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Family Addiction Recovery: A Blog

How Our Childhood Shapes Every Aspect of Our Health with Dr. Gabor Maté

12/19/2018

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Prodependence is the New Codependence

10/23/2018

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Prodependence is a new concept in addiction healthcare. It is intended to improve the ways we treat loved ones of people experiencing addiction and/or early recovery and other troubled people, offering them more dignity for their suffering than blame for the problem. With its attachment-focused view, prodependence pushes aside the flaws of the codependency model, which generally suggests that family members of addicts need to “detach with love” and if they don’t neither the family member nor the addict will change or grow. That advice typically leaves loved ones of addicts feeling confused and misunderstood rather than supported and validated. Prodependence approaches the matter differently, choosing to celebrate and value a caregiving loved one’s willingness to support and stay connected with an addicted family member, while promoting healing for the entire family.
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"The Journey of The Heroic Parent" by Dr. Brad Reedy

4/12/2018

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Reinventing Codependency/Recovering From Self-Love Deficit Disorder

8/25/2017

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Codependency No More! How to Recover from Self-Love Deficit Disorder
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Ross Rosenberg has pioneered 15 principles that help his patients resolve their painful dysfunctional relationships patterns.

Have you been stuck in multiple relationships that bring mostly conflict and almost no joy? If this is your pattern, you may be suffering from what Ross Rosenberg calls “Self-Love Deficit Disorder”.

When a therapist colleague and friend recently asked me to explain what Self-Love Deficit Disorder is and how to treat it—I panicked. Although I love talking about my latest discoveries, especially my renaming of codependency to Self-Love Deficit Disorder. I paused to think of the best response. Being fatigued from seeing six psychotherapy clients that day, I considered using the therapist’s conversation maneuver of avoiding the subject by asking a similarly difficult question about a topic on which the client loves to talk. My second impulse was to skirt the question by explaining that the answers are best explained in my latest seminar video—the six-hour “Codependency Cure.” 

These discoveries organically materialized in my life as a direct result of my need to heal emotional wounds and to tear down the emotional, personal, and relational barriers keeping me from experiencing self-love.

My third impulse, the best one, was to proudly and enthusiastically share my “children” with yet another person. Those who know me well understand how my Human Magnet Syndrome, Codependency Cure, and Self-Love Deficit theories and explanations are byproducts of my own family of origin issues (trauma), my roller-coaster journey to recover from it, and the joy of learning to live free from codependency. These discoveries organically materialized in my life as a direct result of my need to heal emotional wounds and to tear down the emotional, personal, and relational barriers keeping me from experiencing self-love. This is not just a set of theories I like to talk about, but a personal mission that I plan to be on for the rest of my life.

Although I wasn’t excited about the prospect of talking shop at that moment, I tapped into a well of energy and enthusiasm that gave me the much needed boost to give a condensed rendering of my latest work. But this time, I set a boundary (for me and them): it would only be a fifteen-minute explanation! I figured since I had already given many radio interviews, written many articles, created training courses, and, of course, been a psychotherapist for 29 years, it would be a piece of cake.

And ... I did with time to spare! Knowing that others might ask me the same question again or would benefit from a similarly condensed rendition of my conceptual and theoretical work, I decided to create a written version of this discussion. 
​
The following are my 18 guiding principles of Self-Love Deficit Disorder and The Human Magnet Syndrome.

​Click here to cont.
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Love More, Care Less: ‘Detached Attachment’ and Other Boundary-Setting Ideas

8/16/2017

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How do you get your nearest and dearest to change their behavior? Simple: Stop giving a damn what they do, says Martha Beck.

“Now my whole family is abusing me!” said Loretta, a client at a women’s resource center where I volunteered back in the ‘90s. “If I leave my husband, it’ll just be out of the frying pan and into the fire.”

“Are you — “ I cut myself off before finishing my thought, which was, “Are you crazy?” Just the week before, I’d participated in an intervention where Loretta’s family had urged her to leave her battering husband, Rex. Each person had expressed enormous love for and protectiveness toward Loretta. Now she thought they were all abusers? Huh?

“They’re just like Rex,” she said. “You saw it. They judge me. They criticize me. Nothing I do is enough for them.”

I opened my mouth, then closed it. Opened then closed it again. I kept that up for about a minute, like a perplexed goldfish, as I groped for the right thing to say. It killed me that Loretta was interpreting her family’s desire to rescue her as criticism and judgment. But even as I tried to come up with the kindest possible phrasing for “What the hell is wrong with you?” I knew my question would come across like a slap. 

