No Roots vs. Your Roots....

One of the most popular songs right now is sung by Alice Merton...and is entitled "No Roots".  If you haven't heard it before, you may want to give it a listen before you read any further....

Funny about roots.  I was just thinking about this song as I was cleaning out my flower beds this weekend.  Talk about "no roots" as being a major goal of mine!  As anyone who enjoys gardening will tell you, it is the roots attached to unwanted weeds that are the most frustrating to get rid of.  At one point, I yanked the living crap up and out of one "thing" (whatever it was!) that I swear was over three feet long!  I also thought about the Bible verses which talked about our spiritual condition as same related to seeds that are planted and the extent to which they can or cannot survive over time (Matthew 13 in case you're interested in reading about the Parable of the Sower..).

This roots thing is a pretty big issue---and always has been.  To have them...or not to have them....and what it means in the bigger scheme of our lives and the quality of our close relationships.  Is it better to adopt the "No Roots" philosophy Merton sings about?  Or is it worth establishing and at least attempting to maintain roots---no matter how shallow they may feel or literally be at times?

Currently, we all live in an age where anybody can basically pick up and go to wherever they want to live---and to work.  Whether their destination ends up being across town or across the country, we all have the ability to start over/start new/start afresh if we choose to.  When I was kicked out of my parents' house at age 18, thankfully I had somewhere to go and moved to another town.  Because I had never lived outside of my hometown, it felt like a different state moving just under 20 miles away.  And it was good for me.  It was good for me because I didn't have to think about running into anybody I knew (from my old neighborhood) when I was out and about.  I didn't have to talk about how my family of origin was to anybody if I didn't want to.  I could just do me (as these kids call it today) and that was fine by me.

In that sense, I had no more roots to concern myself with regarding "family".  Yet, there was something inside me that knew I still needed one (a "family" that is!).  If you haven't ever seen the documentary "Paris is Burning";  time to check it out.  Everybody yearns for their own "family"...even when the one we were born into throws us under the bus and then runs over our heads.  Hey, this isn't news.  Happens all the time.  Happened to #MeToo.  Of course, in cultivating the "House of Mary D", I wasn't interested in being anybody's Mom or Matriarch.  I just wanted to be safely loved...and free to safely love in return.  In that sense, I knew the roots I needed to re-establish were an important part of me feeling halfway decent about being here---about being my authentic self---and about finding/discovering my longer-term purpose over time.

For those who truly live the "No Roots" lifestyle....the quality of our lives gets reduced down to making the most of a bad situation.  We were not created to live in isolation and truly trust no one.  And I am not including here the person who decides to take a year off from life and just "do" themselves wherever that may mean and in the company of whomever they come across.  Everyone loves a good adventure;  I understand that.  In the end, however, we all need to pick our right now and real life "life" so we can establish our roots, nurture them, allow them to grow, and allow ourselves to blossom as a result.

No roots may sound appealing when we are unsure as to who we are exactly or what it is we should be doing with our life over the longer term.  Yet it is no way to live when suddenly we wake up one day and realize the opportunities we once thought would never end...have definitely ended.

Roots can be a bad thing when they represent the weeds that choke, kill, and destroy us from the inside out.  Those kind always need to be yanked and discarded.  However, for those roots that are truly "good"....we need to do our work to keep them alive and thriving...

Until next post....

Relationship Junk: Grudges, Grief, and Guilt! Part II

Last post, I presented how the deadly triad of grudges, grief, and guilt can take a person down the tubes when it comes to the quality of their important relationships.  Regardless if we are throwing our junk out there at other people we claim to love and care about---versus dodging the same junk that others are hurling at us---the outcomes are still the same.  We don't like what is happening, it makes us feel icky, and we don't know how to stop it from happening in the future...

Briefly, our grudges keep us traumatically bonded to those who have hurt us.  This isn't good.  Instead of appropriately confronting what happened and when (you'd be amazed how many people never even "think" to consider this!) be it to a professional therapist and/or the other person(s) directly involved....we do all sorts of things to continually throw ourselves under the bus.  Without doing the work of releasing ourselves from our past and present grudges, we fundamentally change the ways in which we think, feel, and behave...and not in a good way.  We keep re-enacting old scripts tied to our past relationships with the subconscious idea of "fixing" now what we couldn't fix then.  We lose our ability to pay attention to right now and real life reality.  Everything and everybody is seen through the lenses of what they are going to say or do to mess things up...for us.

