Your Circle of Trust…

One of the hardest things for me to accept while I was trying to repair my broken self was the idea that people I love are not always trustworthy. I am the kind of person who takes a little time to decide if I can trust someone, but once I make that call, I am ALL IN. I never re-evaluate. This has caused me great distress.

To avoid having to re-evaluate relationships, I had this bad habit of making excuses for people and requiring more of myself in some relationships. By all outward appearances, it seemed that in some relationships, I would do all the "giving" and someone else was allowed to do all the "being." I rationalized this as being kind. It is not kind. It is unhealthy.

To find my way back to joy, I had to step over some dead bodies and just let them lay there. I had to do an appraisal. I had to think back and remember - is this relationship both authentic and trustworthy...or is it not. In order to thrive, we all have to make some tough calls. Some people we just have to let go of - even if we really like them, even if we understand why they are behaving as they are, even if we love them.

We must keep walking. Once we have assessed and determined this is our course, we do not ruminate over the past, we use the past to propel us forward with new tools for building and nurturing relationships.

Here's why: relationships, trusting and authentic ones, are crucial for mental health. We cannot live without them. But we need to be selective. Some people need to be let go, others need to be moved to the outside of our circle of trust. This is not judgmental, this is using discernment. This is not saying someone else is bad and we are better, it is acknowledging that, for whatever reason, we are not a good fit for one another.

Do you find it as hard as I do to admit that not everyone is our friend?

A Mighty Good Start…

Yesterday I talked about my friend with the overbearing mom. Her mom, unwittingly perhaps, taught her daughter from a young age that she would never be competent or good enough or responsible enough to solve her own problems. Mom over-reached, over-corrected and over time, my friend developed this bad habit of not trusting herself. Who can blame her?

Recovery helped my friend regain her footing and find her adult self. She says it has been a huge blessing in her life. She tells me that recovery has taught her as much about healthy relationships as it has supported her recovery. Through therapy and 12-Step meetings and support groups, my friend has learned that healthy relationships are when two people solve their own problems while cheering each other on.

Her mom has it backwards. She tries to solve my friend's problem while tearing her daughter down.

Until recently, my friend believed that there was nothing she could do to solve this problem, but it was because she was worrying about solving the wrong problem - her mother. In a way, my friend was modeling what had been taught and modeled by her own mom - worry about other people's issues and ignore your own.

Today, my friend has chosen to assume that her mother is as unchanging as the taste of a Big Mac. But she can change, and she's figuring that out. She has some options, but all of them include absolutely refusing to change her own decisions, plans, and actionable items in pursuit of her own dreams and goals not matter what her mother says. That's a mighty good start if you ask me.

Re-Train Your Brain!

I have a friend who is not as old as I am but old enough to make up her own mind about everything. She can drink or not, smoke or not, work or not, marry or stay single, be sexually active or celibate. These are her choices. But she struggles to make choices because every time she makes a decision her mother gives her grief. Nothing she does is quite right. She's either selfish or not taking good care of herself. She is either too frugal or a spendthrift. The feedback, contrary and inconsistent, would be funny if my friend did not care so much about her mother's approval.

My friend has a boundary problem. I'm thinking about buying her a hoola hoop and suggesting she learn how to wear it as a shield against her mother's intrusion. It's easy to poke at the mom and blame her for my friend's distress, but that violates my core value of taking responsibility for every single part of life.

My friend shares this value but she is struggling to practice it. So is it a value for her? Yes, I believe it is and I have seen her over the years develop good skills with others. But her mom might just be her final test in taking responsibility for her life. All of it. Including learning to reject, let go of, activity resist HER REACTION to her mother's words.

Yes, that's it I think. She cannot control her mother but she can learn how to practice new ways of responding. Her brain, lazy as all brains can be, prefers that my friend respond with despair just like she always did when faced with so much negativity as a child. She will have to try all sorts of new tricks of the trade to re-train her brain to stop caring so darn much about her mother's opinions.

This is hard work. It will be learned clumsily over time, so long as she practices. She's practicing and I'm excited to hear, over time, how it works for her. This I know - if she figures this out, she will be able to be more loving to herself and maybe even her mom. That's a big win from my perspective.

