"Have you forgotten the most important Valentine?"

"Have you forgotten the most important Valentine of all?"

We are heading into Valentine’s Day and I remember with fondness, decorating many a shoebox with glitter and paper lace doilies for my classmates to put their Valentines into. Making the choice of whether to give Scooby Doo Valentines or Mickey and Minnie Mouse Valentines was a ritual I eagerly looked forward to every February. And I smile when I pull out the old Valentines I made for my parents during art. Oh, the days of love being simple and fun!

Celebrating love became a bit more complicated as I grew older. Parents lost their luster and pledges of true love turned into betrayal. I watch sadly as people once happy in love, angrily rewrite their history as never having been so. Was love just a fool’s game or is there more to why love seems to have gone from fun as a child to risky as an adult?

Love suffers from a myth which can lead people in relationships to being hurt and becoming bitter about their beloved. The myth? That if a person loves you, it's their job to make you happy.  So… if you are unhappy, the person you love is at fault. Recognize this myth? This myth has done so much damage in relationships that when I spot this myth operating in a client’s life, I call it out for what it is--a lie which hurts all involved.

The truth is that the job of being happy begins with you. Who knows better than you what makes you feel good, what tickles your funny bone, what makes you feel all is right with your world? Only when you learn to love yourself, to support and honor yourself, are you truly able to have a happy and loving relationship with another. Without loving yourself first, you are limited in the love you can receive as well as give another person.

So this Valentine’s Day, don’t forget your most important Valentine of all-YOU! Take some time for loving yourself just as you are. Like old movies? Then watch one this weekend instead of making excuses about why you can’t. Think a clean house is over-rated? Give yourself a day-hell a weekend!-of not telling yourself to tidy up and really enjoy a bit of mess. And shower some true loving on yourself, for loving others always begins with you.

"Why Being a Good Girl Won't Make You Happy"

"Why Being a Good Girl Won't Make You Happy"

I am truly blessed to work with women who courageously take up change for being happier in their life and relationships. They are tired of compensating for their unhappiness with food, or shopping, or by (always) complaining to their friends and family. These women have spent years being the good girls they were taught to be as children. But being a good girl hasn't brought them happiness and tired of being unhappy, they reach out for help for being happy again.  

Being a good girl can serve to make important adults happy when you’re a child. But being a good girl as an adult not only keeps your happiness at bay, it keeps the happiness of those you love at bay as well. The saying “If Mama ain’t happy, nobody be happy” is not a judgment about unhappy women, but a truth about the impact a happy (or unhappy) woman has in her relationships and life.

How happy/unhappy you truly are is felt by all you care for in life. Putting on a smile and pretending to be happy does not fool anyone but yourself. When I invite a woman to be silent less and share herself more with those important to her, fear of being rejected is often the reason she has not done so. Yet the price of not being authentic in her relationships has eroded her self-respect and trust of herself and others. The woman begins to realize how pledging allegiance to relationships or institutions which don't honor her, are relationships and institutions she can ill afford for being happy in her life. 

Here are a few questions to ask yourself:

• If you no longer believed you needed to be a good girl for being happy in life, what would you change in your life or relationships?
• What would you stand up to-that you now only complain about or feel helpless to make better-if you had support?
• Would you be more willing to make different choices if more happiness and self-respect would be your result?
• If you could be happier if you reached out for help, what stops you?

The questions above are not meant for you to answer by yourself. Only recently have we embraced a belief of strength as being solitary. I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty clear how that’s (not) working for us. Talk about these questions with those you trust and I'd love to hear from you!

"Don't Let the Holidays Get Hijacked by Your Past"

This time of year can be tough. Lots of being pitched to for spending money as love, to feel only "happy happy happy!", and a body that simply wants more sleep due to less sunlight. Add spending time with family you chose to move away from, lots of alcohol and sugar, and your holidays become less about peace and goodwill and a lot more like a marathon. Especially when the people you moved away from can still make you crazy!!

Family is the best and family is the hardest

Getting together with the people you grew up with can be like time-traveling to the past. You are no longer a child and the people you work with or are friends with consider you an adult. Yet getting together with the family you grew up with can give you a case of bad deja'vu and provoke some not so fun emotions in you. Heh! Wasn't what you didn't like about your family supposed to go away when you left home?

Behave like a grownup even if others are not

Leaving home is not the same as making peace with those you grew up with. While distance and a place of your own may allow the occasional visit with family to be pleasant enough, the double whammy of alcohol and your longing for a Norman Rockwell holiday can make holidays with family tricky. All it takes is a parent behaving as you hate them behaving and before you can say "world peace", you're screaming at them for being a jerk. 'Kinda like a child having a doozy of a temper tantrum (gulp).

