Jo Ellen Fletcher, M.A., LMFT
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You Cannot Hate Yourself into Loving Yourself.

3/31/2016

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When I am tempted to be mean to myself,
here are a few things I remember:


1. The people you compare yourself to compare themselves to other people too.
We all compare ourselves to other people, and I can assure you that the people who seem to have it all do not.When you look at other people through a lens of compassion and understanding rather than judgment and jealousy, you are better able to see them for what they are—human beings.
They are beautifully imperfect human beings going through the same universal challenges that we all go through
.   

2. Your mind can be a very convincing liar. 
There is a quote that said, “Don’t believe everything you think.”
That quote completely altered the way I react when a cruel or discouraging thought goes through my mind. Thoughts are just thoughts, and it’s unhealthy and exhausting to give so much power to the negative ones.     

3. There is more right with you than wrong with you.

This powerful reminder is inspired by one of my favorite quotes from Jon Kabat-Zinn:
“Until you stop breathing, there’s more right with you than wrong with you.”
As someone who sometimes tends to zoom in on all my perceived flaws, it helps to remember that there are lots of things I like about myself too—like the fact that I’m alive and breathing and able to pave new paths whenever I choose.

4. You need love the most when you feel you deserve it the least. 
I find that it is most difficult to accept love and understanding from others when I’m in a state of anger, shame, anxiety, or depression. But adopting the above truth really shifted my perspective and
made me realize that love is actually the greatest gift I can receive during such times.  

5. You have to fully accept and make peace with the “now” before you can reach and feel satisfied with the “later.” 

One thing I’ve learned about making changes and reaching for the next rung on the ladder is that you cannot fully feel satisfied with where you’re going until you can accept, acknowledge, and appreciate where you are. Embrace and make peace with where you are, and your journey toward something new will feel much more peaceful, rewarding, and satisfying.



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Wanting is Seeking Elsewhere.

3/28/2016

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Wanting is the urge
for the next moment to contain
what this moment does not. 
When there is wanting in the mind
the moment feels incomplete.
 
Wanting is seeking elsewhere. 

Completeness is right here,    
right now. 

 I remember,
I won't be happy as long as I am
wishing for something else. 

I will not be satisfied with a relationship,
or with a friendship

if I am waiting for
the other person to change.
 

I loose my power
and give it away to them
to change my joy,
define my moments in life.

When I can do this myself.
As well, I loose the power
over the beauty of this moment,
this day.

When I accept
what I have
and what I am
and what I see,
in this moment,
I am fully alive. 

In this moment

I feel the joy of knowing
that it is all that there is right now. 

And that is o.k.
I can bring great peace and great joy
to my day

by being in each moment.



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Falling Out of Love

3/20/2016

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Here is something important to remember.

When your relationship seemingly comes to a halt: when you and your partner reach gridlock, neither of you can reduce anxiety through accommodation, and neither of you has any of the old kind of validation to offer the other. 

Truly validating your partner when you have reached gridlock means accepting that he or she is less likely to accommodate you---and you will have to confront yourself. 


At the point of gridlock your choices are limited.
1. Push your partner to violate himself/herself by accommodating you.
2. Turn yourself over to your partner by accommodating him/her.
3. Separate emotionally or physically or,
4. Confront yourself and become more differentiated.

Gridlocked couples experience themselves as "falling out of love."
Ironically the ability to love doesn't truly develop until the honeymoon is over and gridlock arrives.

Gridlock drives you closer to your own core
as it nudges you towards differentiation. 


And as you get more firsthand experience with your own essence, you become more accepting of everyone else, including your partner.











Passionate Marriage - Schnarch



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Feeling Stronger

3/15/2016

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Strength is often quiet, receptive determination rather than chest thumping pushiness.

Strength has two primary aspects:
energy & determination.

You can intensity these by quickening your breathing a little, or by tightening your shoulders slightly.
Ge familiar with the muscle movement---often subtler ones--- associated with strength.

