2016 NEW YEAR RESOLUTIONS

Happy New Year!  Many of us look at the New Year as a time to change our lives.  We often see it as a new beginning and as a way to re-invent ourselves and our lives. While we are trying to motivate ourselves through the new resolution, we also have to be ready for the change as most change is challenging.  If the behavior we wanted to change was easy, we would not need the resolution.  Psychological studies have shown that approximately 50% of adults tend to make New Year resolutions, especially regarding weight loss, exercise, smoking cessation, and better money management and debt reduction. Other common resolutions include but are not limited to getting more organized, volunteering and helping others, learning something new, drinking less, enjoying more family time, and generally enjoying life more.

Please keep in mind that if a resolution is unrealistic, you may be buying into false hope and setting yourself up for feelings of failure. Your resolution has to be realistic and match your internal view of yourself and what you are capable of given your life situation.  For example, debt reduction is a wonderful goal, but it has to match your income and fixed expenses.  It would be unrealistic to reduce your debt by an amount that is not commensurate with your income. Also, if you make a resolution but tell yourself that you don’t really believe you can do it, the resolution can lead to negative self-talk, making you feel like you failed. 

To change a behavior, you first have to change your thoughts and expectations and you have to be realistic with the goals you set.  To help reach this goal, try focusing on one resolution at a time.  Set realistic goals in steps or chunks.  For example, with debt reduction, first stop putting any more charges on your credit cards.  Pay some over the minimum on each card but target one card to pay down to zero, however long that takes.  Once that card is paid, target another card, and so on.  Make your resolutions daily and not yearly.  Every morning, remind yourself what your goals are for that day and reinforce your resolution with your recent success. Ask yourself how you are going to meet your goals today.  When you achieve smaller goals along the way, it is less overwhelming and much more reinforcing.  It is also very helpful to enlist the help of someone else, like a support buddy.  This can be a friend or a family member.  Depending on the resolution and goal, it can even be a co-worker or a support group (like weight watchers for weight loss).  Practice your new thoughts based on supporting evidence.  For example, for weight loss, remind yourself that you have stopped gaining weight and have started to lose weight.  For debt reduction, remind yourself of the decreasing balances on your credit cards.  Verbally reinforce for yourself how good your success feels and how much you want to continue to feel that success.  Be aware of your thoughts and feelings, especially those thoughts that might sabotage your success. 

Don’t forget to have fun and reward yourself along the way.  It is important to recognize and acknowledge those intermediate successes so the journey does feel impossible.  Most importantly, have a plan for relapse prevention and goal maintenance.

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HOLIDAYS 2015 

The holidays are once again fast approaching and maybe this will be the year that we do things differently. So many of my patients and friends confide in me that they really do not enjoy the holidays. They rush through Thanksgiving and dive head first into shopping for gifts, sending out cards, going to parties and giving parties, and find themselves feeling flat and tired. Let yourself enjoy each holiday in its own right.  

Halloween is a lot of fun, especially when you have children who are excited about their costumes and all the candy they will receive. Thanksgiving truly is a day to give thanks for what we have, family, friends, a safe place to live, and food to eat. 

Try and really look at the difference between wants and needs. If all your needs are met and you are able to have some of your wants, than you are much better off than many people around the world. As for the post‐Thanksgiving holidays, make your budget, your list, and methodically make your way through and really enjoy the processing of selecting gifts and wrapping them and anticipating the pleasure of the person you are giving the gift to. If you have to spend time with family members that you really do not enjoy, try and look at what you do like about that person and remember that every person has a story and you may not know their entire story. Wish them well in your thoughts and maybe you will even see them smile. If you are missing people that have passed away or are not able to be with you this year, focus on the positive memories. For those people that cannot be with you this year, call them. Maybe even arrange a group call on skype or face time. Share memories and remember what you are thankful for. Even if your life is not where you want it to be, there is always something to be thankful for and something to share. HAPPY THANKSGIVING AND HAPPY HOLIDAYS!
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SOCIAL MEDIA ADDICTION

Everybody has an opinion about social media.  Some people do not see or understand the attraction to social media and other people cannot understand why more people are not more involved.  Like anything else in life, we all don’t like the same things.  For those of us who do like social media, some are involved on a very minimal level and others are involved throughout their day.  The question is; when is it too much?  When social media is used as an escape it is too much. 

If someone turns down a social invitation or time with family because they want to update Facebook or follow someone on Twitter, it is too much.  Social media should add to the quality of our lives, not become the focus of our lives.   There is nothing wrong with enjoying pictures on Instagram or Facebook, or following someone on Twitter.  However, to put anything meaningful on these sites, you have to go out and live life.  If your children seem overly consumed, maybe limit them to an hour a day.  And while you are at it, limit yourself to an hour a day.  I have met people who proudly tell me that they spend up to five hours a day updating all their social media.  What else could have been accomplished in that five hours?  Maybe spending time with family or friends, working out and exercising, learning a new hobby or skill, reading a book.  Social media is an adjunct to life, not the center of life.  

