A few years ago when I first went to treatment for my eating disorder, my brother flew to LA for 24 hours to see me. He was the first family member to visit and to say I was elated is an enormous understatement; I literally couldn’t wait to see him. When he sent me his flight details, I took them to the clinical director who proceeded to inform me that I would not be able to see him when he arrived because I would be at a lunch outing. It was a compulsory group activity and she would not make an exception. I would have to wait until 2pm to see him, 2 hours after he was scheduled to arrive.
I was livid. I thought she was totally unreasonable as it meant that I would only be able to spend a total of about 5 hours with him out of 24. I also had not seen him in more than a year. As it turned out, I ended up not seeing him until 3 hours after he got there as we were running late back from the lunch outing. This further infuriated me. I really felt that an exception should have been made given he was flying in from Australia for the day.
I didn’t react kindly to her and I avoided her for the next few days. When I finally told her how upset I was about it all, she said she totally understood. She was so calm and composed and then I apologized to her for being upset. She asked me why I was apologizing; I was so confused. I told her I was apologizing for being angry with her. She asked me if I thought I shouldn’t have been angry and I was even more confused. I sat there very awkwardly feeling like I was in some sort of trick situation. I will never forget what she proceeded to say to me:
“You know Phoebes, I am a good and loving person and I try to do my best to be thoughtful and considerate towards others. But being thoughtful doesn’t equate to being a pushover or giving in to others when you have made a thoughtful decision and think it is the right one. Sometimes you just have to listen to your gut and back yourself.” We talked more about how important boundaries are and that people are never going to be happy with everything you do. But if we start turning our lives upside down and changing our minds so that other people will be happy, then not only will we never happy ourselves, but we will waste so much time and energy that is better spent being who we are rather than worrying about who people think we are.
In this situation, she was in charge of my care and saw that my meal plan was a very vulnerable thing. Missing a chance to eat out in public with the other clients was not something she thought I would benefit from at such an early stage in my recovery and she felt structure was what I needed most. Her job was not to make me happy but rather to do what was best for my recovery. She made the call and she never expected me to be happy about it but she expected me to accept it and I did.
I am a pretty sensitive person. I care a lot about people and I don’t like upsetting them. That is not to say I don’t speak my mind; I am sure my brothers and sister, parents, fiancé and close friends will all attest to that fact. But as for setting boundaries in relationships, standing up for myself and finding a voice in difficult situations, this has not been an easy thing for me to learn.
Recently, I was accused of being too sensitive and told that I needed to get a thicker skin. I was struggling again with caring too much about upsetting other people. When I talked to my sister about it later, she said “you do need to get a thicker skin. Get back to having the confidence in yourself I know you have. You have good values and you’re fair but that doesn’t mean you abandon yourself just to please others.” It was awesome advice and spot on.
The thing I realized afterwards is that I already have a thick skin, I just sometimes take it off!
No matter how much we work on ourselves, some things often arise again and again and we need to remind ourselves, or be reminded when old habits are creeping in. I am reminded that upsetting others is a part of life. I am never going to please everyone. I certainly care about others and don’t set out to hurt but I cannot do things to please people when pleasing that person means compromising my values, my ability to make a well balanced decision and the plethora of other things I should be doing in this life instead of worrying about what others think of me.
Very conveniently last week a client came to me and talked about a problem he had with a work colleague. The long and the short of it was the only way this colleague was going to be happy was if my client stunted his own potential, treated said colleague as their boss even though she wasn’t and engaged in office gossip and criticism of his other colleagues. This client knew that if he were to do any of these things, he would be compromising his own values, gifts and potential and that staying true to what he knew to be right was the only way to resolve the problem. For the record, this client had tried being honest and direct with the colleague and it didn’t work. We forged a plan for him to detach from this colleague and remind himself multiple times a day (we came up with a mantra) of who he was and what his values were.
