Tag: wholeness

Why Do I Care What You Think?

Published on by Scott Williams5 Comments

We are a people who struggle with self-worth. I meet few people who are happy with who they are. We are the chronically under-valued and the terminally insecure. We have a tendency to look to other people for approval and live our lives in order to be loved. We tell our children to love themselves, but battle with self-loathing.

For years I considered myself a rebel, a person who lived outside the box, who didn’t give a damn about what others thought of him. Looking back it is easy to see how this was a coping mechanism, a way of finding acceptance, if only with myself, as a marginal personality who did not easily “play well with others”. If I couldn’t win at fitting in I would give the finger to the establishment and act as if their opinions did not matter. I gave the impression that I was vain, when in fact I was insecure.

I can see, now that I am getting older, the temptation within myself to act like a performance monkey. Seeking to fit in does not end after high school.  We have been programmed since birth to base our feelings of self-worth on what others think of us and what we do. For some reason we are extremely conscious of the opinions of those around us. Those people who choose to criticize us may, in point of fact, be idiots and subjective to the highest degree but this seems to matter very little. Jumping through the hoops of people who don’t even respect is what we do.

There was a time in my life when it seemed important that people liked me. I was running a non-profit and had shareholders who were strongly opinionated and often very negative. I was always available to help salve their broken lives and marriages, and they were always available to critique my performance. I remember vividly one meeting with a couple at a local coffee shop wherein they decided that I needed to be “fixed”. It was to be the last of several meetings, all designed to help me come to grips with my glowering flaws (in their opinion). Late in the conversation it finally dawned on me, I didn’t even really like or respect this couple. I knew their dirty little secrets, their insecurities, their propensity to be condescending and arrogant. I realized that if we did not have a shared vested interest I would never want to be their friend or hang out with them… ever. I had been emotionally prostituting myself in order to appease them – something that now seemed impossible to do. My fear of their disapproval and perhaps disengagement from the non-profit had created a sick codependence.

It is one thing to seek to be kind and a person of integrity. It is another thing altogether to base your self-worth on the opinions of fallible and fickle people whose opinions should not matter. Wholeness is found in the realization that I cannot jump through enough hoops, suck up to enough people, to fill that hole in my heart that wants to be loved. Chasing that dragon is like chasing any other addiction, it just leaves us broken.

Accepting who and what I am, right now, is a daunting and difficult task. Letting go of our need to make everyone happy feels completely wrong. If people had to accept us for who we are would anyone still like us?

In counseling I admonish single clients, often fresh out of dysfunctional relationships, not to date until they don’t need to. They usually look at me funny and I find it necessary to explain – don’t bring your garbage to your next relationship. Don’t use that next person to fill that hole in your heart. Don’t depend on someone else to make you whole or happy. Don’t date… until you don’t need that person to fix anything. Become emotionally self-contained. Work on becoming whole.

Sounds easy, doesn’t it?

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Dreams

Published on by Scott Williams19 Comments

The work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives and the Dreams shall never die.
~Edward Kennedy

As the Cooper brothers sang, “Dreams never die, just the dreamer”. Growing up, most of us had huge dreams and unrealistic expectations. We dreamed of being rock stars and rich tycoons. The world lay before us, our oyster as the cliché goes, and anything was possible.

Then reality kicked us between the legs and throat-punched some of our dreams.

If you’re anything like me, and I know I am, then you have realized that life has not always turned out the way you thought it would. I had no idea that I would be living and doing the things I am now. It’s not a bad life, it’s just a different one.

Time has a way of healing hurts, or so the cognitive distortion goes. It also has a way of killing dreams and shoving reality in your face. That storybook romance you signed up for has turned out, after a number of mind-numbing years, to be a series of boring and hurtful years with someone who does not understand you and never will. By now, if you are close to forty, you have a storehouse of trauma to deal with, or not deal with. The older you get the harder it is to be an optimist. We become realists about life, or pessimists, if we are honest enough to admit it. If you have ever found yourself almost yelling at a wedding, “Don’t do it!”, then I’m talking to you.

I have developed a theory which I call the “37 year itch”. This theory propounds that somewhere around the age of 37-45 women (and obviously some men) who are married or in a long-term relationship wake up one morning and look at the aging, snoring, drooling person beside them and realize that they do not want to spend the rest of their life waking up to this schmuck. The children are in school now, their career has been stunted, and the thought of forty more years with Mr. Entertainment is too much. You would be shocked at the number of marriages that end when the players are in their late thirties and early forties. A majority of these break-ups are initiated by the woman (in a heterosexual relationship… and obviously in a lesbian relationship…).

Dreams never die – if only it were so. Some of us become afraid to dream any more. Dreams can remind us of our failures, of opportunities lost, of hopes deferred.

It’s not too late to dream again. Your mature dreams may not involve superpowers or thirty-day orgasms, but they can still be amazing. Every time I hear of a fifty year old going back to university or a grandfather dating again I believe in dreams. Every time a woman has the guts to try again, or a person believes they can be whole again, I believe in dreams. Here’s to everyone who didn’t have the brains to stop while you were behind, who started something wonderful, who faced down their fears and rebuilt their world. Here’s to those of you who are too stupid to quit. It is a powerful thing when someone dares to hope.

Here’s to hope.

the-shawshank-redemption-1994-bluray-720p-x264-wiki19875022-11-05I love this quote from Shawshank Redemption. Red, the narrator, is finally released from prison after a lifetime of incarceration and decides to get on with living, ” I find I’m so excited, I can barely sit still or hold a thought in my head. I think it’s the excitement only a free man can feel, a free man at the start of a long journey whose conclusion is uncertain. I hope I can make it across the border. I hope to see my friend, and shake his hand. I hope the Pacific is as blue as it has been in my dreams. I hope.”

May you be free.

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