Doing Things Differently

“To reach a goal you have never before attained, you must do things you have never before done.”
—Richard G. Scott

There are times in our lives when the desire to grow and move forward is a powerful force that cannot be snuffed out without doing it. We may not see that in order to reach a new goal or destination that we may have to look outside the box and do things in a way that we have never before done them.

If insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, then we certainly know that we don’t want to follow that route so we must try things a different way. Most likely we will need to seek help in some way to do this. We may seek information from books, the Internet, or people, but if we don’t know how to proceed out of our routine it’s a good idea to seek such help.

Sometimes we get stuck in the rut that says “my way is the best way and it’s familiar so I will keep doing it.” Getting out of that mindset and trying something new and different can be a scary area to pursue, but well worth the rewards if we do it and reach the goal we seek.

We won’t get very far in life if we hide behind fear and “I can’t” thinking. What we will get is a safe existence for the most part, probably full of regret and envy of others who have forged ahead and found new experiences in their lives. Many times what we do in life is a risk of sorts; changing jobs, beginning or ending a love relationship, having or adopting a child, all these things require us to think and do something different than we did yesterday.

Do something different and see where it leads.

Needing Others

“We need others. We need others to love and we need to be loved by them. There is no doubt that without it, we too, like the infant left alone, would cease to grow, cease to develop, choose madness and even death.”
—Leo Buscaglia

Many people have the idea that it is wrong to need other people. Sometimes this is because they have experienced extreme pain from the loss of a loved one due to death or a breakup of some sort. And some people were taught as children that they should not ever need anyone.

Neediness and needing others is not the same thing. People thrive on love and nurturing. We were created to be in relationship with other people. Some of us need more interaction than others.

Sometimes because we have opened ourselves fully to another only to have lost that person in a devastating way we retreat from all interaction, or we get only so close to those in our lives. We have our guard up. We build walls that may never be penetrated. We constantly watch people come and go in our lives because they cannot cross our boundaries, the ones we have built on fear.

And when we have these walls we lose out on a lot in life. Yes, we may avoid pain, most likely we do avoid a great deal of it, but we also don’t allow ourselves to love or be loved and without that we are empty shells. God works through our relationships and interactions with others. When we shut off from people, we close the door on God as well.

Getting and giving love can happen in many ways. Even if we don’t have a romantic partnership we can give and receive love from others, and we should do this even if we have a special love relationship. We give and receive from our friends, community, coworkers, neighbors, anyone in our lives who we can share kindness with will offer us opportunities to share love.

If we have a particular need and it is not getting met we can ask for help from someone close to us. Sometimes we may just need a hug or a listening ear. And it’s almost guaranteed that a good friend would be flattered that we asked and then in turn feel they could come to us for the same.

To continue to grow emotionally and spiritually we need to love and be loved. We cannot ever expect one person to meet every need so it’s important to have a circle of people and love in our lives.

Giving and receiving love is important and something we should all seek; never be ashamed of it.

Being Vulnerable

“We all need somebody to talk to. It would be good if we talked … not just pitter-patter, but real talk. We shouldn’t be so afraid, because most people really like this contact; that you show you are vulnerable makes them free to be vulnerable.”
—Liv Ullmann

To be vulnerable with another, to be truly open, raw, exposing ourselves to be hurt or ridiculed or loved is one of the most difficult things we can do. So much of the time we live behind the façade that everything is okay within us. We hide our pain, jealousy, anger, and fears behind the walls that we put up to protect ourselves from the world.

And when we feel brave enough to let someone see in, even if we only let them see through a tiny sliver of a crack of our armor, it can still feel like we’ve been peeled back and opened for all kinds of emotions to sweep over us. But we should do it anyway. We should find safe places to be vulnerable.

Sometimes we can do this with a really close friend, partner, sponsor, or in therapy. And when we do it we grow. We may feel as though letting someone see exactly who we are is so painful we’ll die from the embarrassment, but most likely what we say to another isn’t anything they haven’t felt or done or experienced. It’s such a relief to find out that others aren’t any more perfect than we are since not a single one of us is perfect.

It’s also an added boost when we are vulnerable with someone to find out that our letting them see inside our true self helps them to do the same either with us or with someone else whom they trust.