When he came back this week he said that nothing had really changed that much in terms of the behavior of the said colleague, but he said that by reminding himself of who he was and who he wanted to be, the colleague took up less energy in his life and he felt lighter than he had in weeks. We can’t change others, but we can change how much energy we allow them to take up. As a beautiful friend of mine recently said 'sometimes, people just need to learn how to have a care factor of zero.'
Getting a “thicker skin” does not equate to being insensitive; it means having more confidence in who you are as a person which in turn enables you to let what others say about you and how they feel roll off your back. I would hope that anyone would come to me directly if they felt that I hurt them or had done wrong by them. I would listen to them and how they feel and take the time to decide whether I should rethink my view. However, that doesn’t mean that I am necessarily going to change my position just because someone didn’t like what I did.
So next time you get hurt by someone’s comments, whether they are made directly to you, in a passive aggressive way or behind your back, before you go down that rabbit hole of feeling guilty and hurt and allowing the inevitable feeling of self doubt to creep in, remember who you are! If you are a caring and kind person, chances are you just used your voice and that may have rubbed someone up the wrong way. Trust in yourself and the person you are and do what my Grandmother did, she literally would make a flick on her shoulder as she walked away from the person or situation in order to signify that she had let the comments go and they would not take up any more of her precious energy.
There are a lot of real problems in this world that deserve and need our time and emotional energy; caring about what other people think of everything we do is not one of them! I don't like to use comparisons too often but sometimes they are important to bring us back to the real world.
Love Phoebe
The Power of Women
Strong women. May we know them, may we raise them, and may we be them!
Two weeks ago my best friend from Australia came to visit me. She was here for 3 days and I believe that we did not come up for air the whole time; such was the extent of our chats. I am pretty sure one night we actually fell asleep mid conversation.
She’s that friend who knows me inside out, lets me talk without judging me and knows how to pull me up when I need it. She is not a ‘yes’ friend nor is she interested in me pursuing anything other than a life that is authentic to me. She is always so happy for me through good times, and there for me during the bad times. She is a soul mate and has such an elegant way of letting me know when she thinks I may need to rethink a decision or a viewpoint.
This was the first time she had come to LA and she looked at me at one point and said “you’ve built an amazing life for yourself here Phoebes. I love your fiancé, I love your friends and I am so happy for you.” While we may say we shouldn’t need validation, I am the first to admit that when I get it from someone I love and respect as dearly as her, it means a lot to me.
This is a friendship that has spanned some 25 years and I know that it will last the rest of our lives. I trust her whole-heartedly and she has never once betrayed my confidence. And she got me thinking about the women in my life.
I am a self-confessed girl’s girl. I need my female friendships or I don’t feel like myself. I have wonderful friends and women back in Australia. My mother sent me to the school I went to for many reasons but one of the main reasons was because the women she knew at University who had attended my school, had such strong friendships. I think the importance placed on those friendships growing up has enabled me to find extraordinary women in LA.
Recently on a walk with one of my wonderful friends here, she talked about the competition that exists between women and particularly mothers. We weren’t referring to healthy competition but rather the kind that is based on jealousy and results in women who cut other women down. We’ve all had that friend and if we ask ourselves honestly, I am sure we are aware of some times when we have not acted in ways that were kind or respectful towards other women.
The more I move through different phases of my life, the more I hear about other women cutting each other down. I thought we were past that after high school but sometimes it seems as though high school is being relived all over again when people start families. “Can you believe how much she works? Those poor children of hers.” Or “I can’t believe she is a stay at home mother – she must be so bored.” Or my personal favorite – “She’s trying to have it all.” It is almost as if we can’t bear the thought that someone is doing something different than we are and that if we don’t point out the holes in their choices, they might be perceived as doing a better job than us.
And then there are the snide remarks. I have never, ever seen someone benefit from a snide remark. I know for me that when someone “subtly” lets me know they think I should do something different, or that they disapprove of my choices, especially about an issue that really isn’t their business, my knee jerk response is to shut down and pull away from that person. Some people fight back, but after asking several clients what their response to certain snide remarks is, I think the overwhelming majority of us stop trusting that person and put up barriers to protect ourselves.
