feel good

Toxic Friend Much?

What about when a friend is verbally or emotionally abusive to you? It’s easy for a friend to laugh it off as a joke or accuse you of being too sensitive. There is a sort of locker-room camaraderie which is a good cover for bullying using such methods as put-downs, name-calling, or teasing.

Even if it is all in good fun, piercing jabs can still cut like a knife, even if you try to convince yourself that you might be misinterpreting their snide remarks. They couldn’t possibly have mean to cut you to the quick, like that.

Nonetheless, you deserve the respect to which you are entitled. Your life is not a joke to be laughed at or made fun of. No one has the right to take you or your life for granted. You never need to heed anyone’s disrespect or other toxic abuse.

Toxic friend much?

If you’re disrespected by someone in your inner circle of friends, you might have to do a bit of emotional housecleaning. Disrespect has many faces, like not valuing your goals or intentions. They take cheap jabs at your appearance, clothing choices, job, what kind of car you drive, or home you live in. They may not value your time, skills, or special abilities, and may ask you to help them but never have an inclination to honor the value of such or offer to pay for your services.

They make fun of you, making you the but of their jokes, condescend in public, in an effort to make themselves look better at your expense. If they don’t stick up for you, support you, express an interest in your life, recognize your value, or understand who you are or how important living the way you do is to you, it might be time to cut them loose.

If you find yourself unable to share intimate details about your because they’ll be disregarded or made fun of, or worse yet, tell wild stories about your shared personal data behind your back, this person is not a friend. If a friend cannot take you seriously, or see from your point of view, at least trying to understand what it might be like to be in your shoes, he or she might not be as good a friend as you may have thought.

If your friend discounts what you have to say doesn’t want to listen to you or feels as though anything you might have to say doesn’t matter. They might even ask you for your opinion about something but disregard your input as invaluable, they may see themselves as superior to you and your input as worthless.

You can trust a true friend with your most intimate details. A friend that cannot be trusted isn’t much of a friend. If he or she makes a promise, and you cannot depend on it, or take them at their word, there is not much of a friendship foundation of trust on which to build.

What if you know that your friend is untrustworthy or has a dark side? You know he or she tells half-truths, withholds information, or right-out lies. It’s only a matter of time, ‘til you find yourself on the wrong side of this person, as he or she talks behind your back, tells lies about you, betrays you, or sets you up to take the fall for something you didn’t have anything to do with.

Friends who are constantly using you, draining you or valuable resources, they are counted among the energy vampires and have little or no respect for you and your needs.

Toxic friendships can be hard to let go of because you are attached to this person, you care about and may even love him or her, but this person is not good for you. The toxicity may ebb and flow, sometimes being tolerable or fine, but at other times, tragic. This kind of back and forth, up and down, kind of relationship is crazymaking.

You have every right to be you, and it’s up to you to protect the sacred space which surrounds you.

Your sacred space is your holy of holies and it’s up to you to keep it sacred. Surround yourself with people you can trust to value you, your love, support you, lift you up, inspire you, and to keep an honorable give-and-take relationship.

How Do You Feel About Things?

How you feel about things in life greatly influences your general state of mind. For the most part, how you feel about things dictates what kind of life you will live, how healthy you will be and how long you will live. Mental and physiological health is keenly attuned to how you feel. The people who have control of how they feel about things, maintaining a more positive outlook, experience a more stable emotional vibration allowing them to have more happiness, good health, love and longevity.

If you are actively taking responsibility for living a better life, you are looking at your mind/body/spirit dynamics and taking care to optimize your life and lifestyle. You’re more conscious about what your relationship with your body is like and you’re more attentive of the food you eat, maybe you’re exercising more, spending more time with Mother Nature, you are taking a more proactive approach to how you conduct your life, but are you making the effort to control how you feel?

A healthy holistic lifestyle includes influencing, taking more personal responsibility and being conscious about your intellectual and social health, physical health and the health of your emotional state. How you feel about things, your emotional state, greatly influences the health of all the other areas of your life.

Life brings you a great deal of opportunities to negatively influence how you feel about things. There are our familial and social relationships and interactions with other people with whom we do not maintain a relationship as life goes on all around us. Other opportunities to affect how you feel include your vocation, finances, your health status, concern about your community, and the world at large.

If you are to get a grip on how you feel about things that are presenting themselves to your awareness, you are more proactive about taking responsibility for what you are exposed to, if you are able.

The amount of stress you are exposed to can have a huge impact on how you feel, so managing stress is a key component in feeling better about life in general. Stress reduction should be of primary concern for establishing a better emotional state and by exposing yourself to fewer stressful situations, you will feel so much better about what life presents to you.

Many techniques are readily available to reduce, manage, or eliminate stress which is felt physiologically including meditation, breathing exercises, positive affirmations and visualization. Only you can determine what best suits your personal taste and resonates with you.

Eliminate media exposure to things that make you feel bad about life, the government or your safety. Most media comes packaged with an infectious negative vibration which affects how you feel about things. Consider turning off the TV, avoiding negative news and Internet feeds, by taking a media hiatus.

Guarding your thoughts to prevent you from focusing on things that are negative will go a long way in feeling better about life. Avoid negative self-talk, which leads to poor self esteem and diminishes confidence, making you feel helpless, if not hopeless, about your life.