Sometimes we are vulnerable and discover that perhaps we would have been better off to keep the walls up with a particular person. When that happens it is still not the end of the world and the worst thing we can do is never trust another person to see inside us, we may just need to choose more carefully.

We are the same inside whether or not anyone else ever sees that person we try to keep hidden. We can find freedom when we let others see who we really are, when we stop using so much energy to try to make the outsides look the way we think they should all the while neglecting the reality of who we are.

Being vulnerable is scary, but it is important for our healing and growth.

Staying Open

“When we close ourselves off from our friends, our fellow travelers, we block God’s path to us and through us. …When we close ourselves off from each other, we have destroyed the vital contribution we each need to make and to receive in order to nurture life.”
—Karen Casey

Not shutting down after being hurt is difficult. Staying open despite our pain takes a great deal of effort. And we may need to shut down temporarily from time to time. But to stay shut off, to build up another wall each time we are disappointed and hurt is not the answer. Putting up walls and shutting down just adds to our pain.

If we are living a full life we are going through painful experiences. That’s just how life is. We know that we grow through the tough times, we’ve already learned that. Then why do we get angry with ourselves and God when we find that we are in the midst of a painful growing situation? Most likely because we expect perfection from ourselves and wish we could have known not to go into the situation where we got hurt. We blame God because we don’t understand God.

Some of our pain from a situation can be from prior relationships, issues from when we were still children, and low self-esteem. For instance, if we have a fear of abandonment and we are abandoned by someone, it’s easy to see the pain of the current situation magnified.

Even when we feel a lot of anger in a situation with someone, we can know that the person that hurt us was placed in our lives for a reason. That may not be clear to us at the time of our intense pain, but hopefully one day when the pain has lessened we will see. And likewise, we were put in the other person’s life for their growth.

Whenever we are hurting it feels as if the pain will never stop that we will never feel good again. But we will return to a better place. And we’ll have learned something in the process. We will also be stronger. But the experience, the pain we felt, the growth, will only be worth it if we continue to live and stay open.

Shutting down is the only thing that keeps the pain present and keeps us from growth.

Sabotaging Relationships

“Trouble is part of your life, and if you don’t share it, you don’t give the person who loves you enough chance to love you enough.”
—Dinah Shore

Some of us have issues in our past that may cause us to unconsciously sabotage relationships. We may be afraid on some level to enter into new relationships and that fear can manifest in different ways. We might not even realize that’s what it is, but when we overly find fault with others and things start to change drastically in how we feel about another person, with no apparent reason, we need to look at what is happening.

If we grew up in a dysfunctional family, we most likely have carried many issues into our adult lives. Our issues are carried over into any relationship we have no matter how intimate or casual. Some of our behaviors, many we learned as survival techniques, simply aren’t healthy in adult relationships.

In order to have healthy, fulfilling relationships we may need to look at our “failed” relationships and see what part we played in each of the endings. We can do this in different ways by talking or writing about the issues we had with the other person. We may discover that we are doing things that we aren’t even aware of. It takes some time and effort, but an inventory of ourselves is always a good thing, as long as we see positive and negative and not just the negative.

It’s important to learn as much as we can about who we are and how we operate if we want to have intimate, lasting relationships with others. Being open to feedback from others is a good thing too.

Look within to find answers to relationship problems.

Crack the Walls, See What Lies Beyond

“Letting someone in means abandoning the walls you spent a lifetime building.”
—Unknown

Most of us have certain things we don’t wish to experience, especially in relationships, so we put up walls to protect ourselves from getting hurt. We could have built these walls in childhood and have had them for decades in order to protect our feelings, our self. Or we could have put them up while in a recent relationship that was dysfunctional.

Sometimes these walls are necessary and, yet, often there comes a time when we feel safe enough to knock them down, or at least begin to chip at them.

It has been my experience that on occasion I have begun to dismantle a wall as if to take a brick off one at a time, only to hurry back and fill up the hole because it got too scary or someone unhealthy came along. And at other times I’ve knocked the walls down quickly as with a wrecking ball never to put them back up.

We do what we need to do when the time is right and we feel safe. And like a lot of things in life, it’s often one step forward and two steps back. As long as we are aware of the walls we use to shut us off and protect ourselves we are on our way to tearing them down.

We can remove our walls brick by brick at our own pace.