I don’t believe that the gossiping and passive aggressive remarks come from a terrible place; I actually believe it stems from insecurity and self-doubt. In a world where 3 year olds are taking entrance exams for pre-school and a child’s homework not being done is a poor reflection of parenting, and social media where you can log on in an instant and see how Gisele is crushing life better than you, parents are constantly being judged! It is insanity and utter nonsense.
Something has to give somewhere with this. In the strive to be perfect we are seeing more young mothers develop eating disorders, alcohol addictions and severe anxiety and depression all in the pursuit to be seen as having it all together. I don’t meant to tip too much on social media but if you can tell me that you have logged on to it and never felt at least a moment of disappointment about yourself and what you have accomplished after you compare your life to someone else’s, then you are doing a lot better than I am.
So how do we start tackling these problems rather than getting on board and making ourselves sick trying to conform to being the perfect employee, the perfect woman or perfect wife or perfect mother?
I opine that we reject all this critiquing of other women and start by rallying around each other and each other’s choices. We get off our high horse by thinking we did it better or are doing it better. We don’t judge women or look for what is wrong with their choices, their bodies, their relationships, their jobs or their children. We look for all the good they are doing and we pat them on the back for how hard they are working and what a great job they are doing. We every once in a while ask, “are you okay?” and if we are privileged enough that they share their struggles with us, we absolutely keep their response to ourselves.
I also believe that a great way to reject judgment and critiquing of other women is by owning up when we feel jealous or envious of each other. Jealousy and envy thrive in secrecy and cause resentment, pettiness and gossiping. There is something so liberating about saying to someone “she seems to have it all together and I feel like I compare myself to her.” I can almost guarantee that if you are talking to a true friend, you will get the validation you need in that moment that you are doing a lot better than you think you are. And if you want to be brave and take it a step further, tell the person about whom you are comparing yourself to that you are doing that. I think it will help you realize how human we all are and how we all feel that at certain times.
It doesn’t matter what women are doing with their family and work life balance. What matters to me is that we live in a world where women are free to choose what works best for them and their families and that we support each other. After all, feminism is really about women being free to make choices.
My fiancé and I hope to have children one day and if and when we do, I hope that the women in my life back my choices even when they are different to their own.
So next time you think you are going to offer some “words of wisdom” to someone about how you think they should do things, or you go to say something about someone else and their choices, stop and think. Check in with yourself about where you are coming from. It is a place of care and love? If it is then ask yourself, what is the best way I can support this person in my life right now. And if you don’t know the answer, ask them! Finally, if you identify it is coming from a place of insecurity, jealousy, self-righteousness, or “just trying to help”, do a double take and try to remember who you are and who you want to be.
A New Year, A New You…wait, what?
Everywhere I look at the moment there seems to be an advertisement saying ‘start the year off right’ or ‘cleanse that body after the holiday season,’ or perhaps the most interesting, ‘Make this year the new you’.
Every year the message seems to be the same…a new you! What if I like the current me? Or, what if I still like the ‘new me’ I created last year?! Do I have to change myself on January 1 every year? It seems like a lot of hard work and, if I make the changes that are being suggested, it seems like it is going to cost me a lot of money!
I’m not a huge proponent of the whole ‘new person’ concept. I believe in personal growth, in working on ourselves and that people can if they choose, change how they behave and react dramatically. However, our soul is the essence of who we are and trying to become someone new seems sad to me. The message of these advertisements seems to convey to me that somehow I wasn’t good enough last year or I have done something naughty or wrong by indulging over the holidays and that my jeans are a little tight because I wasn’t disciplined enough. To be honest, I think my jeans are a little tight because I filled up on love and human connection over the holidays.
Personally, I find these messages of ‘new you’ exhausting and a little defeating. I absolutely agree that sometimes after the holidays we want to get back into our routine. We may be feeling sluggish and irritable after over-indulging and not a lot of movement. But that doesn’t really call for a total overhaul of who we are does it? And if there are changes that we want to make, maybe having a more gentle and gradual approach to those changes will ensure their longevity.
