Life in a Box...

My brother called me this week and told me about a call he had listened to that upped his awareness around codependency. Since this is relationship week in our Brilliant Horizons class, it made me think about the kind of conversations I have with my clients around their relationships.

If you have a great relationship based on trust and respect, Yah and congratulations!!! If you are having some challenges in telling the truth in your relationships ~ with respect… read on for some things you can do to support changing your pattern.

One of the biggest challenges we all face is to say what’s true for us – without making others wrong. We live in the box of I’m right, I’m better, I’m smarter & I’m more, and what we’re really saying is:

• I don’t like myself
• The truth is too vulnerable
• I don’t trust you 
• I need to be heard and therefor I can’t hear you

Clients tell me about the challenges they face with their intimate partner, their children and co-workers. Inevitably it boils down the co-depandant nature of the clients world.

Co-dependence sounds like this...

I don’t want to upset anyone

I don’t want to be confrontational

I don’t want someone else to suffer because of me

I don’t want to be alone

I don’t want to rescue myself but I do want to rescue you

I really need to be right

I really need to get it right

You are wrong

You are doing it wrong

The story I hear the most often is about not wanting to be responsible for someone else’s pain and suffering.

The truth is, as with everything, it’s really about our own suffering when we hurt someone. But think about this, affairs hurt, gossiping about your partner hurts, staying with your partner until the kids leave hurts. Wouldn’t it be worth telling the truth, your truth, and risk being intimate with someone you love, rather than plotting and planning what the end would look like? Yelling at or judging your kids, being mad at work, complaining and suffering does nothing for anyone.

• Practice telling the truth and know that it’s only one truth
• The truth always reveals itself eventually – learn to trust
• Ask for what you want
• Lighten up – please!
• Claim back your power by only saying yes or no when you want to

To make it even more complicated we watch the news, listen to all the limited perspectives of others and we have our own beliefs from our family of origin. Throw all that together and you have Fear and Control, and Power and Powerlessness.

Perhaps if we all learned to speak the truth without making another wrong, the world would change. I know for a fact… that at least your world would!

Compress decades of work into weeks… Call today for personal coaching and change your life now! karen@rubyredroad.com 518-932-7855

---