• Addressing an addiction. Addictions—to alcohol, nicotine, sex, food, or drugs—are powerful and difficult to overcome. Addiction is not an issue that is easily addressed by yourself. In my practice, I work with clients to help them replace destructive, addictive behaviors with new, healthy habits. There are many ways of addressing addiction, including multi-modal approaches and alternative therapies such as hypnotherapy and acupuncture. Support groups have proven to be particularly valuable for people dealing with addictions for a number of reasons: for one thing, being held accountable to a group can be a strong motivator; in addition, the emotional support such groups can offer can be invaluable. The first step in addressing any addiction is acknowledging that you’re addicted and seeking the help you need. If you suffer from an addiction, I encourage you to explore all the resources available. Check online and in your local newspapers for support groups in your area; explore available treatment centers; talk with your medical doctor or a therapist about treatment options; and seek counsel from trusted friends and family members. Be sure to find a group or professional that you’re comfortable with, one that offers compassion, understanding, and support.
• Support for achieving your Life Vision. Don’t hesitate to seek out professional resources to support you as you work toward mastering the art of aloneness. For example, if you’re working on issues around what you eat and how much, there are all kinds of outer supports that can be valuable resources. A good nutritionist can help you develop a healthy food plan. A support group can help you sustain your resolve. You may want to hire a personal trainer to help you get in shape, or you may sign up for a yoga class. Or you may want to work with a coach who can help you sustain your motivation and hold you accountable to your goals and action steps. You have the option of exploring alternative therapies to help you reduce stress or finding a psychotherapist to help you move beyond your conditioning and retrieve your authentic self.
Mastering the art of aloneness does not mean addressing your challenges and issues all by yourself. You may need a coach, psychotherapist, or other practitioner to help you do some of the work it requires. There are all kinds of therapeutic approaches and modalities from which to choose—both traditional and alternative. When you’re seeking professional help, I encourage you to use all the resources at your disposal to find the right person—someone with the skills and expertise to meet your needs and a working style you’re comfortable with. Here are some resources that may help you:
• You’ll find descriptions of many of the most common types of healing and personal-development modalities listed in the Resource Guide at the back of this book. For recommendations, I encourage you to talk with friends, family members, and health professionals you know and trust. A personal referral is always valuable. And take the time to interview anyone with whom you’ll be working.
• Check the Internet for national organizations and associations representing various disciplines and specialties—such as the American Holistic Health Association, Mental Health America (formerly the National Mental Health Association), and the American Association of Acupuncture & Oriental Medicine. Such sites offer information on how to locate qualified professionals in your geographic area. They can also provide valuable information regarding the professional requirements for specific specialties—certification, licensing, and training. The Resource Guide at the back of this book also provides detailed listings for organizations and associations around the world that address specific issues.
Mastering the tools and techniques presented in this book should give you valuable skills for assessing the kind of professional help you need, evaluating providers, and determining what works best for you. The better you know yourself and the more fully developed your intuition, the greater your ability to identify the resources that can provide the support you need. When you’re evaluating a psychotherapist, coach, physician, or any other type of professional, ask about:
• Qualifications: What are your credentials? What is your training and professional background?
• Experience: How long have you been in practice? What’s the primary focus of your work? What is your experience and success in working with the types of issues, challenges, and/ or goals I want to address?
• Approach: What’s your approach or methodology? What does the process involve and how much time does it typically take?
• Practical Information: How long does each session last? How frequently do we meet? What are your charges and payment policies?
Most importantly, you’re looking for someone who is supportive, caring, and nonjudgmental. During your interview, look for someone who is 100 percent present and focused on you and your concerns. Red flags include brusqueness, inflexibility, a rigid approach, or a sense of distance. This must be someone you can trust fully. Ask yourself: Do I feel comfortable with this person? Will I feel free to tell him anything? Is this someone who is engaging with me in a human and real way? If not, don’t hesitate to find someone else.
When you’re looking for a support group, the operative word is support—that is, finding an uplifting, caring, supportive environment. Not long after my separation, I found a support group in Germany for people who were separated and divorced. Most of the people who attended the sessions were angry and in pain, seeing themselves as victims and blaming their spouses for their situations. While moving through anger is an important part of the healing process, at the time, it wasn’t what I needed. If you’re considering a support group, interview the person who runs the group. The facilitator’s attitude will be a good indicator of the character and quality of the group. Any group can only be as supportive as the facilitator and the people involved. Feel free to explore the group situation before you commit to long-term involvement. Check in with your intuition, and base your evaluation on whether the group culture is compatible with your authentic self, your personal goals, and your Life Vision.
Exercise: Outer Support Assessment
Take out your journal and write “My Current Outer Support System.” Again, if your list is short or you have no outer supports, don’t judge yourself. Most of us were not conditioned to develop a set of outer supports. Remember: you’re looking for information that will help you move forward in your life.
