Successful Change

Successful change requires more than getting rid of bad habits. In order for change to be successful, you have to replace your bad habits with different, more healthy habits.

When I was trying to get away from focusing my life on other people and living for them instead of living my own life, one of the hardest things to do was to figure out how to change my thought processes--what to replace my unhealthy thought patterns with. You do a lot of thinking over the course of a day--what was I supposed to think about instead of dwelling so much on my relationships? It took a lot of prayer and pondering and reading through my patriarchal blessing to find new things to focus on in my life that seemed meaningful.

As a parent, I find that I have much more success influencing my child’s behavior if instead of just telling him he can't do something, I tell him something he can do to replace the negative behavior. For example, if he's using a toy in a way that could damage something (like hitting the wall with it), I tell him other ways he can use the toy instead that would be more appropriate (such as hitting the couch or the bed). Or, instead of hitting his sister when she tries to take a toy he is using, I encourage him to say, “Gracie, please don't take my toy,” and then to pick up his toy and move away from her. Or, instead of hitting me when I explain that we have to leave a place and he wants to stay, using his words to express his feelings instead: “I am feeling upset that we have to leave.” This is still a work in progress (he usually hits me and then uses his words to tell me how he is feeling afterwards), but there are moments when I hear him tell a friend he is playing with that something they're doing is making him sad, or when he is trying to do something and says, “This is so frustrating” instead of screaming, that give me hope that the more I reinforce these healthier methods of handling difficult situations the more he will be able to replace his negative behaviors with more productive ones.

I recently discovered a habit I’ve formed that I think may not be serving me very well, but I haven't figured out what to replace it with yet. I’ve noticed that when I’m in a social situation and I feel anxious or threatened in some way, the coping method I usually use is to withdraw. I don't like competing for attention and will withdraw rather than asserting myself. Thinking back on past experiences when I have done this, I don't think it’s a habit that serves me very well. When I choose to withdraw, I put the full burden of me being involved in the social situation on others and feel insecure if they do not go out of their way to involve me, instead of taking responsibility for my own involvement or lack thereof. I also start interpreting the situation in my mind in ways that add to my feelings of insecurity: “I'm not involved because people don't care about me that much,” or “I’m not involved because I am lacking in some way.”

I’m wondering what healthier strategy I can use to replace my withdrawing strategy. Maybe I just need to dig down to what is triggering the initial feelings of anxiety--what exactly is making me feel threatened--so I can analyze if it's necessary for me to feel threatened. Usually being able to put what is triggering my emotions into words helps me take control of those emotions and debunk any false beliefs that may be lurking in my subconscious.

Honestly, the first step is probably just being able to recognize in the moment that I’m feeling threatened and to be cognizant of my normal reaction to that feeling so that I have the opportunity to consciously make a choice about how I want to react, rather than just letting my subconscious habits take over.

I think that is a worthy first goal for changing this habit: notice when I am tempted to withdraw, analyze the situation, and at least give myself the opportunity to choose to act in a different way instead. That will be my plan for now. I don't know yet what different choice I will make, but I will at least give myself an opportunity to make a different choice. Baby steps ;)

The Roots of My Dysfunction

I feel like you see the symptoms of your dysfunctions long before you are able to dig down to the real roots of those dysfunctions to weed them out. That's been my own personal experience anyway.

I’ve known for years that something was not right about the way I experienced certain relationships in my life--mostly my emotional responses to them, I guess--but I couldn't put my finger on what my dysfunction was. I could see the symptoms of it--the constant need for reassurance of love from the other person, the desperate desire to be with them every possible second of every day, the insecurity triggered by them having other people and experiences in their life that didn't involve me, etc., etc. I likened my feelings about these relationships to addiction on multiple occasions and knew this could not be a good sign. But I didn't know what I was doing wrong, and I didn't know how to change. I don't think I even knew I was supposed to change or that change was possible.

I knew my emotional experience was not “normal” or socially acceptable--I knew the word “needy” had very negative connotations and that needy people were generally spoken of with exasperation and contempt--so I tried to act normal and keep most of my crazy hidden inside. I tried to explain my feelings to myself in ways that put a positive spin on my experience rather than making me sound incredibly creepy and dysfunctional. After all, none of us likes feeling dysfunctional. I just loved people more intensely than your average person. That's not a bad thing, right? How can you love someone too much?

As long as I called the emotions I was experiencing “love” it was difficult to figure out where I was going wrong, since it's hard to argue that loving someone is a bad thing. But somewhere along the line my definition of love had gotten all tangled up with need and insecurity and control, and all those separate pieces had to be unraveled before I could clearly see what was love and what was dysfunction.