Just as making the facial expression of an emotion will heighten that feeling, engaging the muscle movements of strength will increase your experience of it.

Get in the habit of deliberately calling up a sense of strength. 

Not to dominate anybody or anything, but to fuel your intentions. 

Involve the entire neuroaxis in order to power up your experience of strength.  For example, bring to mind a sense of visceral, muscular willingness to stimulate your brain stem to send norepinephrine and dopamine
like a rising fountain up into the rest of your brain
for arousal and drive. 

Bring the limbic system into the action by focusing on  how good it feels to be strong, so you will be increasingly drawn to strength. 

Add the power of cortical language by commenting on the experience to yourself. 


Add such a mantra to your language,
"I am feeling strong, It is good to feel strong."

When you are experiencing strength---whether you evoked it deliberately or it just came to mind---
take it in so it deepens its traces in conscious memory and becomes a part of you.







Buddhas Brain - Hanson






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Confronting & Changing Your Toxic Inner Voice

3/12/2016

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We either make ourselves miserable
or we make ourselves strong. 
The amount of work is the same.


The negative self talk is the internal dialogue that we call the "inner voice."  The inner voice has been described in different way.  It is like a set of parental recordings that are like tapes.  Internalized parental voices, become automatic thoughts.  Whatever we call them, all of us have some voice in our heads.  Shame based people especially have dominant negative shaming, self deprecating voices.

The "voice" may be described as the language of the insidious self destructive process existing, to various levels in every person. The voice represents an external point of view toward oneself initially derived from the parents' suppressed hostile feelings toward the child.

The "voice" may be experienced consciously as thought.  Most often it is partially conscious or totally unconscious.  Most of us are unaware of the habitual activity of the "voice." 

We become aware of it in certain stressful situations of exposure when our shame is activated.  After making a mistake one might call oneself a 'stupid fool.'  Or say, 'There I go again, I am such a blundering klutz.'


Actually getting rid of the "voice" is extremely difficult because of the original rupturing
of the interpersonal bridge and the resulting 'fantasy bond.' 

As children are abandoned, and the more severely they are abandoned (neglected, abused, enmeshed), the more they create the illusion of connection with the parent.  The illusion is what Robert Firestone calls the "fantasy bond."

In order to create the 'fantasy bond' the child has to idealize his parents and make himself bad.  The purpose of fantasy bonding is survival.  The child desperately relies on his parents.  They cannot be bad.  If they are bad or sick, then the child cannot survive. 

So the fantasy bond (which makes them good and the child bad) is like a mirage in the desert.  It give the child the illusion there is nourishment and support in his life.

Years later, when the child leaves the parent, the 'fantasy bond' is set up internally. 
It is maintained by the 'voice.' 


What was once external --- the parent's screaming, scolding, punishing voice, now becomes internal.  For this reason the process of confronting and changed the inner voice creates a great deal of anxiety. 

However, there is never any deep therapeutic change without anxiety.

Once you have identified and experienced 'the voice' you can challenge both the content and the dictates of the voice.  By consciously going against 'the voice',
by using positive mantras, and words like, "I deserve"
and letting go of the words, "I should."

We truly cannot give what we do not have ourselves. 
If we are shame based we cannot teach our children
to self value.










Healing the Shame that Binds You - John Bradshaw




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Marriage Naturally Stimulates Differentiation.

3/8/2016

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What make us feel loved, the illusion of fusion, destroys marriage, sex,
intimacy and love.


 The 1960s free-love ethic that

"it's unrealistic to expect one person to meet all of your needs" subtly reassures us that we can have everything we want (all we have to do is spread our needs around to several people, which is not how a two person marriage works). 

Decisions, commitments, friendships and integrity only become meaningful in a world of finite options.

The two choice dilemma, hitting gridlock as a couple, happens in most marriages. The tough question,
"Face the anxiety that things will change, or the anxiety in that things will stay the same."


