Quotes found on Divorcebusting (II)

[Ready2Change]

Journaling

Someone very close to me just reminded me that it is so important to not lose one's perspective. I am starting to think that perspective is the key to a lot of the doors in my life that seem to remain closed to me. I use the word "seem" intentionally...I think they may not be closed at all. Actually, I think there may not even be any doors there at all.

I am constantly telling others not to get too close to their own situations, to take a few steps back so they can see what they are doing and how they get in their own way. Time to heed my own words.

I realized something today - I admit that to everyone who knows me, this would sound so daft, as it would have been so obvoius to them and even to me in a sense - I have an intense need to control anything and anyone that has the potential to hurt me. Okay, this I have always known. Here is the thing I realized today...I am going to get hurt again, and again and again and I am not always going to see it coming and I am not always going to be able to prevent it and if I do not stop trying to do so, I am going to hurt myself far more than would the thing I am trying to prevent.

I am limiting myself and the things and people in my life when I try to control them. Worse, I am allowing myself to live in fear. Here is how I do it and I am a master at it. I let down my guard long enough to let something or someone new into my life, just long enough for it or him or her to matter to me, just close enough so that if I were to lose it, it would really hurt. That's when the fear starts and rather than acknowledging the feeling and just letting it be and pass, I turn all of my attention to it. I bring all of my intellect to bear on ways to prevent the thing I fear from coming to pass. In so doing, ironically, I set in motion the very things most likely to cause the thing I fear to happen. I do this not because I want the thing to happen, I do this because I am convinced it will happen no matter what I do, so I make it happen under my control. Doing this creates for me the illusion that I have spared myself some pain. But I am so, so wrong.

Back to perspective. As I was saying, I was advised to take a step back and get a little perspective on what it is I have been doing. Here is what I see from a few feet back...the reason my behavior is so harmful is because it prevents me from living in and enjoying what I have in the present. I have a lot to be happy about right this very minute. Living in and accepting that all I have is this present moment has been a hard lesson for me to learn. Enjoying something is the very thing that triggers my need to control its loss. Problem is, to engage in that behavior is to assume it will be lost, then, acting on a potentially faulty assumption, set in motion the course to actually lose it. So dumb.

I am writing this to remind myself that this journey we have all undertaken on these boards is to save ourselves (and for some their marriages - no longer the case for me). It is so easy to start believing we are done working on ourselves. We are never done...there is always more we can do.

Thanks for reading this.

Veronica V.