When we have not been able to fully accept what it is that we have lost, we become stuck in our grief.  Being stuck in one's own grief over lost hopes, lost dreams, and lost opportunities ultimately leads to a lost life.  Instead of being our best and doing our best in order to make the best of our present circumstances....we don't.  We lead, if you will, about 1/2 a life.  Not a good plan.  Our grief serves as a very heavy cloak that we just can't shake off no matter how hard we believe we are trying.  In this way, our grief prevents us from being more free live in hope and anticipation about our present...and future decisions about basically everything.

Relative to guilt, specifically toxic guilt, we place ourselves in the position of our own judge, jury, and executioner over...?!?!??! from our past.  Nobody will ever be able to fully love us because we are such an (insert derogatory self-perception here) and always will be.  And if anybody dares to fully love us, then they must also be a (insert derogatory other-perception here) because they choose to be with us.  Huh?!?!  Yep, happens all the time I am sorry to report.  I am a loser, then you must be a loser too if  you stick around me for too long.  Wow.  Toxic guilt has no place in anybody's relationships...let alone the ones that matter.

So how do we unload this baggage from our past?  Where do we even begin?

Forgiveness is one such issue that needs to be addressed as part of our healing journey.  Probably the best website I have found is www.theforgivenessproject.com which has no religious or political affiliation...but serves to share stories to cultivate hope, empathy, and understanding.  Without the ability to forgive, we cannot change our thinking about ourselves....about others...and about the world in which we live.  There is no real hope without real forgiveness.  Learning about the power of forgiveness represents a key in unshackling ourselves from our own complicated past...and in a powerful way.

Another area of examination has to do with the extent to which we focus on what others think.  Whether we want to look at this issue more deeply or not, the facts still stick around forever...unlike our feelings.  When we are SO concerned with what other people think, we will reduce ourselves down to whatever WE ourselves think about how to gain the acceptance, approval, and love of "others" on a consistent basis.  This puts us right in the middle of our own dumpster fire as we lead lives that puts us in the role of the consummate codependent "giver" to anyone and everyone we come to care about.  In this way, we make one or more people our "g" word (god!) when we are wanting their love, wanting their approval, and wanting their acceptance.  This motivation for doing what we do for others is not good.  Why?  Because when we expect and want them to do the same in kind for us---it doesn't always happen that way.  We are ignored....we are dismissed...we are told we are too clingy or demanding....and the proverbial sh** hits the fan.  As such, we have to look at the extent to which we have made other people the boss of us...or ourselves the boss of others!

Third, we must stop the very bad habit of drifting mentally away from the here and now (present) to our own anxiety-fueled catastrophic fictional futures....or our depressing and/or nostalgia-driven pasts.  I just finished reading an Anita Shreve book this morning;  she died about a month ago and was a very popular author of several well-known fictional books.  The book I read was "Where or When".  Man, if there ever was a book NOT to read if you struggle with this particular issue of mental drifting...this is it!  Basically, two people who met 31 years ago as 14 year olds at summer camp...and how they blew up their respective families as a result of meeting "now".  The book consists primarily of their fantasy-based renditions of their shared past (one week at summer camp!) mixed in with their fantasy-based fictional hopes for their shared future (not happening, but don't let me spoil the story for you!).  This drifting stuff is not good.  It keeps us from dealing with and doing our best work in the here and now---because we are off somewhere else in our own heads!

Lastly, we need to learn how to take better care of ourselves, in the here and now, and in a way that represents us being kinder---and gentler---to ourselves.  I recently lost 100 lbs.  Did it over the course of the past 11 months.  Do you think I wasn't hungry during those 11 months?  I was.  Do you think I didn't want at times to eat the world of Hagen Das when I felt HALTSS?  (Hungry, angry, lonely, tired, sad, and/or sick...)  Of course I was and did.  BUT---I also practiced being kinder and gentler to myself as part of every decision-making process involved in the course of each day.  You know, those 24 hours I was given to do the right thing for myself---or not.  We can all cultivate this practice even when we would rather fall into our own trap(s) of doing the wrong thing at the wrong time in the wrong manner and involving the wrong person(s).  When we can learn to STOP and RELAX and then THINK before we ACT...life does get better---and definitely easier.  We let go of all the baggage and garbage compiled from the above-mentioned areas of discussion....and can move forward.  As in a good way move forward.

So....let's do our work.  Let's learn to let go of all our relationship junk and become more of who we already know we were designed to be.

I often suggest clients watch an episode of "Iyanla Fix My Life" (OWN network...on air every Saturday and reruns throughout the following week) to observe how this process works.  Doing your own healing work won't kill you, but not doing it definitely may...

Until next post....