My new year didn’t start off with guilt over the holiday season. It started off with me writing down a list of goals that I want to achieve for the year. This is something that I began doing about 10 years ago; I sit down and write in my journal what it is that I think that I would like to achieve over the next 12 months.
Until the last few years however, I had never sat down and reflected upon what I had achieved in the 12 months prior. The main reason for this is that I rarely achieved the goals I had set out to and so re-reading those parts of my journal didn’t seem very productive. In fact, they just made me feel like a failure.
But at the time, those were things that I truly believed were my goals and where I wanted my life to go. It is little wonder that none of them happened. I wasn’t in touch with myself and where I was at in my life. Some of my goals were actually goals I heard other people had set.
In recent years, I started writing down goals that were more authentic to me. They came from a place of ‘want’ and ‘feeling’ rather than ‘should.’ At the start of last year I wrote down that by the end of 2015, I wanted to be working full time for my business, fall in love, take my first vacation in 5 years, stay fit, and last but absolutely not least, talk to my God on a regular basis. There were a few other goals I had on the list but they were the main ones.
When I wrote these things down, for the first time in my life, I wrote them without anxiety or judgment about what would happen if I didn’t achieve these goals. I wrote from the heart and from a place of discernment. I had reflected upon what I wanted and where I wanted my life to go and it was therefore easier for my energy to follow my thoughts.
One of the things that happens when we are congruent with and authentic in ourselves and what we want for our lives, is we are not only better able to articulate our desires, but it feels right that we pursue them.
In 2015, this proved true for me and as the year came to a close, I didn’t feel good just because I could tick off my goals, I felt good because my goals were so in line with where I want my life to go that I was living with that wonderful feeling of being on the right path all year, even before I had met my goals.
That is not to say that I haven’t had difficult times or that life has been perfect; it never is. But there is something calming about being authentic and not having that feeling of ‘I know I should be doing this but I’m stuck where I am.’
There were of course, some goals that I have not yet met and that I will carry over into 2016, 2017 and possibly 2025. And there were a couple of goals that I had set that no longer make sense. But I know that my period of discernment before I set out on the track I wanted was paramount in helping me to set goals that were right for my life.
So as you start this new year, don’t make it about being a new you….be the you you are and always have been but spend some time discerning what it is YOU want for your life and where it is that YOU want your life to go. And don’t judge yourself for the goals you have or the goals you miss.
Happy 2016 Everyone!
Our Hierarchy of Needs: Part 1
I often talk about my niece and nephews on my blogs. Children have a profound effect on me. Their sweet, innocent, vulnerable, yet confident ability to express, and ask for their needs to be met teaches me more than I could ever learn in a classroom. I often talk to clients about how we are born with the ability to express ourselves and our needs, and indeed, my sister’s three children particularly, continue to remind me of that gift.
Last week my four-year-old niece asked my sister ‘had any children died in Paris’. Dumbfounded that my niece actually knew what had happened, my sister responded, “No darling, there were no children who died.” My niece, herself a big sister to her two-year-old brother, then asked if any “big sisters had died.”
The questions continued and my sister found herself in a position where her answers didn’t seem to appease the fears of the three innocent little faces staring up at her. The line of questioning finally led to “who will take care of us if they get you and Daddy?” They were searching for their own sense of certainty.
They questioned whether I would return from LA to be with them and it was only when my sister assured them that if something happened to her and their Daddy, they would indeed be with me, wherever I was, that the line of questioning abruptly ended. The conversation turned to talk of their new bunk beds.
When my sister related this conversation I was both overwhelmed with sadness that my niece and nephews no longer exclusively live in a world of love, of ‘Frozen’ and football; I thought their magical world where their biggest concerns were nap times and broken cookies would last a lot longer than this. I also thought about the children throughout the world who have never lived in a world of love, princesses, cookies, regular nap times and football.