That’s when it dawned on me that Loretta had a point. No, her family wasn’t abusing her the way Rex did — and yet in its own way, their treatment of her must have felt like an attack. They weren’t accepting her as she was. They needed her to change. They raised their voices, made demands, pushed hard. And their intense negative emotions were triggering her fear and defensiveness.
It was in the midst of processing all this that I suddenly heard myself say, “Well, Loretta, I just love you. I don’t care what happens to you.”

The statement shocked me as it left my lips. But even as I mentally smacked myself upside the head, a funny thing happened: Loretta visibly relaxed. I could feel my own anxiety vanishing, too, leaving a quiet space in which I could treat Loretta kindly. It was true — I really didn’t care what happened to her. No matter what she did, I wouldn’t love her one bit less. 

Since then I’ve found that loving without caring is a useful approach — I’d venture to say the best approach — in most relationships, especially families. If you think that’s coldhearted, think again. It may be time you let yourself love more by caring less.

Click here to cont.
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Compassionate Boundaries: How to Say No with Heart

3/20/2017

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How to get your needs met in a way that considers all parties with kindness.

Do you have a pattern of saying yes to others, but then feeling resentful later on? Do you believe that you must come to the aid of others and often give to get?

You are not alone.

Many of us have developed a belief that we must be nice, pleasing, or helpful to the exclusion of our own feelings and needs in order to be worthy of love or appreciation. This belief is, of course, not true and furthermore an impossible goal to meet. When we give to get, we can often end up feeling angry and as a result we don’t create healthy boundaries at home and work.

At the beginning of the year, I was presenting to a group of 100 employees on the topic of increasing resilience to stress. During the seminar, I asked employees what was causing stress in their lives. One of the employees, named Cheryl, said, “ My boss stresses me out.” When I inquired further, she told the group that a few times a day, her boss would text her a note with an alarming tone in the order of “Get in my office now!” Cheryl said that when she received these texts, she would immediately freeze up and wouldn’t know what to do or say for several minutes. She didn’t feel safe to address her boss in his time of fury and wanted to avoid conflict, so she did nothing.

This became a habitual pattern between the two of them: After each text, Cheryl would automatically shut down and wait until she felt ready to respond. This only added to more aggressive outbursts on her boss’s end and it became a vicious cycle of her shutting down, him blowing up, and more importantly Cheryl not setting compassionate and healthy boundaries at work—a pattern that she also re-created when conflict arose at home.

What is a Compassionate Boundary?

Click here to cont.

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10 Steps to Finding Inner Strength

12/24/2016

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When we're empowered to speak honestly about how we feel and what we need, we can tap into resilience and well-being. By Carley Hauck
The two universal laws of impermanence are uncertainty and unpredictability. When life changes unexpectedly, we can often feel off balance, insecure, and unclear of what really matters and/or what to do next. This is normal. What can support us to reclaim our life and tap into our internal wisdom is re-asserting our strength of mind and heart.

Mindfulness and compassion are two important qualities that increase our resilience. At this pivotal time in our world, we need to cultivate both. Mindfulness allows us to see things as they are and turn toward challenges. We can turn toward the uncertainty and difficult feelings around the US presidential election, we can turn toward the devastating truth of climate change, we can turn toward the pleasant and unpleasant with greater wisdom and thus freedom. Compassion is “being with” the suffering of oneself and the other with a fierce heart. Compassion in action has the ability to heal and transform oneself and thus the world into a place that takes the welfare of all beings into consideration.

When is a time that you realized that you gave away your power?

We have all had experiences where we spoke honestly about our feelings and needs and it was judged or dismissed—or even or worse, resulted in love and/or support taken away. Based on these experiences, some of us move into people-pleasing behaviors and often say yes or nothing at all, when we really want to say no. As a result, we don’t assert or claim what we authentically feel and need, and thus we give away our power.
I found in the 10-day mindfulness and authenticity challenge I co-led this October that when we lead ourselves with greater authenticity we feel more empowered in our life.

