Herding cats or ducks in a row?

Today the river is at your feet, flowing in a tumbling, jumbling, joyous mass towards the ocean. All you have to do is step into the energy and allow it to carry you towards the place you know you belong. And you are terrified. Terrified?

You know what you know. You may even know that others know you know what you know.

Do you wake up in the morning with thoughts in your head that are old thoughts? Do you find your brain making old connections, following old riverbeds of thought that you know take you to the places you've already been? You’ve probably been to some awesome, exciting, successful places, so no issues there, it’s just that maybe you’d like to go someplace new, but, like changing the flow of water down an established river, you have to intentionally think new thoughts to create new spillways.

The answer for me when I found myself in this place was to hire a mentor. Someone just at the edge of what I thought I could afford, someone who knows more than I know, which is a lot. That’s not ego talking, that’s reality, and it’s the same reality that so many of my own clients have struggled with in the past. They’ve settled for their own brain for directions, and the things their brains know are based in old habits of thinking. They’ve done the inside work, and delved into the deep, dark regions of their own psyche to unearth the pains that controlled what they’d allow themselves to do. They’ve pushed beyond their own limits time and time again, and still, have wound up falling short of where they know they belong. The only way for them to do it differently, is to be different, and that means not doing it alone.

My brain wants to think that because it knows so much, because it has the degrees, and the workshops, and the certifications, and the experience, and the successes, that it doesn’t need anyone but itself. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. You really can’t know more than you know until someone helps you find new things to know.

We all need a mentor. Someone you are in an energy exchange with, the energy of money, who knows more than you do, who’s at least a level or two ahead of you, who is dedicated to your reaching the lifestyle goals you’ve envisioned in your head for as long as you can remember.  In my very first call to my mentor I changed the way I think, and the way I feel, and no amount of self talk could have done that for me. She talked about getting my ducks in a row and I realized, I didn’t  have any ducks. I had cats. I’d become extremely adept at herding cats. I excelled at taking seemingly disparate aspects of my life and moving them along towards my destination. I could do it, but damn, it was a lot of work!

She helped me bring in the ducks.

At first my ducks were in conflict with my cats. At the risk of mixing metaphors, the riverbed my cats had created were in conflict with the flow that my ducks were craving.

For years I've talked to clients who are herding cats. They are visionaries, artists, and creatives who are able to juggle multiple high-level skills, and wide-sweeping programs of transformation, but who are out of breath with the amount of energy and time it takes to pull it all together. And what I see is, most of them are confused about why they are doing it.

One of the first thing most coaches or mentors will ask a new client is, what are your money goals? This is important, knowing where you want to get to helps you to get there. Much less often, and will a lot less emphasis and definition, will they ask you what your lifestyle goals are. The myth in this is that if we reach our monetary goals, we will automatically achieve our lifestyle goals.

As a lifestyle coach. I help you to define your personal goals, because how you want to experience and be in your life is the key to achieving your professional goals. As an entrepreneur you need the skills of sales and marketing, so you have to learn these things, but you will continue to miss achieving your highest dreams if doing what you do is in service of money over life.

The New Year is a time honored reset button for sweeping life changes. It's time to get real about what you really want. You. Not your friends or family, You. Shape it. Move things around like a rubiks cube til things click. Now find a mentor who knows at least a little bit more than you know to help you get where you really want to go.

What is one thing you're going to do differently, starting NOW?

Guides, Angels, Spirits, and Myth

Guides, Angels, Spirits, Myth and Archetype

As a mentor and coach I often work with people who listen to the abundant intuitive energy that surrounds us. They listen to the sources who are here to help and guide them, and that’s a wonderful ability that can offer support for their decisions when maybe the people around them aren’t in such a helpful place. What is distressing about this is that I also see them using their guides as a reason to play small, and to constrict when they’ve chosen to risk playing big.

Getting my guides into perspective. 

I once had a very unusual dream, so unusual that while I was still dreaming I turned to the other person in the dream and told them they were on their own, that I couldn’t wait to wake up to consult my guides, that I needed to do it right now. And I did. I walked out the door and down the street to where I knew my guide would be. 

I wasn’t actually prepared for who met me, or where I found him. 

Before this dream I had imagined my guides to be bathed in a shimmery, ethereal light, wearing draping clothes, with an overall purity of otherworldliness. Too many movies, I know. The guide I met that day couldn’t have been any further from what I’d imagined.  