Tend to what's unresolved with your family....just not while eating Thanksgiving dinner

Many adults haven't resolved their childhood, limiting their ability to be a grownup with their family. You can choose to avoid your parents or spend way too much energy being angry with a sibling. You wish your parents would change how they treat you, but have you changed how you are with them? The difference between being an adult and being a grownup is one word describes your body and the other word describes your level of personal responsibility and maturity. Guess which one is which?

Commit to being a grownup with your childhood

Will this make your parents see the light and treat you as you want them to treat you? Or prevent a sibling from railing about God intending marriage as only between men and women? I wouldn't hold my breath, but here's a little secret about making peace with your past. When you release your past (including the people in it) from having the power to hold your happiness hostage, you release yourself from being bound to your past as well.

Lift your spirits and create a bit of peace of mind and heart

Peace of mind and heart comes from choosing to extend love to your family, even when they give you SO many reasons not to. Choosing to love when reason tells you not to, creates the peace we all seek, where reason does not. The person you hurt the most when you withhold love from others is yourself. Peace doesn't come from not disagreeing with others. Peace stands a chance when grownups make agreements for keeping the peace. Realize the vast power within you called love, and then be the grownup making things better with your family and in your world.

"Are Ghosts Haunting Your Relationships?"

In my last article “The Calculus of Relationship”  I talked about how simply pointing fingers at who is wrong in a relationship not going so well, does not make things better. In this follow-up article, I talk about how what may be wreaking havoc in a relationship may not even be present. Yup, could be a ghost haunting your relationship!.

So what do I mean by ghosts haunting a relationship? Simply this-a lot of the battles you find yourself in with people close to you-- your partner, your children, your parents or even yourself--can have little to do with the current situation and a lot to do with your past. Past humiliations, past rejections, past traumas all lend themselves to becoming ghosts haunting your life when they have not been resolved. I call them ghosts, for while the event was in the past, it's wielding a LOT of power in your present life.

For example, your parents believe/d control was next to God and a good child was a controlled child. Emotions? To be controlled with your parents deciding which ones you were permitted and which ones were punished. Fast forward to the conversation you are now having with your husband who keeps asking if something is wrong. You answer “nothing”....so why do you feel like crying-or throwing the glass you are using at his head!? Ahh…the ghost of emotions not permitted or punished is haunting your relationship with your hubby.

Or you hear yourself berating your daughter for an A- (vs an A) on her report card and become aghast as you realize you’ve become possessed by the ghost of your father who found “imperfections” unacceptable. Yikes! Or you make the opposite choice of allowing your teen to diss you, patting yourself on the back for not being a controlling parent. Notice the ghost cackling in the corner?

So what can you do when ghosts are haunting your relationships?

• Call the Ghost Busters! No really, get some help. Ghosts can be hard for you to see as they feel and look familiar. What is familiar we are often reluctant to change for something unfamiliar, even if we are unhappy with the familiar.
• Realize your ghosts can be friendly ghosts (remember Caspar?) trying to make life better for you. They are causing mischief to get your attention and where they are causing mischief is where they want you to pay attention.
• There are common ghosts. The ghost of anger haunts most women; anger at their power and purpose as women having been dismissed and denigrated for generations. This ghost appears in women’s relationships with men as belittling men or women withholding from men, their power to inspire and uplift.
• Ghosts can be tricky. It is not uncommon for someone I am working with to describe the detested behavior of a parent and surprise! find that same behavior alive and well in themself! Argh. Ghosts remind us there is a difference between not liking a behavior and not having it haunt our behavior as well.

People are busy and time is precious. We are taught to ignore what is bothering us and to simply exercise more control or reach for our drug of choice. But “shoulda, woulda, coulda” are no match for the ghosts haunting our relationships or our life. As the Ghost Busters knew, people who know about ghosts are who you need to call when your relationships are being haunted by ghosts from your past.

Want some help exorcising ghosts in a relationship or life? I offer a free 60 minute consultation by phone for you to explore with me how to stop ghosts from the past from messing with your present and future. To schedule your free 60 minute session CLICK HERE .

"The Calculus of Relationships"

Relationships can make your life feel like heaven and a relationship can make your life hell. You cannot avoid relationships and how happy you are in your relationships, impacts your family life, your career, even your health. Relationship skills are not considered important learning for life and mostly left up to default learning from your family growing up. The result? Yeah, you’re living it. 