Here are two of the mindful inquiries we explored during the challenge:
How do I give away my power?
  • When I listen to the critical and judgmental thoughts that disempower my worth, potential, and abilities.
  • When I am going too fast.
  • When I say yes, when I really mean no, or not yet.
  • When I don’t listen to my feelings and needs.
  • When I don’t stick up for myself and share my feelings and needs with others.
  • When I am not taking good care of myself with exercise, meditation, nutrition,
    connection, sleep, self-care, etc.
How do I feel empowered?
  • When I slow down.
  • When I ask for support.
  • When I really listen and then take care and support my feelings and needs in action.
  • When I share my truth in a kind and skillful way.
  • When I claim my inherent good worth, kindness, and competence in the world.
  • When I surround myself with people who love and accept me for me.
  • When I spend time in nature.
  • When I engage in healthy practices that nourish my mind, body, and heart like exercise, sleep, healthy food, connection, play, learning, and meditation.
  • When I feel engaged in a community or group with a shared goal or intention.
  • When I feel on purpose in my life.
  • When I am creating.
  • When I am helping others.
We have all had experiences where we spoke honestly about our feelings and needs and it was judged or dismissed—or even or worse, resulted in love and/or support taken away. Based on these experiences, some of us move into people-pleasing behaviors and often say yes or nothing at all, when we really want to say no. As a result, we don’t assert or claim what we authentically feel and need, and thus we give away our power.

Daily Power PracticeWhen we feel more empowered, we have the capacity to better stand up for what we feel and need. Try this practice to feel powerful in all areas of your life:
  1. Close your eyes and let your awareness turn inward to your breathing and the sensations in your body.
  2. Breathe deeply from your belly for 1-5 minutes until you feel your body and mind relax.
  3. Connect to the power within you and outside of you by imagining your breath flowing into the top of your scalp and through your body to the bottom of your feet.
  4. Think of a time during the last few days when you gave away your power.
  5. Do a scan of your body from the top of your head to the bottom of your feet, what do you notice? Where is the body feeling tightness or tension? Allow whatever to arise to be greeted with acceptance. Turn toward all physical sensations with kindness and allowing. What emotion is present: fear, anger, and/or confusion? All emotions are welcome.
  6. What is the story you are telling yourself?
  7. Now ask yourself: “How old is this part of you that believes/is experiencing this story?
  8. Tell yourself, “I transform and let go.” You are letting go of this thought so that it has no power over you.
  9. Open your eyes and shake it off. Do a few movements in your body to somatically discharge any old, disempowering beliefs that do not serve you.
  10. Now bring awareness to your belly, connect to your strength, the talents that you have been cultivating for years, your resilience, and your good worth. Feel the many ways that you are a powerful person. What new and empowered thought can you feel right now?
As you move into the rest of your day, come back to the wise and strong person that you are. Connect to this place in your belly and stand from this spot.

Finding Inner StrengthA few years ago, I was dating a man for several months, whom I deeply loved and had aspirations of a long-term future with. We came to a crossroads in our communication one challenging day and instead of him having the capacity to stay in the relationship and conversation with me, he shut down and left completely. No contact, no repair, no resolution, here is your stuff, gone. It was one of the most difficult experiences I have gone through and believe me I have had several in this lifetime, and expect to have more. Yet, his leaving didn’t break me, in fact it was a huge gift. I felt devastated at first and didn’t quite know how to surf this new and unexpected change. I was moving through the stages of griefand loss (denial, anger, bargaining, deep sadness, and acceptance). I feel thankful for having a strong mindfulness practice that enabled me to really turn toward and thus feel all my feelings. After about two months of daily tears and uncertainty, something shifted within me. I was practicing intense self-love, was claiming myself, my worth, and my life in a way that I had never done before. It was as if my “inner superhero” kicked in.

My inner superhero is She-Ra. She exemplifies strength, femininity, sensuality, and a fierce heart. Her superpower is compassion. During that difficult period in my life, I had a phrase I said to myself daily: “Carley, I am 100% here for you no matter what.” When I could tap into my innate strength and wisdom, I felt empowered, worthy, loveable, and could do and be anything that I put time and attention to. From that day forward my life has blossomed into a deeply transformative and amazing path.

What is your inner superhero saying? Here are some ideas from my inner She-Ra toolbox:
  • I am paid well just for being me
  • I make things happen
  • I am loveable, resilient, and supported
  • I have everything I need right now
  • I attract love and support easily
What we feed the mind, knowingly or unknowingly, deeply impacts how we orient to others, to the world, and to ourselves. If we don’t have the capacity to train the mind, we will be moving through the world unable to access our greatest potential and thus our greater power and well-being.
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5 Science-Backed Strategies to Build Resilience

12/23/2016

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When the road gets rocky, what do you do?
By Kira M. Newman
A mentor of mine recently passed away, and I was heartbroken—so I tried my best to avoid thinking about it. I didn’t even mention it to my family because I didn’t want those sad feelings to resurface.

