Posted by 64bowtie on December 31, 2004, at 3:21:19
In reply to Re: Why??? » smokeymadison, posted by Larry Hoover on December 30, 2004, at 22:40:22
smokeymadison,
I have been asking that same question for 50 years and have most of the story fleshed out now. I suggest that our vision is our culprit until it becomes our best soldier... It becomes our savior by teaching us to embrace the NEW and stop avoiding it. Our answers come from our ability (which we all have and most deny, for family reasons) to process the NEW and incorporate it into our daily lives.
With my Dad, he had so many differing forms of righteousness he was expected to follow, it drove him nuts. His 6'6" father was absent most of the year as a lumberjack in the Northern Woods and Canada. By 1931, the depression had hit hard, and my giant Grandfather was now always around, causing enoermous tensions for all. The poverty and starvation led to malnutrician. My Dad's still mostly a mess at age 83.
I continue to enumerate the culprits (our personal demons) I see in folks' lives that something can be done with, not requiring recurring hospitalizations, as in my Dad's case:
1. Conflict resolution because of poor impulse control
2. multi-generational bad habits
3. multilayer bad habits (one begets many begets another)
4. Dysfunction is a porduct of poor habit management thus dysfunction becomes a particular suite of bad habits.
5. Family enmeshment or/and codependency
6. Indecision retards necessary action
7. Denial blocks out our vision of new stuff
8. Operating nearly 100% from feelings while not being in touch with those very feelings that seem to run our lives.
9. Our emotions and sensibilities are highjacked and blackmailed by our obligations and expectations.
10. Our rules based childhoods of moral (uncontestable) codes don't work in our adult lives that require practical, not rigid, guidlines.We literally drive ourselves crazy trying to hammer these square pegs into the only holes available to us as adults; round ones, which are full of options and adaptations. Proof is that often shoulds turn into don'ts and don'ts turn into shoulds in our adult lives, and most don't get it. Shoulds and don'ts don't work for adults the same way as for kids. "Optional Outcome Thinking" takes us off this merry-go-round.
Remedy:
1. Accept beliefs as a filter, a tool, that helps us be efficient, and is not an end in itself.
2. Suspend one belief at a time until enough information tells you if it is yours or some one elses induced onto you, and if its a useful belief. Otherwise, discard it and go on. Don't remain "beholding" to the riff-raff who try to run your life.
3. Have a "social" Emancipation. Do it as a ritual. Declare yourself an adult, capable of so much more than you could imagine as a child, and deserving of respect as an adult from that moment on. It started change in my life in 1989; it'll change yours, toooo!!!
4. Find a balance of your feelings, behaviors and intentions. Begin problem solving with your feeling, logic and spiritual selves.
5. Seek goodness, truth and beauty in all your affairs, with emphasis on beautiful outcomes, while seeking out others who themslves are seeking goodness, truth and beauty. Once you are "there", you'll know the difference.Rod
poster:64bowtie
thread:435824
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20041226/msgs/435927.html