The office was in an old tract home, down a nondescript suburban street, and was a confusion of walls covered with memos and sticky notes threatening to bury the old metal drawer desk haphazardly stacked with papers and books. I was sure I’d been sent to the wrong place. I was even more sure of this when a rugged, unshaven man burst in wearing a flannel shirt and levis. He slid  into the metal pedestal swivel chair, crossed his arms behind his head and planted his work boot covered feet on a bare corner of the cluttered desk. 

I asked him where my guide was (okay, maybe I demanded). He said my guide was busy but had sent him as this wasn’t really that important. Before I could speak he started laughing, out loud, total guffaw belly laughing, and said that the dream I’d come to him for didn’t mean at all what I thought it did. He laughed til the tears rolled down his face. I left, shaking my head and wondering, what then did it mean?

I did ultimately find out the answer, and I too had a total guffaw belly laugh over it all. He was right, it wasn’t even in the ballpark of what I originally thought it meant.

So what’s my point? It’s this. Everything we know, every decision we make, is informed by lifetimes of experiences. Our fears, our successes, our desires, and our insecurities are just a few of the things that shape our perceptions, and our perceptions are what we call REALITY. Our guides also use our experiences to communicate to us in a language we understand. We understand it, because we created it out of our experiences. That does not mean it’s reality. 

Guides, Angels, God and Spirit are not in our lives to take away our ability to practice free will, they are here to help us see what we might be missing, to broaden our horizons, and sometimes, to offer their protection.  

The question to ask yourself is: Do you still need the kind of protection you’re being offered? Or, is it time to say thank you for your wonderful guidance, you’ve helped me to become who I am, and, I've got this one.  

Your guides are not your parents. Even if they were, do you still listen to mom and dad when they tell you how to live your life?

The final question I will leave you with is: Why do you give your guides a level of control over your life you’d give to no one else? Are you steering your own ship, or having you given that power away?

What's in an Empty Nest?

Sounds silly, huh, if it’s empty then how can anything be in it? The physical space may be empty but no way is the space in your heart or your head. Those places are full of longing memories, regrets, love, relief, wishes, and the hopes and dreams that were born the day you first held them in your arms.

I’d never considered my mortality until the day I brought my son home from the hospital. I sat there on the coach with this tiny, helpless being whose hands now held my heart, thinking, wow, I want to live forever because I don’t want to miss a thing. Of course as he got older and hit those pre-teen and teenage years and the dirty socks began to take over my house, my thoughts changed to, gads, when is he gonna grow up and move out, and will we survive that long? We did, and he has, and one year later, I've found my equilibrium again.

If you’re like me, you raised your child to be independent, to think for themselves, to be strong and self reliant. How much does it suck sometimes that it worked? They are as stubborn, creative, willful and defiant as we ever imagined ourselves to be, and masterful at making both good and equally bad decisions. We’d like to put our arms around them and talk them back from the cliff's edge so they can learn their lessons from our own deep well of painfully gained wisdom, rather than watch them fall and have to struggle through their disappointments, sadness or loss of heart. Like we were ever willing to do that.

So what do you do to bridge the gap between dependent child to independent young adult? How do you prepare for it before it happens? Can you even do that? And here’s the big thing, our own life experiences are going to color whatever happens! A little known fact is that for every age of your child, you’re going to relive what was going on in your life at that exact same age, consciously sometimes, unconsciously more often.

This can mean a lot of mixed emotions. Were your parents supportive, did they send you off to college, buy you a car? If not, and now you can do that for your kids, you’re probably thrilled you can do this for them. But what if they don’t want that? Are you resentful at their rejection of this gift? And what if they do want it, are you also (somewhere deep inside) feeling a bit like a martyr that you’ve done for them what your parents didn’t do for you?

Maybe you never thought of this stuff, maybe you’re shaking your head now, thinking, why stir up a can of worms I never even considered? And what does this have to do with having an empty nest? And now that I'm all stirred up, what am I supposed to do?

These are all things in the gap. And there’s so much more. Things you wish you’d done, things you wish you hadn’t done, things you still hope to do, and all colored with the warm and wonderful memories of those children who once held your hand and looked at you with all that trust and love.

What you’re supposed to do is go on. Allow them to make their mistakes. Grow and be bigger than your parents before you, even if they were the best parents ever born, you were born to be greater. If they were the worst parents ever, it’s not for you to say, hey, I survived it, so will they. Don’t pass it on. Heal it. Give your kids what you never got and you’ll be making the world a better place. Oh, and get a hobby. Quick. And a cat.