This work of recognizing my weaknesses, unraveling all the pieces, and reworking my definition of love began two years into a relationship with a close friend. When my friend was finally brave enough to communicate her feelings more honestly and set boundaries with me, I finally came face to face with the reality of how my weaknesses were affecting our relationship and how and why I needed to change.

Tracing my dysfunctional behaviors back to their roots was a long, slow, painful process. I was already so deep into the relationship and behaviors that I had to work backwards to figure out where they were coming from and what I needed to do differently. I was able to uncover some of the roots of my dysfunction, but some remained a mystery to me. I could clearly see the behaviors and emotions that were unproductive and work on changing those, but I wasn't sure what motivated me to begin them--why certain relationships triggered these behaviors and emotions for me and others did not.

Recently I made a new friend. As the friendship progressed, I started feeling the crazy coming on. None of my relationships had triggered it since the friendship that I had worked through a lot of my issues with. This time I was prepared to meet the crazy head on though. I was able to say, “Hello, old friend. Let's figure out who you are. If I can name you, you will have less power over me and I will be able to see clearly to unravel you before you start tangling me in your web of dysfunction.” And, after a lot of pondering on what may be triggering the crazy in this new relationship, I think I may have finally uncovered a couple more of the deep roots of my dysfunction.

Here is my hypothesis (and I reserve the right to modify it in the future, as needed, as future experiences make additional truths more clear to me): I think that when I am in a relationship with someone that I really like, but I don't feel like I am in a position of power in the relationship (for example, if I sense that the relationship may be more significant to me than it is to the other person), then as my love for that person grows, my fear of loss or rejection grows as well, in equal proportion. I think all of my dysfunctional behaviors are born out of this fear and the habits I’ve formed to try to cope with it.

When I start loving someone a lot, but I feel unsure if I’ll be able to keep them, and the more I love them the scarier not being able to keep them gets, I start feeling a panicked need to control the relationship somehow to make me feel safer in it. Basically, I start trying to control the other person and their feelings towards me in various ways to make sure they keep loving me and can't live without me. This leads to serving with strings attached (offering tons of self-sacrificing service in exchange for love and security in the relationship instead of setting reasonable boundaries for myself and letting the other person set their own reasonable boundaries), lots of over-the-top proclamations of praise and love for the other person, insecurity about all aspects of the other person’s life that don't involve me and are therefore out of my control, the need for constant reassurance of love from the other person to ensure that my strategy of controlling how they feel about me is succeeding, and a disproportionate sense of responsibility for the success or failure of the relationship overall since I am trying to control both sides of it instead of making my own choices and letting the other person make theirs, independent of me.

Recognizing where the feelings of panic and desperation that trigger my dysfunctional behaviors come from helps a lot in learning to manage those emotions in healthier ways. Since I already know from all my work in my other friendship that any control I think I have over the relationship is a complete illusion and that the strategies I use to try to control the relationship not only hurt the relationship but also make me feel more insecure rather than safer in the relationship (the complete opposite of what I’m trying to accomplish), it's pretty easy to conclude that trying to manage my fear by trying to control the relationship is a losing strategy on all sides and will not help me achieve a single one of my relationship goals. Having a personal testimony of that makes it a lot easier to choose to let go of the need for control, now that I know that's what I’m feeling, and relax and leave the other person free to make their own choices and be responsible for their own half of the relationship.

Realizing that I have no power to control the relationship or anyone else’s feelings about me is scary in some ways, but also very relieving in other ways. I don't have to hustle for my worthiness (that's a Brene Brown quote) because it won't do me any good anyway. Other people get to choose how they feel about me no matter what I do or don't do, so I may as well just be me and relieve myself of the burden of trying to take responsibility for others’ feelings about me. I can't be perfect, and even Jesus Christ, the only perfect person, was hated by a ton of people, hated so violently, in fact, that they put Him to death over it. Sheesh! You're never going to win the control how other people feel about you game, so it's just better not to try to play it.

So here's my goal, my new strategy going forward:

1) Accept that loving someone is a scary thing, and that's okay;

2) Respect and love other people enough to let them make the choices that are best for them rather than trying to control their feelings and choices to try to protect myself from loss and rejection; and

3) Self-validate rather than trying to use other people to validate me and my worthiness

Thanks for reading! Good luck to you all in uncovering the roots of your own dysfunctions ;)