Step One: Supportive Relationships
First, make a list of all the people in your life with whom you share supportive relationships. This includes supportive friendships and professional relationships. You may find it helpful to refer back to the list “Attributes of a Supportive Person” earlier in this chapter. In your journal, complete the following sentence:
The people with whom I share supportive personal and professional relationships are:
Step Two: Other Outer Supports
Now think about any other outer supports you currently have in place in your life. These might include support groups; classes you take regularly; memberships in gyms, clubs, community organizations, or professional associations; or any professionals who provide you with ongoing support—for example, a personal trainer, coach, or psychotherapist. In your journal, complete the following sentence:
Other resources for outer support I currently have in my life are:
CHAPTER 10
BRINGING YOUR
VISION TO LIFE
At the beginning of this book, I talked about these three keys to mastering the art of aloneness: focus, strategy, and commitment. You’ve already laid the groundwork. You’ve connected the dots between your family of origin and your default operating system. You’ve uncovered your innate nature and begun reclaiming the wholeness of your authentic self. And you’ve identified the attributes of your ideal life. But you still have some important work to do. In this chapter, you’ll be clarifying and defining your focus—your Life Vision—and developing a strategy that will guide you through your day-to-day life—your action plan. In the final chapter, I’ll talk more about how to sustain your commitment.
This chapter is a little different from th
e preceding chapters. It’s particularly exercise-intensive, so I encourage you to work through it over a period of days or weeks. You may start to feel a bit overwhelmed if you try to complete all these exercises in one sitting. This is where everything will start to come together for you. You’re going to develop a strategy for achieving your Life Vision and living in greater alignment with your authentic self. You’ll be creating a life in which you’ll feel more whole and complete on your own. And, like the Jane Austen character depicted in the movie Becoming Jane, you’ll be in a position to honor your truth, because you’ll know exactly who you are and possess the freedom to act on that knowledge.
This is where the culmination of your personal-development work begins:
• In Exercise One, you’ll identify the most important attributes of your ideal life, zeroing in on your top priorities as you move forward. You’ll do this by referring back to some of the exercises you completed earlier in the book and creating a list of ideal attributes that will help you refine your focus.
• In Exercise Two, based on this list of ideal attributes—the personal qualities, behaviors, and life circumstances to which you aspire—you’ll write a Life Vision statement that will serve as your guidepost and anchor as you move forward.
• In Exercise Three, you’ll identify the barriers you face—the core limiting beliefs and habitual behaviors of your default operating system, as well as other sabotaging beliefs, thoughts, behaviors, and circumstances that hinder your ability to move forward.
• In Exercise Four, you’ll use all the information you’ve gleaned from the preceding exercises to identify three specific goals—your top priorities in moving toward achieving your Life Vision.
• In Exercise Five, you’ll develop a set of action steps that will help you achieve those goals.
• Finally, in Exercise Six, you’ll begin to create a new life structure, incorporating your action steps into your daily and weekly schedule. This structure will help you adhere to the new routines that will build your inner and outer supports and help you follow through on your goals and commitments to yourself.
Before you begin, consider some of the people you’ve met in this book: a woman who wanted to expand her social circle but felt uncomfortable attending Dance Free alone. A high-achieving man who had played the Hero role for so long that he was unable to live the balanced life to which he aspired. A woman so afraid she’d be unhappy without a man in her life that she plunged into a marriage that was doomed from the start. Everyone puts his own imprint on this process. Each of you comes to it with your own unique fears and foibles, a distinctive set of core beliefs and habitual behaviors, your own innate nature, and a vision of an ideal life that’s all your own. As such, the exercises in this chapter will take each of you down a different path.
To help guide you, I’m going to introduce you to two hypothetical people: Jane Doe and John Doe. Their purpose is to provide a frame of reference for the exercises that follow—or rather, two frames of reference. Although through our life conditioning many of us have adopted patterns that are based on gender stereotypes, that’s not why I’ve chosen a man and woman. My goal is simply to present you with two multidimensional people whose hypothetical experiences can guide you as you take these crucial steps toward becoming a whole and complete person on your own.
Meet Jane Doe
Jane Doe is in her late 20s. In her relationships, she has a tendency to withhold how she really thinks and feels, allow people to treat her disrespectfully, and put other people’s needs ahead of her own. She’s a classic people-pleaser. Jane grew up in the Midwest, the only girl in a family of five. Her father worked in sales and traveled a lot. When he was home, he’d toss the football around with Jane’s brothers or take them to a ball game, but he never paid much attention to Jane. He was also a demanding husband, snapping orders at Jane’s mother, treating her like a subordinate. Jane’s brothers had strong personalities; they were athletes with big personas, popular and outgoing. They dominated the household. Her mother was compliant and accommodating, a homemaker who waited on her husband hand and foot and was devoted to her three children. But she was preoccupied with her only daughter’s appearance, frequently telling Jane to stop slouching, lose weight, and try to improve her looks by wearing makeup.