I felt grateful that my sister was able to give my niece and nephews security by reminding them how much I love them and that I could and would, indeed, be their backup plan.
But most of all, I was struck by how direct and honest they were with my sister about taking care of their needs. Ultimately, they wanted to know that their basic needs were going to be met if the worst-case scenario happened. They needed answers and once they got them they were satisfied and moved on.
I started thinking about the things we need to know and the things we don’t. My niece didn’t ask where they would live or any other logistics. But what she was asking for was elemental, instinctive, fundamental and so very human.
So often when we get the answer we are seeking, we continue to look for more answers. Living in uncertainty fills almost all of us with fear. I like to think that my faith fills my heart with peace. I talk to my higher power a lot. I cry when I need to and try to fulfill my needs by juxtaposing leaning into the vulnerability that arises in everyday life with trusting in my higher power.
It has taken a lot of work for me to come this far and yet so frequently I fall short. I experience discomfort and then I start looking for some certainty of my own when what I really should be doing is checking in with myself that my basic needs are met and then, providing they are, asking myself what is it that I am afraid of that is making me seek further certainty than I actually need.
Abraham Maslow wrote about our basic needs in his well-known theory/table “Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.”
The most fundamental and basic layer of the pyramid encompasses physical needs such as air, food, water, clothing and shelter. In ascending order, the levels then include security, love, friendship and esteem. Maslow states that if these basic needs are not met then the individual will feel anxious and tense.
The D- needs, also known as the deficiency or basic needs are food, air, water, clothing, sleep and shelter. We are not motivated to seek other needs until these needs are met.
Once we have these D- needs met, we move to our safety needs which include protection from elements, security, stability and freedom from fear.
The next rung on the pyramid is love and belonging. We crave friendship, intimacy, affection and most of all, love. For most people this is a tricky one and, over a lifetime, our needs can often rest here because we sometimes try to equate love and intimacy with achievements and success; these fall into the next layer but in reality, if our basic need of love is not satisfied, we don’t feel fulfilled. It is why, no matter how much money one has, without love, money alone does not fulfill a person long term.
The fifth layer is self-actualization which has three facets: realizing our personal potential, self-fulfillment and seeking personal growth through experiences. Maslow offers the following description of self-actualization:
'It refers to the person’s desire for self-fulfillment, namely, to the tendency for him to become actualized in what he is potentially.
The specific form that these needs will take will of course vary greatly from person to person. In one individual it may take the form of the desire to be an ideal mother, in another it may be expressed athletically, and in still another it may be expressed in painting pictures or in inventions' (Maslow, 1943, p. 382–383).
It is important to remember that throughout the course of one’s life, the journey up and down this pyramid can and will fluctuate. Life events like death, divorce or even disconnection from a spouse or loved one can require a person to revisit the third layer of love and belongingness before they can resume focus on financial prosperity. In the same way, the loss of a job or one’s savings can require further discernment of layer four. And there are ripple effects to many of life’s events which can cause one to revisit their very basic physiological needs!
In my recovery from my eating disorder, while I had access to food in order to meet my basic needs, my inability to nourish myself appropriately prevented me from being able to truly focus on meeting my specific relational needs.
Once we have our basic needs met, what do we do with that? In Part Two of this blog, I will address what Maslow later added as an additional need.
Stress and Certainty.
Last year at the local Church Nativity Play on Christmas Eve, all the children were asked to dress as shepherds or angels. My niece is very much into dressing up, particularly as an angel, princess or a fairy and so my sister just assumed that she would be very excited at the prospect of playing an angel. When my niece expressed that she wasn’t excited, my sister was quite taken aback. After probing her for more information as to why she wasn't excited, my niece said “I don’t want to be an angel Mummy, I want to be God.”
Starts young doesn’t it?!
I usually don’t write a lot about God when I am writing outside my own journal. Mainly because I realize that so often, I lose the reader when they see His name. For the purposes of this blog, I encourage you to interchange ‘God’ with ‘Universe’ or ‘Life’ or ‘Allah’ or ‘Buddha’ or whomever or whatever it is that you believe in. For me it is God and so that’s why I write His name but the message is really relatable no matter what it/he/she is that you believe controls our destiny.
