If you have missed previous parts, please drop down the page and click on the blog archives on the right…Thank You!
We are human beings. We like to have fun. We love to be pleased. We love pleasing others…in every way imaginable. And all of the things we choose to do come from our experience, our comfort zone, our individual map of what is good to do and what is not so good to do. We sometimes look outside our comfort zone, and even allow others to take us outside our comfort zones. But we live 99% of our lives within the parameters we have learned previously. Much of what we do we do not even think about! The routines of our everyday lives are automatic. We wake at the same time each day. We have the same things for each meal. We are on autopilot, even in our interactions with others. And most of the time, this serves us well, giving us no reason to do anything different.
Then what happens to our lives when the comfort zones that have been built in our minds begin to not work so well? The decisions we had been making without thinking very much are no longer getting us the desired results, and we don’t even see the impact on those around us. There is stress at home, with the spouse and with the kids. There is stress at the office. There are missed commitments. There are missed or cancelled appointments. We are not on our “A” game, and those who we are closest to can see it. They may even, usually after some period of time, mention something to us, and we tell them that they are imagining things. So we keep on doing the same things, and the list of things that are no longer working is getting longer. And then we begin to notice some things going not so well. And we take notice and fix things for a day, or two, or three, and then we are right back walking the destructive path.
How do I know? I lived it! And I lived it with the people I loved most, my wife and kids, for the better part of 17 years. For most of that time, I swore that it was not me that had changed, but everyone around me. Logic should tell us that when many people notice that things are not right, it is us who need to adjust, but we are in serious denial because we are living off of our map, and it has been right all of this time, right? Instead of using the shovel to fill in the holes in our life, we just keep digging, and the hole gets bigger. And one day it gets so big that everything we know just vanishes into it!
What do we expect when our loved ones are telling us that we need help and we deny that we do and redirect that THEY are the problem? Why would sane people continue to live in a world that gets more chaotic each and every day? After some time, they don’t. They get it, and they see that leaving is the only sane alternative. And with them, they take our comfort zone, the day-to-day life that we were mostly enjoying and had become used to, even the chaos! What are we to do???
There are several options…some of which might lead us to a better place…some might just continue the nightmare. The bottom line is that we need to take a long, hard look into the person in the mirror and answer some really tough questions. And that is where we will go next time…with my sharing the steps that I had to take to figure things out!
Until Next Time!
Julius
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