12-step

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Connect With Others to Get Friendly With Yourself

Self-Care Tip #81 – Connect with others.  Be a friend to yourself.

So you have bought into the famous, “You are not alone” stock.  After 2 months on psychotropics (medications for emotional illness,) you finally have an interest in people.  You are at least a little motivated and less afraid of things that move.  You don’t feel like you are the reason for original sin and more often than not, you think happiness might be more than what shopping can offer.  What is this strange and unfamiliar sensation?  And what to do with it?

It is time to connect.  Many of us get to the point where we no longer want to hide, we don’t hate ourselves, and we don’t hate others.  We get to the place of showing our under-belly just a little to the big wide world and are shocked that the only thing we feel is the wind as everyone is rushing by!  Just when we start wanting what we spent so much time hiding from, we seem to have forgotten how to connect with others.

It is no secret.  America is culturally impoverished.  We have little of cobblestone streets to meander down, dressed in clean clothes after a days work, checking up on neighbors and gossip.  We have few degrees of activity between full throttle and dead/no heart beat.   Come now!  How to connect in a world where our parents expected us to pay rent when we turned 18years old?

If you find yourself in something of this situation try on one of these basic tools and see what fits.  You can’t expect them all to.  So if you strike out a few times, keep on!

1.  Volunteer – for example, and in no particular order…

2.  Meetup.com – an awesome site to find people interested in what you are interested in.  e.g. book clubs, skiing, small business, Italian

3.  Support groups

4.  Write!  Although this at first thought may appear isolating, it is not necessarily.

  • Blog!  🙂
  • Journal

5.  Toastmasters

There is so much more.  Please let me know your thoughts and I’ll keep adding to this list!

Self-Care Tip #81 – Connect with others.  Be a friend to yourself.

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Get Treatment to Move On – Addictions

Molested by his cousin, neglected by his parents, he watched his intoxicated father beat his mother.  Thinking she would die too many times, he ran away, returned in a police car over and over again, as if wanting to get away was a crime.  He came back and raped his neighbor, more than once.  He spent a lot of time trying to get sex even though he knew it was ruining him and others.  He lost interest in almost everything else.  He suffered uncontrollable impulses.

He was 18 years old when he left it all for the safety of prison.  During the next fifteen-some years he was diagnosed, treated, and kept.  But kept for what?  For eating.  He gained weight, until he needed 2 seats to sit in.  Eating became his preoccupation.  He didn’t have sex.  He had food.

He was released to a home for sexual offenders, put on a diet and lost weight.  He lost it big and fast and felt in control.  He started purging and not finishing his meals.  He thought about purging all the time.  He knew he shouldn’t do it.  His voice was changing, raspy and his throat hurt but he still purged.  He wasn’t having sex.  He wasn’t over-eating.  He was purging.

For whatever reason, no one had yet seen the pattern.  Mostly everyone saw sex offender.  Me included.  I was trying.  I was trying to treat him with empathy, trying to get past the bile that comes when I think of rape, trying to consider the courageous things this man was doing now in life.

In one of my favorite scenes from the film, Rachel Getting Married, Kim played by Anne Hathaway argues with her sister about her own chances to have a future:

Rachel: Kym, you took Ethan for granted. Okay? You were high for his life. You were not present. Okay? You were high.
Kym: [Whispering] Yes.
Rachel: And you drove him off a bridge… and now he’s dead….
Kym: Yes, I was. Yes, I was stoned out of my mind. Who do I have to be now? I mean, I could be Mother Teresa and it wouldn’t make a difference, what I did. Did I sacrifice every bit of… love I’m allowed for this life because I killed our little brother?

I thought of this and somehow through all that trying, I did. And because I could empathize, a space opened up for me to be more objective.  That’s when I saw it.  I saw the pattern.

Addictions migrate.  Someone who may have started out as a food addict, might turn to gambling, and then later to alcohol.  Someone with sex addiction, might turn to food and then later to purging.

It can be like that game I used to play at Chucky Cheese, trying to hammer down the little animals that pop out of holes.  We need to treat the disease of Addiction regardless of how it’s dressed, or else it will keep popping up.  And like Kym, if we do, although perhaps terribly wrong in some unchangeable ways, we will still have a future.  If you’d like to read more about this “kainos” (Greek word for the opportunity to be made new,) read the post New versus New.

Self Care Tip #62 – Get treatment to move on.  Be a friend to yourself.

Question:  What do you think?  Please tell me your story.

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Your flawed self

My niece is sitting beside me and I can barely keep my hands off of her 5 month self.  I am eating a blueberry scone slowly.  She, with her tummy-full of breast milk, is watching every bite, a faint smile on her pink face.  I’m a little afraid she’s learning to eat carbohydrates from me and I want to tell her that I can’t remember the last time I ate one of these.  I start eating faster and turn away so I don’t imprint this on her supple myelinating neurons.

We closet eat, closet smoke, closet shop, closet sex, closet what we want to protect others from but what we independently are strong enough to handle …or not.  There is a term called “self-sabotaging behavior.”  Reducing this, we find that the process of closeting is in fact the handle on the door to that mal-behavior.  Keeping it real is the same as saying get it out of the closet.

My mentor and brother, Cameron Johnson used to say, “Go where the pain or fear is and it will lose control over you.”  People who work the 12-Steps call this “Rigorous Honesty.”  It is a pealing away of all pretense with yourself.

Avoiding rigorous honesty turns into self-sabotage.  We end up cutting ourselves down at the knees.  Anxiety uses fear to make us hide.  In cases that include emotional illness, of course medication will help our work toward honesty.

It is not about whether we hide our bad sides or not – we do.  It is about trying to keep it real.  The only thing to be ashamed about, if we must, is not trying.

So to my niece, I give her my flawed self and when the time(s) come, I will accept hers as well.

Self Care Tip #45 – Show the world your flawed self.  Be a friend to yourself.

Question:  How have you experienced the freedom that comes from going toward the fear?  Please tell us your story.

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