Start reprogramming your mind positively. Get into a routine of reciting positive affirmations, and honoring yourself by speaking words of kindness and love about you, who you are, how blessed you are, and how your life may be a blessing to others. As you retrain your mind to think more positively, you will feel better and your physiological health will also get much better. It is a fact of life.

Learning how to let go of negative emotions, like uncertainty, sadness or anger, is hugely beneficial because if you hold these feelings inside they deplete your immune system and you become more susceptible to failing health and disease.

Finding a confidant who you can trust and talk to, as well as writing out in a journal how you feel about things negatively in the past as well as in the present, or even things that may be looming in the future, can be an effective key to releasing pent up negative emotions.

These practices in self-care will make you feel better about living a better life:

Engage in stress reduction techniques
Eat food that nourishes your body and exercise
Wind down and calm yourself for a good night’s sleep every night
Limit or eliminate exposure to negative news and media
Don’t put off dealing with issues you face in life
Practice positive and loving self-talk
Do something fun, that you like, every day

And forgive yourself for everything, for after all, you are doing the best you can with what you have.

Want Vs. Need

You may find yourself dealing with the confusion surrounding wants and needs. In your mind, you have a pretty good idea what you want to have or experience in this life. Then there’s the greater part of you (that can be somewhat illusive) knowing what experiences in life you need which are meant to bring you the greatest benefit for your life and affecting the lives of those around you. It’s no wonder you experience some conflict trying to balance what you want versus what you need.

Needs

Certainly you have elemental needs we can all agree on, like air, water, food, clothing, shelter and sex (I know, we all have different ideas about sex, but let’s face it, if it wasn’t for sex we wouldn’t be here).

Then there are the things that we want. Our wants are categorized and prioritized by our personal preferences. The higher the priority, the more associated with need what you wants becomes.

Highest Priority

For instance, we all want to have a sense of being safe and secure, have a certain degree of health, wellbeing, and most of us have a longing to be loved. Love is a spectrum which runs from one end representing the admiration for a pet or someone on the fringe of our circle of acquaintances to the other end representing selfless or obsessive admiration and devotion. There is something about love, being loved, giving and receiving love and not quite being able to achieve a level we feel so enthusiastic about obtaining that drives us to extremes.

Of course we have other psycho-emotional desires, like respecting ourselves and being respected by our peers, feeling that our life has some sense of meaning, and that we may be able to contribute in some way to the greater good.

Other Preferences

Some of the other preferences that most of us share include wanting a sense of justice for what is right and what is wrong, a feeling of being unique to one’s self distinguishable from others, while maintaining a sense of camaraderie, self-reliant or independence while feeling as though you are part of a greater group of people, we desire a sense of accomplishment or accumulation of material things, admiration or status among our peers, and if wronged, we want to be vindicated or destroy our enemies.

What Makes You Feel Good?

Above all, we just want to feel good, and fortunately, our society revolves your desire to feel good. In fact, it creates environments to promote a sense of not feeling good, to maintain you in a perpetual state of dissatisfaction so that you are constantly supporting the commercial machine in a furious attempt to find something to make you feel good.

Atop the list of things that make us feel food (though momentarily) are money, drugs and sex. It is generally accepted among the ranks of Americans that money can solve most problems and the more of it one has, the more sense of satisfaction and happiness can be attained. Drugs (or any addictive stimulant, including alcohol, tobacco, chocolate and obsession with various other foods) can offer a false sense of wellbeing, calm or pleasant feeling in solace, and sex (especially when accompanied by orgasm) gives us that emotional high without the use of drugs. These things make us feel good, whether we like it or not.

But do they really satisfy?

What You See is What You Get

Two people look at the same scene, one person sees one thing, the other sees something similar but completely different.

This has always bothered me somewhat, especially in the light of my law enforcement experience, when the report representing what someone has seen determines a person’s future.

It’s also disconcerting when someone says “I’ll believe it when I see it with my own eyes.”

More and more I’m thinking that our sight is not all its cracked up to be.

If you add the audio portion, certainly that can add a more credible view… Then, again, someone can say a sequence of words, and I hear something quite different from what the speaker spoke, even though what I heard was a correct representation of the actual words.

I’ve had people thank me following a talk, for specific insights that they received from my presentation. I’m surprised when they echo my words back to me, and the impactful message that they received, was nowhere to be found in my notes or presentation.

Then, I hear people say, “Trust your feelings,” which I encourage people to trust, possibly even more than what they see. Yet, for me, my feelings often betray me, not correctly representing the facts.

It’s as though truly objective perception is impossible from within.

Any single witness may be better than no witness at all but with many witnesses (maybe a hundred) one might be able to extract a reasonable representation of an event… but then again, what is the intention of those reporting the incident?

The group, entity or individual(s) collecting the various reports and extrapolating the facts may have a particular expected outcome that skews the end result.

Shifting Perception

If you can conclude that anything has an incomprehensible number of various interpretations, is it reasonable to assume that you – and any point in time and space – can choose to see anything from a different perspective?

How to Shift Your Perception

Using your imagination, you can change your perspective by putting yourself inside the mind and body of the other person. What must it be like for them in that moment? Can you imagine (or maybe even feel) how they are feeling?

Shifting my view to an aerial perspective is often helpful, to imagine what this incident would look like from without myself, like from the view of an overhead news helicopter.