The Walls Exploded With a Mighty Crash!

Children of narcissistic parents rarely survive psychologically intact. 

Your world view is so psychotically manipulated that what makes sense to you isn’t what makes sense to others. You may develop eating disorders and addictions, determined to take your life apart at the very core in an attempt to make sense of the insanity, or you become an overachiever in an attempt to establish control over any corner of your life. You are trapped in a cycle of reacting, instead of acting, to the circumstances you were born into. Whether you live your life as a shining example, or as a terrible warning, you carry the terrible burden of knowing you’re mother is incapable of loving you. The horror of this is you believe you are unlovable.

Boy, or girl, your narcissistic mother is fused with you. Her coldness and lack of empathy affect you from the start. She experiences you as an extension of herself, never as an individual. You are hers to dress up or destroy. She will use your tragedies, your challenges, and your successes as a means to further her own image. She is psychologically merged with you and it’s incomprehensible to her that there could be anything wrong with this. When she says “this is going to hurt me more than it’s going to hurt you”, it’s true. She can’t feel anyone’s pain but her own.

The narcissistic mother says things to you that cause you to shake your head in disbelief, but also in confusion. When she says you’re jealous of her, you know you’re not, but then wonder if there might be truth to what she says? Self-reflection is how a normal person responds to what others say. You can’t allow yourself this luxury when you’re in a relationship with narcissism. You’re not in a relationship with another person; you’re in a relationship with a twisted perception and your ability to self-reflect is what will be used against you.

What they accuse you of doing is the very thing they are doing to you. When they accuse you of being jealous, it’s because of their own envy. When they accuse you of lying, it’s because they know how easily the lies pass their own lips. When they say they fear your anger, it’s their own seething rage that concerns them. Their every move is focused on undermining you, shaking your confidence so deeply that you will never be free, and they will never be alone. Their hold is so strong and pathological that you won’t know what you’re thinking.

Another aspect of the power the narcissistic mother uses is to cause powerful, damaging psychological rifts between you and your siblings and extended family. You are pitted against each other by conspiratorial secrets, which are usually lies, but she’s so skilled at manipulating emotions that even when the lies are uncovered and seen for what they are, pity for her will keep her safe from recrimination.

If you have siblings, she will choose one child as the special “Golden” one to be focused upon. If you’re the Golden Child, you can do no wrong. You’re dressed as the perfect incarnation of the mother. You are invited to participate in the mother’s activities, to be the perfect little “mini me”.  The narcissistic mother chooses another child as the "Scapegoat".  If you are this child, you are the target and reservoir for the narcissistic mother's expression of her unconscious feelings of self hatred and worthlessness.  This child is a living disposal for the narcissistic mother's toxic venom. She will often be offered up as the sacrificial lamb to cover for her if someone notices that something  in the home might be amiss.

When you begin to break free of her hypnotic grasp, the narcissistic mother can be relentlessly cruel and critical.  They will discover flaws in you if you are the “golden” child, and if you are the “scapegoat” child, you will be blamed for the golden child’s exodus.  This will always be true since the narcissistic mother suffers from a severe personality disorder.  These individuals are completely self absorbed, cold, manipulative, deceitful, exploitative, and lacking in human empathy.

If you are the adult child of a narcissistic mother, you can heal.  One of the first steps is acknowledging and grieving over the fact that you never had a real mother, someone who loved you or cared about you as a separate, valuable human being.  You have to learn that you are not your mother, or any of the things she says you are. One of the biggest challenges is to untangle yourself from the pity and compassion you have for her.  If you don’t take these steps, you’ll continue to repeat relationship patterns of childhood rather than work through the pain to transform it.

When you begin the work of separating who you are, from who you’ve been told you are, you will vacillate. You will walk away, and you will return. You’ll do this until you can finally accept that no matter what you do, you will never be seen as an individual, and you’ll never be forgiven for abandoning your role. The narcissist will up the ante, they will involve other family members, and they will do almost anything to bring you back into the fold. Rarely will you have the support of someone who’s still inside the dynamic because they are still mesmerized. They can sometimes see what the narcissist is doing, but they will find excuses for it, just as you’ve done all your life.

You must be brave in order to risk the possibility of a happy, joyous, and free future.

You Probably Think This Song is About You, Don't You?

Are there people in your life who, no matter what you do or how well you do it, still manage to find fault, leaving you feeling like you're crazy? Do they manipulate the truth, rewrite history, or blame others for their mistakes, past or present? If so, you're probably dealing with Narcissistic Personality Disorder. 

