The area that I live is rural and the pop of the surrounding towns is 3K or less... the largest city (about 125K) is an hour away...
But as they say, GAL is about doing things that are personally stimulating and enjoyable... so while I'd love to be a little more social, physically with people... I still get in "me time"...
Like you (Huh), I am a jack of all trades type with a very narrow and deep specialty... rarely is my true skills ever desirable locally... I really do love my local (home) region so living here and raising a family was important to me 10 years ago... still is, but my life is changing... maybe my mind should change, with it...
Choices... either I move to an area which will give me more success at finding work with my specialty, which will put me thousands of miles away from my children... or I look at career as my more generalized self-employ focus is really, really soft... every neighborhood kid can do the work I do... and they will do it for next to nothing... I prefer self employ... I'm good at it, too... but aside from last year's project... IDK... I need to investigate other streams if I have any hope to stay self employed... so maybe... a 20 year career prior to retirement age is something I will do... but I know how much commitment and resolve that would require from me...
I've done start ups on as little as $100... and they're generally decent returns... but they're also generally short term "projects", as markets get soft, quickly around here...
I'll look into the authors you mentioned above...
I wanted to touch lightly on my mom's alcoholism... the most recent blow out was tough and she really showed remorse... My understanding of people and now my DB work has me understanding that I should not have expectations... I'm working with my Dad on this, but he still falls back into the enabler role, always desperate to believe that "this time, maybe she means it... maybe she's changed..."
I never put my personal respect into that equation, but after reading your thread... I wonder if that is something for me to review...
I wonder if, you and I... we look to be only "good enough" and are not so focused on money... because of the alcoholism... we seek relationship (acknowledgment) in our work, rather than monetary gain... in my case, money was never a problem growing up... but I felt abandoned due to the alcoholism... and then combine that with a sense of unworthiness...
Your W's avoidance of your mom... did your W raised in an alcoholic environment...? Mine did... if not fully, certainly borderline... So together, we would mostly avoid alcohol abusive people and environments... until recently where my W seems to have become engaged in it more deeply... I don't know OM3 enough to know his use of alcohol, but I certainly see my W being much more of a user of alcohol... and my D13 appears (as initially pointed out by a close friend) to be showing signs of living in an alcohol centric environment...
At one point this summer, I picked up my kids for a weekend visit and popped over at a friend's place... they were having a bonfire and I had a couple drinks and according to my friend (also raised in an alcoholic family) indicated D13 had a concern that I was drinking... my friend indicated it was a reaction that she had as a child... anyhow, the point being is my friend figures that my D13 reacted that way because my W is taking the kids to parties where people, including my W, are getting very drunk or alternately (abandoning the kids) getting sitters or shipping the kids off so that W can go drinking...
Again, over analyzing for the purpose of DB... but just some thoughts of the effects...
In the end, DB is about the now and being solutions based and future oriented... but after that, there's always room (and sometimes motivation) to do regressive... to help understand the "why" and be prepared...