A Lesson of Self-Awareness

At Northstar Community, we often talk about our core values as preferable ways to guide us in decision-making. If I value recovery, which I do, I try to support recovery work. MY recovery work. Families say they find this helpful. A friend of mine discovered that he was paying for his son to visit a psychiatrist who was prescribing a stimulant for his adult son's ADHD diagnosis. Dad was very upset because this particular stimulant has been highly addictive to his son in the past and led to lots of negative outcomes. Plus, there had never been a diagnosis of ADHD in his son's medical history. Dad thought he was being a recovery ally by helping his son deal with his mental health issues by paying for treatment but now Dad feels like a sucker who is paying for his son's addictive drug of choice. What's Dad to do? He's been OBSESSED with fixing his son for so very long but lately he's wondering if his efforts are actually hurting his boy.

Dad is anxious and panicky. He wants to call the doctor and give him "a piece of his mind". He wants to yell at his son and ask him, "What the heck are you doing?" But neither of these seem very recovery-friendly. Using his core values (recovery-ally, compassion and kindness) Dad decides that he needs to stop paying for the psychiatrist in order to be kind to himself. He makes an amend to his son about getting up in his business by having access to his medical records and explains that he will no longer be able to pay the psychiatrist's bills that exceed insurance costs (Dad does pay for the insurance premiums because he does not want coverage to lapse) because it is not good for Dad's recovery. No judgment of the doc or the adult son. Just a simple, direct, clear and apologetic communication about a change Dad needs to make in order to apply his core values to himself and others.

I appreciate the way Dad is continuing to learn and apply his core values. He's even chosen to shift the priority of his core values and add "self-care" to the top of his list. He is going to use that money he has been spending each month on his 40 year old son's psychiatrist visits to fund his own self-improvement project by hiring a personal trainer and improving his fitness.

Jesus Shows the Way

Jesus was a good man but he was not such a good god (according to Barbara Brown Taylor) if you compare him to all the gods that came before him. He was not big and strong and demanding that his followers feed his ego. He was like no other god before him - a suffering one.

So let's make a note of that right off the top: we have freedom which gives us liberty but it does not give us license to do whatever feels good. We have the freedom to choose but our choices are boundaried ones. And they cause suffering.

Just because something is technically legal doesn't mean that it's spiritually appropriate. If I went around doing whatever I thought I could get by with, I'd be a slave to my whims.

1 Corinthians 6:12 The Message

Here's why: we are conditioned to think, feel and act in ways that are contrary to what John the Baptist came preaching and Jesus modeled. John the Baptist preached repentance - not out of guilt or shame, but his was a liberation theology - you can be saved from your old life and receive a new one. This assumes of course that our old lives are unsatisfactory. And I see no reason to think that has changed much.

Our survival instincts, long bred within us cry out for the same characteristics ancient mankind attributed to their gods - strength and power and domination. But Jesus did not come to appeal to our lowest instincts, he came to call us to our highest potential - a whole brain experience. He came to transform the world by loving it, not controlling it. Which, interestingly enough, models the same thing God modeled. Here's the thing I will never understand about God. He chose to enter into a partnership with humanity by inviting us to be part of running the world. He did not make us start at the bottom of the pyramid and work our way up into a position of worthiness. Straight after creating Adam and Eve, he says - "Here, run the place." (Genesis 1 - 3 gives us a good look at God's big idea and the rocky launch his concept endured.)

Most of the time it seems that it is more natural for us to run the world based on preferences, on finding a pattern that our brain can accept - us and them. This is our survival instinct - and it looks different for different people. At our house we play team game tag, which basically means Pops and Christian and Norah against Meme. Pops has a great self-preservation instinct, he's always ahead of the kids. Others among us think our survival depends on finding our one true love - who completes us - or finding a group we can belong to who will keep us safe. However our instincts define survival, we are well practiced at it; this has unintended consequences.

What happens when our fears and insecurities cause us to over-react in a frenzy for survival? What happens when we see danger lurking around every corner? Stay tuned.