NPD is an insidious set of behaviors that can be very difficult to identify and even harder to treat. Because this is a personality disorder, therefore a learned behavior, there are no medications like there are for things like schizophrenia or depression which are brain disorders.  Because it's a learned behavior, the only way out of it is to unlearn it, usually in a group therapy setting whose goals are to help the patient develop a healthy individuality (rather than a resilient narcissism) so that they can acknowledge others as separate persons. 

No amount of compassion, understanding, or empathy on your part will ever change the behavior of a person with NPD. You can twist and turn yourself like a Rubiks cube, hoping to hit upon that just right combination that will finally please them and end the insanity, but you'll never find it. Your heart will break a little bit more each time you think you've finally gotten through to them, only to find they lack the ability to self reflect, and once again, nothing has changed. They will only use your goodwill to further their own ends.

Pathological Grandiosity
Narcissists believe it is their right to control what you do. If they don’t get their way, they act like spoiled children. They will throw tantrums and accuse you of keeping things from them. They are very paranoid and sure you plan to cause them harm.

Disclaimer:
A person with NPD doesn't think the Sun revolves around them. They think they ARE the Sun. Just like the sun, their outsides are bright and shiny, accentuating their superiority, but on the inside they're burning with an overwhelming sense of self-loathing. It's this tension of opposites that creates their inexhaustible needs.

Verbal Assault
A person with NPD will call you names, degrade, scream, threaten, criticize, berate, cry, and humiliate you. They will find opportunities to point out your flaws in front of friends or family and embellish upon them to the extreme. They'll make snide remarks and use sarcasm to erode your sense of self-worth and self confidence, making you look bad in front of others in an attempt to dissuade them from being your ally. This also offers them an opportunity to martyr themselves by showing their audience just how difficult you are to deal with and what they have to go through in order to put up with you.

Gaslighting
Gaslighting is a slang term from the 1950’s meaning to drive someone crazy. The person with NPD will swear that events never occurred and that certain things were never said. Even though you know better, over time you can begin to question your sanity. Be alert to gaslighting tactics that can beat you down and make you think you are going insane.

Blackmail
Emotional blackmail is one of the high stakes tactics someone with NPD uses to push your buttons. They play on your sense of compassion, fear, or guilt in order to manipulate you and get their own way. They may refuse to talk to you, threaten to end the relationship, withdraw financial support, even threaten to commit suicide in order to maintain their sense of control. 

Constant Chaos 
The person with NPD will keep you in a state of total chaos by starting arguments and constantly being in conflict with other family members.

Entitlement and Expectations
A person with NPD places unreasonable demands on you. They may expect you to reject everything in your life to tend to their needs. They may demand all of your attention. They may offer to help you in some way then withdraw the offer without notice because something better comes up. Their excuse to you will be that you should understand because they deserve to be happy and this makes them happy. Don't you want them to be happy? No matter how hard you try to please them, they will always demand more, and if you express hurt or anger you will be accused of being unreasonable. They are a bottomless well of need. You will be criticized and berated because of your inability to fulfill their demands.

Unpredictable Responses
This includes emotional outbursts and extreme mood swings. If they like something you do today they may hate it tomorrow. Their response to being called on this discrepancy can be very extreme, and their constant nitpicking will undermine your self esteem, self confidence and mental well-being by keeping you constantly on edge, wondering how they'll respond next. Spending any time around this kind of person is challenging, stressful, and anxiety provoking. At the very least your sense of balance is uncertain and prolonged exposure to their behavior leads you to question your own sanity.

Martyrdom
Anything that happens around a person with NPD will instantly be interpreted by them as having happened to themselves. They play the pity card often, and well. If a friend is ill, they cry, not for the friend, but for themselves because they now have to suffer the pain of having a sick friend. The more advanced their illness is, the quicker they will go through friendships because their level of neediness is exhausting and bottomless.They are masters at turning any situation into their own righteous platform. If you set boundaries they take it as a personal rejection and they will condemn you. They know where your vulnerabilities are and won't hesitate to use them against you.

Extracting yourself from someone with Narcissistic Personality Disorder can be very difficult, especially if they are a family member or someone you work for. The more they lose control of you, the more vicious their attacks can become, and the deeper their verbal attacks will bite. Their attacks can also escalate to physical violence and deliberate sabotage. Don't go through it alone. You need people on the outside who can see clearly for you until you can do so for yourself.