In college, I found calculus to be very confusing until I realized the correct answer would only be obtained when I solved more than one factor. Once I learned calculus was not a linear process, solving calculus equations become a challenge I knew I could solve. Solving relationships problems is a lot like calculus-there’s always more than one dynamic to solving the problem. 

Here’s an example of what I mean by the calculus of relationships. You know those fights you have with people where what you are fighting about isn’t really what you are fighting about? Yeah, on the face of it, you’re arguing about whose turn it is to take the dog out. When really what you’re arguing about is how you’re mad at him for going out with his friends instead of you last weekend and he’s mad at you for paying more attention to your friends than him. Grrr.

So what can you do when you're in relationship trouble? 

1. Control does not equal strength nor power when it comes to relationships. A common mistake in relationships, this one will get you in trouble every time. Control in relationship presumes power over another person and no relationship will last nor be happy without mutual respect and sharing of power. Control takes many forms-from controlling the information you share with your spouse to controlling what your child is allowed to make choices about. Relationships need trust, respect, and courage to flourish or they become prisons the person being controlled will make a break from.

2. Change your channel from complaining to creating what you want. Complaining may make you feel good, even powerful at the time, and can become a bad habit you indulge in. Complaining has the additional bonus of making it seem as though you are doing something, but in truth, you are keeping safe on the sidelines instead of taking action for making things better. Instead of complaining about how the romance has gone out of your relationship, make it your personal mission to make date night romantic again. It takes just as much effort to be miserable as it does to be happy!

3. Speak up! The power of small is in voicing what matters to you. By this time in your life,  you’ve most likely been told to speak up, that others cannot read your mind. Yet I bet there are still times you hold back from sharing with your best friend or your spouse when they’ve hurt your feelings, or speaking up about where you’d rather go to dinner. You tell yourself it’s not a big deal, stay silent and then find yourself in a funk or being a bit bitchy. Yeah. When you don’t speak up for yourself or what matters to you, your relationship with those near and dear to you will suffer as will your self-respect. That voice inside of you telling you to stay quiet is not your friend!

4. While it’s true it takes 2 to make a relationship heaven or hell, playing chicken with who “should” make things better, who should change, is a dangerous game.  Relationships may initiate through chemistry, but what keeps a relationship happy and healthy is maintaining trust, respect, and empathy with each other. If you find yourself distrusting, disrespecting, or not caring for the other person, action is needed for tending the relationship before lasting damage is done. All healthy long-term relationships-be they personal or professional-go through cycles of change and renewal. To expect a person or relationship not to change is to not only invite unhappiness, it invites the death of the relationship. 

Look for my next article on relationship ghosts. If you find yourself in an unhappy relationship, don’t despair nor cast aspirations on yourself or the other person. Not unlike realizing your body is unhappy, choosing to take action for tending and mending yourself is what makes you better, not blaming others nor berating yourself for being sick. 

"Are You Going to War for Peace?"

Don’t worry, this is not a story of the often sad and scary news in our world today. This IS a story about how choosing not to go to war for peace will grace your life with the integrity and the peace you are seeking in life and the world.

10 years ago, my marriage of 25 years ended and I found myself alone with 3 children, the mortgage, and marital assets made unavailable through creative accounting by people considered friends-ouch! Person after person challenged me to go to war (court) for getting back what was mine, misconstruing my reluctance to do so as fear.

So what was my hesitation if not from fear?

I knew what my former husband was capable of (I’m a fast learner), but fear was not what was holding me back from going to court with my former husband. It was my clarity about the price my children would pay if I were to focus my time, energy, and resources on battling in court with someone who wanted war. My children needed their mother to focus her time, energy, and resources on their needs as children, including peace in their home and in their family. My children needed me to choose war or peace.

I was faced with the choice to go to war for making peace with my finances-knowing my children would pay dearly for this choice-or making peace with life having a different plan for me. My wounded pride and sense of betrayal were romancing me onto war and yet silent on the true cost of doing so. Sound familiar? How many times have you found yourself at war for soothing pride injured or feelings hurt by someone you love? And only later, realized the cost to you or the relationship?

This was my hardest challenge so far in life and many were the days I did not know if I was capable of making a victory from what felt overwhelming and devastating. Yet embracing my faith and demanding grace be made tangible in my life had previously transformed my chronic illnesses into good health, my infertility into 3 children, and being without a home into a lovely abode. So was having 3 children to support, a mortgage, and no job the challenge given by life to break me or divine faith in my integrity and faith?