In other words, I took the very enlightened approach of pretend it didn’t happen—one that’s about as effective as other common responses such as get angry, push people away, blame yourself, or wallow in the pain.

Even for the relatively self-aware and emotionally adept, struggles can take us by surprise. But learning healthy ways to move through adversity—a collection of skills that researchers call resilience—can help us cope better and recover more quickly, or at least start heading in that direction.

The Greater Good Science Center has collected many resilience practices on our website Greater Good in Action, alongside other research-based exercises for fostering kindness, connection, and happiness. Here are 12 of those resilience practices (squeezed into five categories), which can help you confront emotional pain more skillfully.
1. Change the narrativeWhen something bad happens, we often relive the event over and over in our heads, rehashing the pain. This process is called rumination; it’s like a cognitive spinning of the wheels, and it doesn’t move us forward toward healing and growth.

The practice of Expressive Writing can move us forward by helping us gain new insights on the challenges in our lives. It involves free writing continuously for 20 minutes about an issue, exploring your deepest thoughts and feelings around it. The goal is to get something down on paper, not to create a memoir-like masterpiece.

When something bad happens, we often relive the event over and over in our heads, rehashing the pain. This process is called rumination; it’s like a cognitive spinning of the wheels, and it doesn’t move us forward toward healing and growth.

A 1988 study found that participants who did Expressive Writing for four days were healthier six weeks later and happier up to three months later, when compared to people who wrote about superficial topics. In writing, the researchers suggest, we’re forced to confront ideas one by one and give them structure, which may lead to new perspectives. We’re actually crafting our own life narrative and gaining a sense of control.

Once we’ve explored the dark side of an experience, we might choose to contemplate some of its upsides. Finding Silver Linings invites you to call to mind an upsetting experience and try to list three positive things about it. For example, you might reflect on how fighting with a friend brought some important issues out into the open, and allowed you to learn something about their point of view.

In a 2014 study, doing this practice daily for three weeks helped participants become more engaged with life afterward, and it decreased their pessimistic beliefs over time. This wasn’t true for a group whose members just wrote about their daily activities. It was particularly beneficial for staunch pessimists, who also became less depressed. But the effects wore off after two months, suggesting that looking on the bright side is something we have to practice regularly.

2. Face your fearsThe practices above are helpful for past struggles, ones that we’ve gained enough distance from to be able to get some perspective. But what about knee-shaking fears that we’re experiencing in the here and now?

The Overcoming a Fear practice is designed to help with everyday fears that get in the way of life, such as the fear of public speaking, heights, or flying. We can’t talk ourselves out of such fears; instead, we have to tackle the emotions directly.

The first step is to slowly, and repeatedly, expose yourself to the thing that scares you—in small doses. For example, people with a fear of public speaking might try talking more in meetings, then perhaps giving a toast at a small wedding. Over time, you can incrementally increase the challenge until you’re ready to nail that big speech or TV interview.

In a 2010 study, researchers modeled this process in the lab. They gave participants a little electrical shock every time they saw a blue square, which soon became as scary as a tarantula to an arachnophobe. But then, they showed the blue square to participants without shocking them. Over time, the participants’ Pavlovian fear (measured by the sweat on their skin) gradually evaporated.

In effect, this kind of “exposure therapy” helps us change the associations we have with a particular stimulus. If we’ve flown 100 times and the plane has never crashed, for example, our brain (and body) start to learn that it’s safe. Though the fear may never be fully extinguished, we’ll likely have greater courage to confront it.

3. Practice self-compassionI’ve never been a good flyer myself, and it was comforting when an acquaintance shared an article he wrote about having the same problem (and his favorite tips). Fears and adversity can make us feel alone; we wonder why we’re the only ones feeling this way, and what exactly is wrong with us. In these situations, learning to practice self-compassion—and recognizing that everyone suffers—can be a much gentler and more effective road to healing.

