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Grace, Truth and Time

  • Are you FINE?
    • Freaked out
    • Insecure
    • Neurotic &
    • Emotional


Blessings and Negative Control

  • Self-Esteem: Where does my value come from
  • Control what others think of us (argue, rationalize, deny)
  • Reality: When it’s something I did
  • Try to convince others of who we are
  • Boundaries: When it’s something I want to protect (myself or others)
  • Tell others what to think, feel, do or let others tell us
  • Self-Care: When it’s something for me: mind, body or spirit
  • Controlling behavior to “enable mind-reading” then others take care of our needs
  • Moderation: When it’s something from history
  • All or nothing, right or wrong
  • Self-Fulfilling
  • The more you believe or tell yourself something, the more you can find life proving it.


Sorting out Good and Bad: Ideal Self versus Real Self

From Changes That Heal by Dr. Henry Cloud

  • Tendency to solve the problem of good and bad by SEPARATING the two
  • Creates inability to tolerate weakness and failure in ourselves or others
  • To navigate life successfully, must be able to live with both
  • IDEAL Self is imagined perfection
  • Internalized values from our upbringing coupled with our own wishes for ourselves
  • REAL Self is the one we truly are
  • Weak, broken, and not what we imagined
  • Relationships between them
  • Problem: Ideal judges the real as BAD so deny part of who we are. Leads to secondary symptoms
  • Intrinsic Solution: Acceptance of the BAD. Do not question if good or bad. Ask “what am I doing?”
  • Value the REAL self as perfectly imperfect

Grace

  • Moderation: how much baggage to unpack or fears to conquer or obstacles to hurdle
  • The Positive: Undeserved Kindness
  • Bestowing compassion and love towards a person/self and wanting nothing in return
  • The Negative: Complacency
  • Deny existence of a problem. Cannot experience intimacy because lack truth for connection
  • Without TRUTH free to behave as one wishes regardless if excessive or unacceptable
  • “That’s the best I could do”
  • “I can’t help that he reacted that way”



Truth

  • Reality: limits, direction, and guidance make the structure of life
  • Who are we and how does that fit into it
  • “Do I need to clean it up?”
  • Coming up short and struggling with success leads to painful feelings
  • Without GRACE quick to judge
  • “Should-ing” all over ourselves



Time

  • Needed for the process of change to occur
  • The pendulum swinging from one extreme to another will settle with TIME
  • Messy is okay
  • Doing our best doesn’t look the same every time
  • Takes TIME to recognize GRACE and need for it
  • Takes TIME for TRUTH to sink in

How NOT to Change: Strategies for Staying Stuck

From Theories of Counseling and Pyschotherapy by Nancy Murdock

  • Don’t listen to anybody
  • Listen to everybody
  • Endlessly analyze and don’t make any changes
  • Blame others for your actions or problems
  • Blame yourself or put yourself down regularly
  • Keep doing the same thing that doesn’t work
  • Keep focusing on the same things when that focus doesn’t help
  • Keep thinking the same thoughts when those thoughts don’t help
  • Keep putting yourself in the same unhelpful environment
  • Keep relating to the same unhelpful people
  • Put more importance on being right than on changing




Thoughts to ponder

  • People who do not move, do not feel the chains holding them in place
  • Do not accommodate, come at it as you are
  • Counter steer against what has been handed down
  • Change occurs when we brush up against something uncomfortable




Finding Our Truth

Excerpt from The Language of Letting Go by Melody Beattie

We must each discover our own truth. We must stand in our own light. We often need to struggle, fail, and be confused and frustrated. That’s how we break through our struggle; that’s how we learn what is true and right for ourselves. There is no easy way to break through and find our truth. But we can and will if we want to. Each of us has our own share of truth, waiting to reveal itself to us. Each of us has our own share of the light, waiting for us to stand in it, to claim it as ours. Each experience, each frustration, each situation, has its own truth waiting to be revealed. Don’t give up until you find it—for yourself.