Jane was the quiet one in the family, the brainy one. She always did well in school, but her mother focused more on Jane’s appearance than on her academic achievements, and she was discouraged from participating in athletics of any kind. Like Cinderella, Jane was the one required to stay home and help her mother with the cooking and household chores. She believed that, like her mother, she’d grow up and find a man to take care of her.
Today Jane is a librarian’s assistant. Although she has a winning smile and a fresh, natural look about her, she’s self-conscious about her body and hides herself in baggy clothes. She’s interested in politics and history, but she has yet to realize her academic or career potential. Plagued by feelings of low self-esteem, Jane is terrified of spending the rest of her life alone. She has a tendency to overindulge with junk food to comfort herself, a legacy of her mother’s food-focused child-rearing style. Jane’s family role: the Lost Child. Her core limiting beliefs: Others’ thoughts, feelings, and needs are more important than my own. I’m ugly.
Here are some of the things Jane discovered by working through the exercises I’ve described in the early chapters of this book. She uncovered the aspects of her authentic self that had been buried through her conditioning—including a desire to pursue her interest in history and politics, go back to school, and excel in her field. During her Ideal Partner Visualization, she imagined her ideal partner as an author or professor—an academic whiz. In her Ideal Life Visualization, she imagined living in a small town near a university and renovating an older home. She saw herself as a smart, sophisticated, independent woman living an active, politically engaged life in a close-knit community of intellectuals. She envisioned herself feeling accomplished and sharing supportive relationships in which she was able to express her needs and set healthy boundaries.
Through her personal-development work, Jane realized that she reinforced her core limiting belief that she was unattractive by hiding beneath baggy clothes. She had long ago lost touch with her authentic self: a bright, intellectually engaged person with a passion for ideas and politics. To master her aloneness, Jane needed to focus on building her self-esteem and finding ways to have healthy relationships with others. She also decided to go back to school and complete her master’s degree in history and politics.
Meet John Doe
John Doe is 45 years old. He’s been on a quest for the ideal mate since his divorce three years ago, but he can’t seem to find the perfect woman. He’s a high achiever, a Type A who works long hours as a creative director at an ad agency. Because of his work schedule, he doesn’t take very good care of himself. He drinks a lot, exercises little, and lives with a fair amount of stress. Whenever he tries to get in shape, he can’t seem to stick with it. He has a pattern of going to the gym for a few days or weeks, then dropping his new regimen when he gets a new project at work. He also has a habit of being critical and demanding in his relationships, a pattern that has promoted conflict in his marriage, work, and social relationships. Since his divorce, John has fallen into a pattern of jumping from one brief relationship to another, looking for someone younger, someone better-looking, someone with a smaller waist or a higher salary.
John is charming, funny, and very creative, but lately he’s been feeling disenchanted with his work and plagued by feelings of loneliness and frustration. He grew up in an affluent family where being the best at what you did was the measure of your self-esteem and money was the measure of the man. His father was a perfectionist, critical and demanding—a pattern that played out in his relationships with his wife and his children. John replicated that same pattern in his own marriage. While he was always highly creative, rather than pursue his dream of being a
painter, he found an outlet for his creativity in a high-powered career that would be acceptable to his family. At this point, there’s something missing in his professional life, and he’s become bored and unhappy at work.
John’s Ideal Partner Visualization uncovered these attributes of his ideal partner: healthy, physically fit, and peaceful. In fact, he imagined her as a yoga instructor. John’s own Ideal Life Visualization included his passion for painting—an interest he had in high school and college but didn’t pursue. Now it’s something he wants to explore to bring more meaning and joy into his life. Through his personal-development work, John came to see that his desire for the perfect mate was a manifestation of his habitual drive for perfection, rooted in his family of origin. And, by identifying the attributes of his ideal mate, he recognized that balance, creativity, and fitness represented voids in his life. To master his aloneness, he needed to focus on restoring balance to his life, addressing his workaholism, and recovering his lost passion for painting.
For your reference, Jane Doe’s and John Doe’s complete action plans appear in the Appendix.
Exercise One: Life Vision Attributes
You’re about to create your Life Vision Attributes list. To help you complete the exercise, go back through your journal to the exercises you completed earlier in this book.
• Review the results of the Ideal Life Attributes exercise that you completed following your Ideal Life Visualization (page 235). What did you list in your journal as your ideal personal qualities, ideal behaviors, and ideal life circumstances?
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