I am someone who used to love certainty. I needed it in an almost addicted-like way. I didn’t always have control over certain situations and I somehow, subconsciously, thought that stressing would make things more in my control. I suppose that’s why we all stress. Stressing or worrying over something, somehow gives us the illusion that we might have more control than we actually do.
Over the last few years, I have realized that not only does stressing actually have no positive impact on the result I am trying to achieve, it actually stops me from being open to all the possibilities that life has in store for me.
We are all on a journey that we like to think we have control over. ‘We are in charge of our own destiny’, I hear over and over. While I am absolutely someone who thinks that we make our own luck, and that hard work, commitment, and a propensity to honor our values and do the right thing will lead to a fulfilling and meaningful life, it would be God-like to think that we have full control over where life takes us. I believe that there is a path laid out for us and all that stress and worry do is prevent us from being present and enjoying what is before us.
From the time I was about 10, I knew I wanted to live in New York. Having been there only once for a few days when I was 6, it would be naïve to think that I had any idea what living in New York actually meant. I suspect it was a combination of television shows like ‘Friends’, ‘Sex and the City’ and subsequent vacations over the years to New York that continued to fuel the desire; none of which actually prepared me for the reality of living there. Nonetheless, I was determined. When I was 28, I moved to Manhattan. While it was a wonderful experience, 18 months later, I left for Los Angeles, a city that had never even been a place I intended to visit, much less live. A one month stay turned out to be the beginning of the most extraordinary, healing and life changing four years of my life.
To me, Los Angeles is truly a city of Angels. It is where I healed from my eating disorder, found people who once strangers, have now become another family to me. I began the career of my dreams, recovered my faith and developed my true spirituality, and where I finally recovered the real me. In short, Los Angeles turned out to be the New York of my childhood dreams.
Imagine for a second if I had decided, before I even arrived in LA, that I would only be here for a month. Imagine the uphill battle I would have had against the life that was waiting for me. I am not for a second saying that I haven’t worked hard for everything that I have here. I have. And while Los Angeles has been the platform that I sprung from to build a healthy and meaningful life, it would be remiss of me to say that moving to a city where you know only a couple of people isn’t one of the more lonely experiences of one’s life. Add on to that working on recovery from an eating disorder and there have been some painful and difficult days.
However, the one constant presence in my life has been faith; even if I did not know it at the time. A few years ago, I did not have an identifiable faith. I was raised with one but I was certainly not connected to it. If you had asked me what I believed in, I would have had a hard time being able to articulate it. But deep down, on a subconscious level, I had a deep and profound faith and it was that faith that kept me persevering for years when I had no idea if I would actually recover. That faith in turn allowed me to be flexible and open to what came into my life.
I am so grateful for the part of me that was able to be flexible throughout this process. It has been the biggest teaching tool of my life. I have learned that I vacillate between periods of comfort in certainty and periods of absolute fear; this is particularly true now that I have started my own business and work for myself. Whenever I start to stress about something outside my control, or predict how the future is going to pan out, I turn to my God and I either ask Him to take it from me if I can’t deal with talking about it, or, I ask Him to walk with me during that fearful time. I am someone who believes He is always with me but when I talk to Him and verbalize my fear, I am choosing to lean on Him for support during that time. Let me tell you that it feels infinitely better than searching for guarantees and certainty, neither of which is ever available.
Of course it is important to think about important issues and how they may affect you in the future. We should think about what is relevant now and how it will affect us down the road. But if you wait for everything to be perfect or for the guarantees to come, you are going to have a suppressed life and likely not live the one that was laid out for you because you were too busy focusing on the one that you thought was best.
Sometimes I will find myself talking about my faith and feeling strong in it. Then the next day I will find myself stressing about the future. The thing is though; the two don’t go hand in hand. Each time I find myself doing that now, I know it is time for me to work harder at leaning into my faith.