Don't forfeit the 'taste of life' for anxiety.


Going through the trauma of maturing as a couple---differentiating as a couple---opens up the possibility that we may yet become adults.  Digesting and self soothing marriage's restrictions
ripen intimacy and eroticism.  Choosing between gut wrenching anxieties and options makes us more differentiated, more capable of truly loving. 


Such dilemmas, as the need for differentiation, comes from our human nature.  We are fundamentally separate life forms who value both attachment and autonomy. 
Walking together in life as partners and individuals relinquishing fusion which is
"togetherness and control."


Anxiety comes with differentiation. Anxiety is inherent to growth.  Sexual and otherwise.  It plays a productive and necessary role in sexual development and pleasure.  Sexual novelty always involves anxiety and ambiguity.  The real problem is our intolerance and fear of anxiety.   The long term solution, which doesn't kill sex, involves becoming more mature. 

That doesn't mean "keeping a stuff upper lip" but it does involve learning to self soothe.









Passionate Marriage - Schnarch

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Couples, Facing the Two-Choice Dilemma.

3/6/2016

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The illusion of many couples are that the must "be in the same boat." 

Once you realize that you and your partner are in
two separate "boats" you understand the nature of your dilemma: you want to steer your own boat---and your partner's too.

We call this "togetherness"---as long as you are steering for both of you.  When your partner does the same thing, however, it's called "control."  If you want both absolute certainty of your partner's course and certainty that you are not controlling him or her---you have run into a two choice dilemma.

Such dilemma's arise from our human nature: we are fundamentally separate life forms who value both attachment and autonomy. We have the fantasy that we have the choice between being anxious or not.  Unfortunately, we don't.

Our choice is between one anxiety or another.  Do something scary---or face problems form not doing it.  Make an error by commission---or by omission.  Do (sexual) things you have never done---or forfeit the taste of life. 
Face the anxiety of growing up---or the terror of facing life as a perpetual child.

Confront the fear of differentiation or the dread of marital living death.


You and your partner will probably face the two choice dilemma specific to your relationship at some point, if you have not already.  Dilemmas are part of the fabric of life---and thus part of your marriage.

When relationships hit gridlock, everyone wants two choices
.  The problem is you only get one at a time.  You make a choice and then your partner makes a choice.  That is when you encourage your partner to be reasonable so you really don't have to choose.
Expecting your partner to sacrifice for you in the name of love kills marriage, sex, intimacy, & love. 

What makes us feel loved---the illusion of fusion---destroys sexual desire and growth
. That is why if you are "normal" you marriage is an accident waiting to happen. 

The accident is "gridlock" ---which is no accident at all. 
Two-choice dilemmas are grindstone of differentiation. They are part of a system in which your partner's mere attempts to have a self, and that may puncture your narcissism.









Passionate Marriage - Schnarch
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Couples Gridlock

3/2/2016

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When you reach the inevitable point where you are unwilling to adapt to each other and unwilling to confront yourself, you are trapped in emotional gridlock.

The natural evolution of any emotionally committed relationship. There is nothing pathological involved.  You don't need to have anything "wrong" with you to hit "gridlock"---there is nothing going "wrong" when gridlock hits. 


It is part of a sequence created by the lack of differentiation that usually exists when we pick a partner: dependence on 'other-validated' intimacy, a reflected sense of self, and regulating anxiety through relationships.

So, what is the differentiation process? 

Typically is is martial problems caused by emotional fusion: sexual boredom, low sexual desire, lack of intimacy, fights about money, parents, in-laws---and where to spend the next vacation. 


The particulars of what triggers your differentiation are personal and custom-tailored to your past, present, and anticipated future.

The people-growing ecosystem in an emotionally committed relationship is amazingly circular: emotional fusion creates the "problem" that push us

to becomes sufficiently differentiated to
solve these dilemmas.






Passionate Marriage - Schnarch

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    Author:
    Jo Ellen Fletcher, M.A.
    Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist


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