Yea, Cyn! In her final comment yesterday Cyn wrote:
“I don’t want to define my selfworth by the WORK I get done. I just want to BE & enjoy just being me.”
That’s why I’m doing an interactive blog rather than just writing articles. Notice I didn’t tell Cyn what to do, she went from (1) wanting to control her husband to (2) saying she fights with her husband because of self-worth issues, to (3) saying she’d be better off doing work that made her feel good about herself, to (4) saying she wants to enjoy herself just the way she is. She doesn’t want her self-worth to be dictated by what she work does.
I didn’t do much at all, just asked a couple of questions for her to think about. There are gazillion books out there telling us how we can improve our lives. We’re fortunate to have them at our disposal, but they won’t do much until
- we tune into ourselves and see what we really want,
- notice if what we’re doing now is getting us closer to what we want, and, if not,
- do something else.
That’s a big part of the process. Another part, if we so choose, is to remember to keep doing it. Hopefully, that’s an important part of this website, to have supporters interested in what we’re trying. Please keep us posted, Cyn!
I’m confused. What does this have to do with “optimizing stress”? So far this seems very nebulous.
Thanks for asking! I’ll start answering that in tomorrow’s post.
Dear Puzzled, My take on that is to look at what is bugging you (stress), & doing it differently. See if that works. My husband (& I) repeated our point over & over, disregarding the other’s point of view. Now I repeat just what he said and say “I understand” to shut him up. ( He does the same.) When you are validated, you can go on to find a solution–probably a compromise.
Why not go the next step, Cyn, and try really listening to one another?
Thanks for writing!