All we can do is make the best decisions with the information we have at the time. Anything more than that is playing God. Next time you start stressing or searching for the answers to the future, stop and take a minute to look around. Feel where you are and what you are stressing about and take a moment to contemplate whether you are really allowing the faith that you proclaim to guide you or, whether you are trying to guide your faith in your direction. I promise the outcome of these two is very different.
Deal now, or pay later…with interest!
I like to think of my emotional bank and my credit card similarly; if I don’t pay off my credit card when I make a purchase, I end up paying interest on my purchases. I will admit, I have a fear that my credit card will get to a balance that I can’t pay off. It isn’t a mortgage which is (hopefully) an investment, and there is no equity. It is simply a symbol of money I spent, usually on things I could go without. It isn’t that I judge my spending on my credit card, I don’t. There are many benefits to having a credit card. But by paying it off regularly, I know I am always in control.
When talking recently, to a friend about debt he was shocked when I told him that I pay my credit card off within days of using it. My friend explained the financial benefits of keeping my money in an interest bearing account until my credit card bill was actually due as really, all that happens is the bank earns interest on my money instead of me. While I know he is 100% right, my fear of letting my credit card debt accumulate has not yet swayed me from my little practice.
This fear didn’t come from nowhere. When I was 18 I was pre-approved for a credit card without ever having applied for one. When the offer came in the mail, I thought it would be fun and exciting and I really liked the idea of having another card in my wallet and of accumulating frequent flyer miles. I looked at how much credit I had available and it was a lot of money.
About 2 months after I first got my card, I got my first credit card statement. I was absolutely not living within my college-student-babysitting-once-a-week means! I paid a bit off but I didn’t fully understand the impact yet. I continued to focus on how much money I had available to spend, not on how much money I had actually spent.
18 months later my card was maxed out and, every month, I was paying off interest which was about 50% of my still, college-student-babysit-once-a-week salary. I sat down and realized that at the rate I was going, it would take me 25 years to pay it off.
Now, looking back it was not a huge amount of money. It was a lot for a university student but I would have been able to clear it when I got my first job out of college with my first paycheck. But by that time, the interest I would have paid on it would have stopped me from doing a lot of other things.
I realized I was not in control of my finances and I panicked. When I finally went to my mum and told her of my predicament, she sat down with me and we had a long chat about spending. She took my statement, we went to the bank together and she paid it off before I permanently closed my credit card account. We then agreed that I would pay her back over a year until I had repaid her. If you know my Mum, you know what a generous and kind woman she is. It would have been very easy for her to just pay it off and I am sure on some level that was probably what she wanted to do. Luckily for me, my Mum is also very wise and responsible and I don’t believe I would have the approach to credit cards that I have now if she had simply paid it off and let me continue on my merry, spending-outside-my-means way!
If only our emotional debt could be wiped away as easily as my financial debt was.
I was talking to some clients recently about an adage a mentor of mine said to me one day: ‘Deal now or pay later.’ I repeated this saying to my clients and we began talking about why we need to address our emotions and feelings when they arise. The feelings don’t go away when we don’t address them; in fact they just fester and then come back late. With interest! And the longer you leave them, the longer it takes you to pay off the interest, all without touching the principal amount!
We all have scars. Every single one of us has been hurt in some way. The scars can come from family, teachers, friends, work colleagues, romantic relationships and so on. Not one of us goes through life unscathed. But the longer those wounds sit there without being addressed, the more we cover them up and the longer we stay ‘in debt’.
I like to look at my trusted confidants as part of my emotional income. They help me pay off my emotional debts on a regular basis so that I can avoid paying interest. They do this by listening to me and allowing me space to talk about what is causing me pain, or costing me more than it should. I know from experience that if something hurtful arises and I don’t talk to someone about how I feel, regardless of how vulnerable it makes me, or how silly I think the problem is, the problem will become a lot bigger than it ever was. Other problems will then pile on top of the principal problem and not only will I have to sift through the layers of new problems, I will still have to get back down to the underlying concern. Trust me when I tell you that this takes a lot longer than dealing with it in the first place!