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COPING WITH THE BREAKUP OF A ROMANTIC RELATIONSHIP

I wish there was one easy answer to this issue.  Unfortunately, the answer depends on so many different variables such as duration of the relationship, intensity of the relationship, age at time of breakup, and reason for the breakup.  Breakups are stressful and painful no matter how they happen, even for the person doing the breaking up.  The loss of a relationship is a form of grieving, just like when we experience a death.  We grieve many types of losses, not just by death or loss of relationship.  We may grieve the loss of a job, moving away and losing our home and community, loss of a friend, even loss of physical integrity.  When dealing with the loss of a relationship, as painful as it is, we have to remind ourselves that the pain is temporary.  We have to also remind ourselves that were the relationship strong and balanced, it would not have ended.  Therefore, I like to describe it as a dress rehearsal for the real relationship.  It was a time to learn about relationships and what you like and what you don’t like.  Many people express a fear that they will end up alone.  Better to be happy alone than miserable in a relationship that just does not work or even worse, may be abusive.  So how to go forward?  

The most important requirement to coping with a breakup is to get out from under the covers, take a shower, look great, and go out with your friends and/or family.  Stay active and involved.  If you were never that involved or active, now is a good time to start.  You can hurt and be miserable or you can hurt and be active and distracted.  That latter is better as it allows you to see that life can go on in a positive way.  Who knows, maybe when doing something you love, you might meet someone wonderful who really gets you and wants to be with you forever.

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ACCEPTING HELP GRACEFULLY

 There are many of us who are quite happy to give help and enjoy the role of caretaker.  It makes us feel good to help someone else.  However, there is a subset of us who are not comfortable accepting help from others.  We are concerned that we are a burden, we feel guilty that someone may have spent money on us or gone out of their way to do us a favor.  The bottom line, however, is that a balanced relationship allows us to be on both sides of help and sometimes we just need to be gracious and say “Thank you”.  This means not constantly or frequently telling the other person how sorry you are for inconveniencing them and accepting their help at face value.  Helping you allows the other person to also experience the joy of helping and actually creates a better balance in the relationship if you have been able to help them in the past.  All this being said, even when offering or accepting help, we need to have healthy boundaries.  Don’t accept help that you know will absolutely hurt the other person and don’t offer help that you know you either can not afford to offer or will hurt you and your family in some way.  There are times we want to help, but what we can offer may not be realistic for our current life situation. 

However, the strength of emotional support can never be underestimated.  Even small measures of help can have a tremendous impact on the other person.  For example, a phone call or visit, sending over dinner or inviting someone over for dinner.  This allows the other person to know you care.  If you are on the receiving end of this type of help, understand the other person is giving what they can based on where their life is and know they are thinking about you and you are not alone.  Remember, when someone wants to help you, they care.  Let them care.


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TOXIC PEOPLE

A staff member recently gave me a list of 15 questions regarding toxic people and I decided the best way to go about this was to just directly answer each question.

  1.      What are the signs someone is toxic?  The signs typically involve a pattern of behavior although this is not always the case.  The pattern I am referring to is when a person repeatedly engages in a behavior designed to take advantage of you, make you feel badly about yourself, make you feel guilty, and make you feel the life is being sucked out of you.

  2.      What does it mean to be toxic?  It means the person has been seriously damaged at some point in their life and maybe at several points in their life.  Rather than dealing with their emotional pain internally, this person deals with their pain externally.  In other words, they are spreading the pain and becoming an emotional cancer that will emotionally devour you and even possibly destroy your life.

  3.      What do toxic people do to our lives?  They can, if allowed, actually take over your life.  You may find that everything in your life revolves around their dramas and crises.  A sense of entitlement may develop and may develop quickly, such that you may be punished if you do not rescue them or listen to them when it is demanded of you.  Toxic people are typically master manipulators and use guilt as part of their control.

  4.      How does removing them from our lives help?  Removing toxic people from our lives helps us have more stability in our lives, allows us to develop healthy boundaries with people, and takes the contrived drama out of our lives.  It allows us to breathe emotionally.

  5.      Who deserves another chance?  If someone harms you with the intent to harm you, think long and hard about keeping them in your life.  If you keep them in your life and they intentionally harm you again, consider them malignant and cut them out of your life.  Remember, toxic people engage in a pattern of abusive behavior.  Anyone can have an occasional slip.  The non-toxic person, however, will readily apologize and not blame you for their behavior.

  6.      What is the difference between a person making a mistake or using poor judgement vs. a person who is toxic?  The toxic person engages in patterns of dysfunctional, harmful, malignant behavior with an intent to hurt you while someone just making a mistake or using poor judgement will take full responsibility and learn from their mistakes and feel genuine remorse for hurting you. 

  7.     When do you put someone out of your life? As soon as you realize they are toxic and have overtaken your life.

  8.      What does it mean to cut out toxic people and what does that look like in how we handle ourselves with or around them?  Cutting out toxic people is like cutting out emotional cancer.   As with any cancer, we cut it out and never take it back into our lives.  If you run into them, you can be socially polite, but do not give them any information about yourself they can use as ammunition to hurt you.

