Disagree persuasively and respectfully.
Positively Purging-I welcome your feedbacks in the comments and your likes and passing the real life wisdom on to others as I embark on this new venture of “positively purging“, as I know each of these pieces represents something
When your living through a scary time, how can you stop those feelings from taking over? As a therapist, I have two sets of tools change strategies and acceptance strategies. They work even when you’re experiencing long-term uncertainty. Tools for change are things like taking care of yourself, exercising, trying to stay connected to friends and family and maintaining any amount of structure and joy and satisfaction that you can. At the same time, there’s acceptance, which is not the same as resignation. Acceptance is acknowledging that a situation is what it is and giving yourself permission to struggle, to meet a challenging time as best you can and forgive yourself for any shortcomings without judgement. To use a specific example, say I’m working with someone wo has a fear of public speaking. I would tell them, “You’re not going to make the anxiety go away before you get up and speak to this group. You are going to feel the anxiety and get up and talk. That is true acceptance: to feel the anxiety and do what you need to do anyway to live as best you can along with the negative emotions. -Ellen Hendriksen
Every year, I send my adult daughter a check for her birthday and Christmas. She told me she prefers cash to other gifts. But she never, ever acknowledges them or thanks me. This has been going on for years! I only know if she gets them by checking my bank account. I asked her to text me a few years ago. It helped for a while, then she stopped. I’m on a tight budget, so these checks are a sacrifice. And her silence hurts me. Should I stop sending the checks if she can’t be bothered to thank me? Or maybe just send a card? I don’t want to irritate her, but I raised her better than this.CATHERINE
I have always been told when “We give gifts out of love; we should not expect to be thanked.” I appreciated how Galen dug deeper into this question by asking, “Why does this happen?” I agree with his theory “If a parent (or uncle or grandmother) sends a gift, year after year, without any acknowledgment from the recipient, maybe the recipient doesn’t experience it as a gift. Maybe your daughter and the others see these presents as their entitlement, like stock dividends or Social Security checks. The fact that the gifts keep coming, without further action, supports their belief.” I also agree that mom should highlight the voluntary nature of the checks to her adult daughter (And skip the guilt trip about how you raised her.) Tell her you’re glad to make room for gifts in your budget because you love her, but her failure to thank you hurts your feelings. Then ask her to be more thoughtful. If she still can’t, trade the checks for greeting cards.
Good morning. How are we feeling? Take a deep breath. Close your eyes. Exhale. Go slow. That was a lot that we all went through. But now it’s time to look ahead.
It’s okay to open your eyes. It’s okay to look around. There is so much to see. Don’t worry about all that there is to do. There will be time for the to do’s. Today, just look around. Take it all in. See what you see. Look for what you’ve never seen before. Open your eyes and then share this one simple new observation with yourself. Good for you. Smile. Breathe. Carry on. -Maria