Next time something arises that makes you feel sad or uncomfortable or off kilter, don’t bury it. Find your boyfriend, your wife, you friend, your parent, your therapist, whoever, just someone you trust. Tell that person and allow the principal problem to be paid down by their compassion, love, understanding and companionship. Yes, vulnerability is scary and the worse we think the problem is the more inclined we are to bury it; but the people who care about us want our emotional banks to be healthy and the more you reach out, the more you will find that not only will you avoid paying interest, you’ll actually start saving!
Saltwater Cures Everything
"Do you know a cure for me?"
"Why yes," he said. "I know a cure for everything. Saltwater."
"Saltwater?" I asked him.
"Yes," he said, "in one way or another. Sweat, or tears or the salt sea."
- Karen Blixen (under her pen name Isak Dinesen), Seven Gothic Tales
Don't let Shame hide Under the Umbrella of Gratitude
Gratitude. It's had a pretty big resurgence lately. Not surprising really. Social media's saturation of "perfect lives" and society's media prompted obsession with people who are famous for how they look and what they have, has created a society that now, more than ever, focuses on what we don't have rather than what we do have.
It isn't surprising that people are looking for something more meaningful to guide them; something that comes from within. The emergence of the focus on gratitude, I believe is a result of society wanting a way to look at life that is gentle and kind towards ourselves and doesn't push us to compare ourselves or see our lives as less than what they are. It guides us to look at who we are and turn inward for validation and acceptance.
I am grateful. I am living a life free from an illness that I never thought I would recover from. I like who I am and it has taken a lot of work to be able to say that! And there are still A LOT of fundamental things I want. I took life changing steps and made enormous sacrifices to recover who I am. And the freedom I now have to be me and not be who I think people want me to be is like breaking out of jail. Damn right I'm grateful.
And you better believe I still focus on what I want and need!
One of the themes that has come up through my work and even when I talk to friends is how to be grateful AND acknowledge difficulties in our lives and things we don't have but want. I have one friend who is one of the happiest and most positive people I know. She is happy in her relationship, has a wonderful family, great friends, financial security and the freedom to do almost whatever she wants. She is grateful for all that she has and is very aware that she has a privileged life. However, lately she has been talking a lot about struggles that she has been having for quite some time. She is ashamed of having these feelings and even more ashamed of talking about them because her life is so "perfect" and she should focus on all that is "good" in her life.
Shame. Brené Brown, the renowned scholar, author and public speaker defines shame as the fear of disconnection. "Is there something about me that if people know it or see it, that I won't be worthy of connection?" The problem with shame is that no one wants to talk about it and the less you talk about it, the more fear you have, the less you feel seen and the less connection you actually have. It is a vicious cycle.
Shame doesn't come from nowhere. Often the feelings, thoughts and/or actions we are ashamed of, we are actually taught by society to believe are "unacceptable." So how do we deal with something we are taught is unacceptable to think, feel, or act upon? We suppress it. We numb it. And it is pretty easy to do. More people in the US today are addicted or dependent on external substances than ever before, whether they be food, drugs, alcohol or something else. But it doesn't have to be through substance that we ignore it. Many people I am seeing now say, oh I won't focus on that I will focus on the good. I will be "grateful."
So shame gets to hide under the umbrella of gratitude and we don't get seen.
To truly be seen, we have to tell our truth. Yes, happy people who are grateful for what they have are much more pleasurable to be around than people who complain nonstop. But nonstop gratitude is pretty annoying because it isn't real. Talking about your struggles is not complaining, it is allowing for a deeper connection with another human being and for the space to explore parts of yourself that can cause the most amount of pain possible with the least amount of visibility to outsiders.
So be grateful but serve that gratitude with truth and the acknowledgment of struggles, fears, and insecurities. It allows for intimacy, which is essential to our health and happiness.