Self-compassion involves offering compassion to ourselves: confronting our own suffering with an attitude of warmth and kindness, without judgment. In one study, participants in an eight-week Mindful Self-Compassion program reported more mindfulness and life satisfaction, with lower depression, anxiety, and stress afterward compared to people who didn’t participate—and the benefits lasted up to a year.

One practice, the Self-Compassion Break, is something you can do any time you start to feel overwhelmed by pain or stress. It has three steps, which correspond to the three aspects of self-compassion:
  • Be mindful: Without judgment or analysis, notice what you’re feeling. Say, “This is a moment of suffering” or “This hurts” or “This is stress.”
  • Remember that you’re not alone: Everyone experiences these deep and painful human emotions, although the causes might be different. Say to yourself, “Suffering is a part of life” or “We all feel this way” or “We all struggle in our lives.”
  • Be kind to yourself: Put your hands on your heart and say something like “May I give myself compassion” or “May I accept myself as I am” or “May I be patient.”
If being kind to yourself is a challenge, an exercise called How Would You Treat a Friend?could help. Here, you compare how you respond to your own struggles—and the tone you use—with how you respond to a friend’s. Often, this comparison unearths some surprising differences and valuable reflections: Why am I so harsh on myself, and what would happen if I weren’t?

Once we start to develop a kinder attitude toward ourselves, we can crystallize that gentle voice in a Self-Compassionate Letter. This practice asks you to spend 15 minutes writing words of understanding, acceptance, and compassion toward yourself about a specific struggle that you feel ashamed of—say, being shy or not spending enough time with your kids. In the letter, you might remind yourself that everyone struggles, and that you aren’t solely responsible for this shortcoming; if possible, you could also consider constructive ways to improve in the future.

4. MeditateAs mindfulness gurus like to remind us, our most painful thoughts are usually about the past or the future: We regret and ruminate on things that went wrong, or we get anxious about things that will. When we pause and bring our attention to the present, we often find that things are…okay.

Practicing mindfulness brings us more and more into the present, and it offers techniques for dealing with negative emotions when they arise. That way, instead of getting carried away into fear, anger, or despair, we can work through them more deliberately.

One of the most commonly studied mindfulness programs is the eight-week-long Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), which teaches participants to cope with challenges using a variety of meditation practices (including the ones detailed below). Various studies have found that MBSR has wide-ranging health and psychological benefits for people in general, as well as those struggling with mental illness or chronic disease.

One meditation that might be particularly effective at calming our negative thoughts is the Body Scan. Here, you focus on each body part in turn—head to toe—and can choose to let go of any areas of tension you discover. Strong feelings tend to manifest physically, as tight chests or knotted stomachs, and relaxing the body is one way to begin dislodging them.

In one study, researchers found that time spent practicing the Body Scan was linked to greater well-being and less reactivity to stress. Being more aware of our bodies—and the emotions they are feeling—might also help us make healthier choices, trusting our gut when something feels wrong or avoiding commitments that will lead to exhaustion.
When stress creeps in, good habits often creep out—and one of those is healthy eating. When we’re emotional, many of us reach for the sweets; when we’re short on time, fast food seems like the only option. So in addition to helping us cultivate mindfulness, the Raisin Meditation could help change our relationship to food.

This exercise invites you to eat a raisin mindfully—but wait, not so fast. First, examine its wrinkles and color; see how it feels between your fingers, and then take a sniff. Slowly place it on your tongue, and roll it around in your mouth before chewing one bite at a time. Notice the urge to swallow, and whether you can sense it moving down your throat into your stomach. Not only will you have practiced mindfulness, but you may never look at food the same way again.

One final meditation that we can sprinkle throughout our day—or practice on its own—is Mindful Breathing. It involves bringing attention to the physical sensations of the breath: the air moving through the nostrils, the expansion of the chest, the rise and fall of the stomach. If the mind wanders away, you bring attention back. This can be done during a full 15-minute meditation, or during a moment of stress with just a few breaths.

In one study, participants who did a Mindful Breathing exercise before looking at disturbing images—like spiders or car crashes—experienced less negative emotion than people who hadn’t done the exercise. Negative thoughts can pull us along into their frantic stream, but the breath is an anchor we can hold onto at any time.

5. Cultivate ForgivenessIf holding a grudge is holding you back, research suggests that cultivating forgiveness could be beneficial to your mental and physical health. If you feel ready to begin, it can be a powerful practice.

