okay, technically this is a monologue, but you know what I mean) where you are actively choosing which influences, from which sources, you want to allow into your thoughts. Does that sound like a strange idea? It is not. It's just you being yourself, instead of what other people want you to be.

So go on! Try it! Give something up. In five minutes you can probably write a list of five things in your life you do out of habit, or because everyone else does, that you really don't enjoy that much. Chose one, and even if you only give it up for a day, you will feel more alive than you will have from a lifetime of needless consumption. What have you got to lose?

Gus Moonfoot
Posted from Gus Moonfoot's blog