There is a price for every choice you make; the choices which cost you are the choices out of alignment with your values. Your mind may convince you “it’s ok, it’s just this time, it’s not a big deal”, but your soul knows your integrity just got dinged and your self-respect pays a price. It’s how we find ourselves in a world which considers going to war an acceptable means for creating peace, with civilians and children-the regrettable, but acceptable-cost of peace.

Where in your life or relationships are you living at odds with what you truly want, compromising what is true in your heart and soul?

Where in your life or relationships are you going to war and telling yourself it's for peace? Do you offer yourself reasons practical or personal for doing so, selling yourself or life short? Take it from me, it’s the little choices you make each day which build the muscles and courage of your integrity.....the integrity which gives you the strength and faith for when life challenges you to choose war or peace.

Love More Care Less

There is a deceptively simple suggestion I offer to people working on themselves or their relationships -”love more, care less”. At first, most are surprised, for being told to care less is not what they are expecting from me. Yet, as I unfold more of what I am inviting them into, their bodies relax as they begin to feel the invitation into more love and less care-taking.

We’ve been taught good people care … good children (take) care of a parent’s happiness, good people (take) care of other people’s feelings (even if it means lying to do so), good people sacrifice themselves for (taking) care of others (often creating resentment towards the person they are caring for), etc. Yet did you know the root meaning of the word “care” is “to lament”? Often, caring carries the shadow of lamenting what is wrong with a person, a situation, whereas love offers compassion, patience, tolerance.

To love more care less brings love’s clarity and courage for true (vs taking) care of another-to receive another as a divine being vs holding them as somehow lacking. Loving more and caring less became my mantra when my elderly and scared parents needed my care. Not as their child still reacting to them emotionally, but as a strong woman offering compassion and tolerance. Loving them more and caring less about what I thought best gave me a new compass to navigate caring for people who needed my best, not my history with them nor my reactions to their fear and anger at their growing old.

So how do you love more and care less in your life?

•   As with all wisdom you embrace in life, apply to yourself vs telling others to do so. Offering yourself more love-more kindness, more compassion, more patience, more support, more acceptance - benefits you as well as serves to model and invite others to “want some of what you ordered”. Care less whether you are doing things right, the best, perfectly, are enough, and watch the benefits spill over into your relationships as you judge yourself (and others) less and enjoy your life and the people in them, much more.

• Let go of your expectations. Expectations are where you hold yourself, others, and life to desires which often have less to do with reality and more to do with your own inner critic and secret desires. Expectations in a relationship-be it with yourself or another-lead to nowhere happy, wreaking havoc with being present to when and where life offers you opportunities for love, connection, and joy. Too many relationships begun in love end up as power struggles destroying the love.

• Realize the lens through which you view the world is not the same lens others are viewing the world through. The story of 3 blind people and an elephant illustrates well this wisdom.3 people blind were asked to describe an elephant and each did so from their experience of holding a different part of the elephant- trunk, leg, and ear. No two descriptions of the elephant were the same and yet all 3 were describing the same elephant. Consider how often you care that you are “right” when the truth is we are all right from what we have experienced. Learn to become more curious and less interested in being right.

• Loving more offers more space for curiosity and discovery and less need to care and defend who and what is right. The world of once far-away countries is fast becoming a world of neighbors appearing quite different from us. When we care more about who and what is right and wrong, differences assume greater power. And when we offer love’s gifts of inquiry and curiosity more, we realize more how much our neighbors and have in common with us, be it the desires for our children, for health and happiness in life, having the basic needs met for our family, and a common birthright as human to a life with dignity and respect.

• Love is kissing cousins with respect, appreciation, honor and (taking) care is kissing cousins with control, judgement, and assumptions. One of the exercises I often engage in with my clients is clarifying what are truly their values for crafting a life with integrity to their deepest values. I have yet to have a client choose the values of more control, more judgement, more fear and plenty of clients excited about the values of more respect, more honor, more gratitude in their life. Love is the parent of values timeless in their power to inspire, to uplift, to joyfully live a life on purpose.

Loving more and caring less is not a call to not care and only love. It is a call to what holds power and insight in a world whose dynamics and truths are quickly changing from “power over” to “relationship with”. Love’s true nature is less the Hallmark version of sentiment and nostalgia and more akin to Mother Nature-vast, beautiful, powerful, caring beyond reason, and willing to die so life may continue. More and more I realize how critical it is for each one of us to become aware of what we are willing to die for, of what you commit your precious life to. We were born for the times we live in and fear and despair are calling for us to transform them into your devotion to loving…. more.