Both Nine Steps to Forgiveness and Eight Essentials When Forgiving offer a list of guidelines to follow. In both cases, you begin by clearly acknowledging what happened, including how it feels and how it’s affecting your life right now. Then, you make a commitment to forgive, which means letting go of resentment and ill will for your own sake; forgiveness doesn’t mean letting the offender off the hook or even reconciling with them. Ultimately, you can try to find a positive opportunity for growth in the experience: Perhaps it alerted you to something you need, which you may have to look for elsewhere, or perhaps you can now understand other people’s suffering better.

If you’re having trouble forgiving, Letting Go of Anger through Compassion is a five-minute forgiveness exercise that could help you get unstuck. Here, you spend a few minutes generating feelings of compassion toward your offender; she, too, is a human being who makes mistakes; he, too, has room for growth and healing. Be mindfully aware of your thoughts and feelings during this process, and notice any areas of resistance.

Not convinced this is the best approach? Researchers tested it against the common alternatives—either ruminating on negative feelings or repressing them—and found that cultivating compassion led participants to report more empathy, positive emotions, and feelings of control. That’s an outcome that victims of wrongdoing deserve, no matter how we feel about the offenders.

Stress and struggles come in many forms in life: adversity and trauma, fear and shame, betrayals of trust. The 12 practices above can help you cope with difficulties when they arise, but also prepare you for challenges in the future. With enough practice, you’ll have a toolbox of techniques that come naturally—a rainy-day fund for the mind, that will help keep you afloat when times get tough. Just knowing that you’ve built up your skills of resilience can be a great comfort, and even a happiness booster.

This article originally appeared on Greater Good, the online magazine of UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, one of Mindful’s partners. View the original article.
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Mindfully Free of Wanting People to Be a Certain Way

12/23/2016

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By Leo Babauta

One of the biggest sources of difficulties for every single human being is the desire for people to be a certain way.

We can’t seem to help it: we want the world to be the way we want it. Unfortunately, reality always has different plans, and people behave in less-than-ideal ways.
The problem isn’t other people. It’s our ideals.

Yes, I think it would be great if people stopped killing animals for food and fashion, and became vegan instead. But that’s not the reality I’m faced with, and it’s not going to happen for quite some time, if ever.

Yes, I think it would be great if my kids behaved perfectly all the time, but that’s not the reality of kids. Or any human beings, for that matter.

Yes, it would be great if my wife always agreed with me, but that’s not going to happen.
So the problem is:
  • We have ideals about how people should act, or ways we’d like them to be.
  • People don’t act in those ideal ways, or aren’t the way we’d like them to be.
  • We get bothered by that reality. Frustrated, angry, sad, disappointed, stressed.
  • This makes us unhappy, and damages our relationships with others.
This is obviously not great.
We have a couple options:
  1. Stick rigidly to the way we want people to be, and be upset when they don’t meet those ideals.
  2. Stick rigidly to the way we want people to be, and try really hard to make them be that way. (This pretty much never works.)
  3. Let go of the ideals and be happier and less frustrated.

When we think about it this way, it’s obvious that option 3 is the best route. We’ll talk about this option soon, but let’s talk about a couple objections first.

Objections to Letting Go

When people are confronted with the idea of letting go of their ideals about other people, they usually have a few objections:
  • Objection: But then people get away with bad behavior. There’s a difference between wanting someone to behave a certain way (and getting upset when they don’t) … and accepting that a person is acting a certain way, and then compassionately finding an appropriate response. In the first case, you are angry at them for their behavior, and your response out of anger is likely to make things worse. In the second case, you aren’t bothered too much, but can see that their behavior is harmful and want to help them not harm. You can’t actually control them, but you can try to help. If you try to help but need them to accept your help, then it will be continued frustration. Help but let go of the ideal outcome you’d like from your offered help.
  • Objection: But what about abusive behavior? There’s a difference between being agonized about the abuse, and accepting that the person is abusive and taking appropriate action. Letting go of your ideals about how the abusive person should act doesn’t mean you let them abuse you. It just means you accept that they are an abuser, while taking the appropriate action of getting away from them, and reporting them or seeking help for them if it’s appropriate. Don’t leave yourself in a place where you’re being harmed, but that doesn’t mean you have to be afflicted by someone else’s actions.
  • Objection: But then we don’t make the world a better place. If people behave in less-than-ideal ways, you can agonize about it while trying to change them, or you can accept that the world is not ideal … but calmly and compassionately work to help others. In both cases, you’re trying to do good … but in the second case, you’re not agonizing about how things are.
So these objections are all about wanting to change people’s bad behavior. This article is about inner acceptance of “bad” behavior (or what I think of as “not ideal”) … but once you have inner acceptance, you can take appropriate external action. That might be helping, being compassionate, getting to safety, talking calmly and lovingly to someone, reporting abusive behavior, getting counseling, or many more appropriate actions that come from a place of love, compassion and understanding rather than frustration and anger.