  9.      Why do people choose to keep people in their lives who they know are toxic and what does that say about us?  It means they may have been trained by a toxic parent to tolerate toxicity in their lives and it is expected.  People may not know what it is like to have non-toxic relationships.  How calm and beautiful it can be.  They may think toxic relationships are normal.  Many people say that someone is their friend and it is really only a relationship based on history versus a true friendship.  In a true friendship, the friend does not abuse you, use you or manipulate you into feeling guilty and doing whatever they want no matter what the cost to you.

  10. What if you’re unsure a person is toxic?  If it is a pattern of bad behavior with the same tired excuses that tend to blame everyone but that person, the person is toxic.

  11.  What if you don’t want to let go even if you know you should?  When we care about someone we don’t want to let go.  However, when we make a decision that is healthy for us it tends to be healthy for the people around us.  In the long run, your toxic person has to learn that they are the common denominator and they are the one that needs help.

  12. What if you want to let go but are afraid of backlash or just don’t know how?  There is really only backlash if the other is in a power position over you.  If this is a work relationship, document, keep your paper trail, and maybe even look for a position in another company. If the relationship is with a neighbor, just keep your distance.  However, if the relationship involves family or friends, you really need to consider cutting that person out of your life.  In these more intimate relationships, it is not so much backlash as it is punishing and guilt inducing, which really is more about their toxic agenda than it is about you.

 13.  What if you have to be around the toxic person, such as at work, in the family, at church, or a neighbor?  At work, see if you can transfer to another department or look for another job, in your family keep an emotional distance and don’t get involved in their drama, and with church and neighbors, be superficially pleasant and nothing else.  If you can’t get away from the toxic person, don’t engage these people or give them false hope for your involvement in their drama.  They will eventually look for someone else to rescue them.

   

  14.  Is it even possible for a person to start out benign but become toxic later in life?  

    Absolutely, but not the most typical.  Usually this type of dysfunction starts in childhood due to either or both an unsafe physical environment and an unsafe emotional environment.  Toxic people typically present as charming and wonderful when we first meet them.  If they are really good, they will draw us in slowly so we are sucked in to their drama before we even realize what is happening.

  15.  Can good people be toxic?  No.  Toxic people appear to be good on the surface to suck you in.  They do nice things for you and then when they ask you for something, they remind you what they have done for you.  Whatever they do for you will have strings attached.  Even if they apologize, they find a way to make you feel guilty and wrong.  If their bad behavior does not seem intentional but happens frequently, it is a pattern and a pattern of bad behavior is toxic. 

When someone in your life has a pattern of using you, making you feel guilty, disregarding your needs, or making you feel like you are being sucked dry, they are toxic and you are their prey.  If you do not want to be someone’s prey, don’t let them be your predator.    

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HEALTHY COPING WHEN CARING FOR AN ELDERLY RELATIVE

For many of us, this will mean taking care of elderly parents or possibly an elderly spouse.  This is a painful, exhausting, frustrating, incredible, amazing journey.  Whoever you are taking care of, for whatever reason, the experience will be what you make it to be.  However, there are some guidelines that will make the experience richer.  Let’s assume this is a person you love and want to take care of.   Remember that this is a very scary time for them.  They are losing their independence and for many people that translates into losing their pride.  Whether you are taking care of someone in a facility or at home, try to help your loved one keep as much pride as possible. Some people would be more comfortable being showered by a staff member than a family member.  Other people feel the opposite.  Regardless, try and do the fun things with your elder and allow staff to do some of the more difficult health care activities.   Help them do as much as they are capable of doing.  If they are able to walk, let them and help them walk.  If they are not able to walk but like to be taken places in a wheelchair then try and make that happen.  If they enjoy eating out, take them out. Even if they do not remember what you just did, as long as they enjoy the activity, then provide the activity.  When they can no longer go out, bring the take out to them.  Rent a movie for them to enjoy, especially an older one that they might already remember.  This makes it easier for them to follow and enjoy.  Ask them to tell you all their stories and record the stories or write them.  Many rich family history is lost when an elder dies.   They will usually enjoy having an audience for their stories and even though you may have heard some of the stories, this time you will be more aware that you may not hear it again and you will find yourself wanting to ask more questions. 

Go through old picture albums together, also a great way to travel back through memory lane, hear more stories, and allow your elder to enjoy some memories with you.   One of the most difficult transitions for the caretaker is to transition from the role of adult child or spouse to the role of decision-maker.  Sometimes, in your new rule, you will have to make a decision that goes against what your elder initially wanted.  If you are used to being in the role of child, it is very difficult to not “obey” your parent even when it is not in their best interests.  Remember all the things your elder has already lost:  friends, family members (maybe even a child or a spouse), job, home, pets, physical integrity such as loss of mobility, and cognitive integrity such as memory loss.  One of the most difficult aspects of aging are all the losses.  The last thing most people want to be at the end of their life is a burden.  Don’t make the caretaking a burden or it will come across that way to everyone.  There is joy still to be experienced.  Don’t forget to get help and take some time for yourself or you will burn out.  Make new stories in your life that you can share with your elder, it will make them feels more a part of your life and you will have a very interested audience.  When your elder dies, you want to remember more joy than sadness, and you are the one that can make that happen. 

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