Letting Go of Ideals

So how do you let go of wanting people to be a certain way?

First, reflect on how these ideals are harming you and others.
This wanting your way, this wanting a specific version of reality … is making you frustrated, unhappy, angry. It’s harming your relationship. It’s likely making the other person unhappy as well. This is all caused by an attachment to expectations and ideals.

Next, reflect on wanting yourself and others to be happy.
If the ideals and expectations are harming yourself and others … wouldn’t it be nice to stop harming yourself? Wouldn’t it be nice to be happy instead of frustrated? Think about the desire to have a better relationship with other people as well, and for them to be happier in their relationship with you. This is your intention, and it is one of love.

Third, notice the ideals and frustrations as they arise.
See when someone else is frustrating you, and reflect on what ideal you’re holding for them. How do you want them to behave instead? Don’t get caught up in your story of why they should behave that way, but instead just take note of the ideal. See that this ideal is harming you. Decide that it’s not useful to you.

Also notice your mental pattern of resentment when someone doesn’t meet your expectations, and decide to try to catch it early. It’s a pattern you can be aware of and catch early, and decide to change your pattern.

Next, mindfully observe the tightness.
Turn your attention to your body, the tightness that comes from holding on to this ideal. Pay attention to how it feels, the quality of the energy in your body, where it’s located, how it changes. In this moment of observing, you are awake, rather than being stuck in the daydream of your story about why this person should be behaving differently.

At this point, you can decide to try a different pattern.

A Different Way

So now, you can practice a different way of being.
​
Here are some ideas I’ve found useful:
  • Instead of fixing on one way this person (or situation) should be, be open to other possibilities. Open yourself to lots of different ways this person or situation can be.
  • Try to understand the person, rather than judging them based on limited information. Try to understand why they’d act this way — perhaps they are afraid. Perhaps they’re suffering in some way. Perhaps this is their strategy for protecting themselves.
  • Try to see the good-hearted nature of their actions, rather than one where they are a bad person. For example, you might see that they are tender-hearted and afraid, and so are acting out of fear. Or they just want to be happy, and this is their strategy for being happy. Or maybe they have good intentions and want to help, but are misguided. We all have a good heart deep down inside, but it might take several layers to see that. Anger can stem from jealousy which stems from insecurities and fear, which stems from a tender-hearted worry that we’re not good enough. The angry action isn’t justified, but there is still a good heart at the core.
  • See their suffering that causes their actions and know that you have suffered in the same way. Remember how that suffering feels, so you can see what they’re going through. Compassionately wish for an end to their suffering.
  • Tell yourself that you don’t know how people should act. Honestly, I don’t always know how I should act … I am fooling myself if I think I know how other people should act. Instead, I might be curious about their actions.
  • See the other person as a teacher. They are helping you practice mindfulness, and let go of your old patterns. They are teaching you about reality vs. ideals, about how humans act.
  • Relax. Seriously, see the tightness you’re holding, and just relax. Smile. Be happy in this present moment.
  • Practice see the goodness in the other person, in yourself, and in the present moment. There is always an underlying goodness in this moment, if you choose to notice. Trust in this goodness, and you’ll be afraid less and happier more.
These are some practices. Try them, practice them over and over. I think you’ll be happier for it, and every relationship will be better.
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My Addiction Was a Family Disease

10/6/2016

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Parenting is hard and blame is easy to throw around. Still, if my adolescent addictions had been seen as part of something larger than just "Anna's issues," it might have helped.

My parents started off pretty relaxed about drugs—by which I mean that they were open with me that they had smoked pot and they didn’t subscribe to any alarmist tactics when it came to warning me about any drugs. Whether this was ultimately good or bad, I have no idea. But it seemed like the right way: We lived in Marin County and this was the ‘80s, which meant that members of the Grateful Dead frequented the same local supermarket as us. Being alarmist about drugs in the '80s was not the Marin way.

​Click here to cont.

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