Growing up in a difficult family or living in a difficult family inevitably produces negative consequences of all sorts. These are on top of the other challenges you face — challenges around life purpose and meaning, making a living and paying the bills, getting ill, falling out of love, making mistakes and disappointing yourself, and more.
Here are twelve tips that may prove valuable. I hope that they serve you!
1. Accept Being Human
Human beings experience emotional distress in all sorts of ways: as sadness, anxiety, addictions, unproductive obsessions, unwanted compulsions, repetitive self-sabotaging behaviors, physical ailments, conflicts of conscience, despair, boredom, and angry, bleak, and agitated moods.
Can you accept this? When distress returns, can you stand unsurprised and, instead of blaming the universe, shrinking from the moment, or throwing up your hands, say, “I am a human being. I am nothing but human! Now, let me do what I can to gather myself and make myself proud.”
2. Acknowledge the Constraints of Personality
Our personality is at once a pressure cooker and a windowless room. It sends our mind racing, it builds up grievances, it chooses sides, it frightens itself, it experiences disappointment and loss, it maintains dark secrets, it gets violently aggrieved, it wants what it wants, and it knows how to hate at least as well as it knows how to love.
Yet what it does and how it operates seem not to interest its owner. It is as if we are born with one genetic instruction before all others: “Never look in the mirror!” Your personality is your responsibility, and your personality is your destiny. Only you can improve it.
3. Be Yourself
You must improve yourself — but you must also be yourself. This means asking for what you want, setting boundaries, having your own beliefs and opinions, standing up for your values, wearing the clothes you want to wear, eating the food you want to eat, saying the things you want to say, and in countless other ways being you and not somebody small or false.
This doesn’t mean denying the importance of others — of individuals, communities, or civil society. Rather, it means that if you are gay, you are gay; if you are smart, you are smart; if you require freedom, you demand freedom. Make use of your available personality to upgrade your formed personality.
4. Invent Yourself
You come with attributes, capacities, and proclivities, and you are molded in a certain environment. Your personality forms, and you tend to repeat behaviors that don’t serve you. But at some point you must say, “Okay, whatever is original to me — whether it’s an extra dose of sadness, a bit too much sensitivity, or something else — and however I’ve been formed — to shrink, to fantasize, something else — now who do I want to be?”
You reduce your emotional distress by deciding to become a person who will experience less emotional distress: a calmer person, a less critical person, a less egoistic person, a more productive person, or a less self-abusive person. You make the clear, conscious decision that, no matter how tightly wound you may be, you will make use of your available personality and your remaining freedom in the service of your life-purpose choices and your other important intentions.
5. Love and be Loved
Part of our nature requires solitude and a substantial rugged individualism. But this isn’t the whole of our nature. We feel happier, warmer, and just much better, we live longer, and we experience life as more meaningful if we love and let ourselves be loved. We must be individuals, but we must also relate to other people.
To do both requires that we acknowledge the reality of others, that we not only speak but also listen, and that we make ourselves fit for relationships by eliminating our worst faults and growing up. If you withhold, if you lead with criticism, if you can’t get over yourself — whatever you do that harms your chances at love, make remedying that one of your primary life purposes.
6. Get a Grip on Your Mind
Nothing causes more emotional distress than the thoughts we think. We must work at identifying the thoughts that don’t serve us, disputing them and demanding that they go away, and substituting more useful thoughts. Only you can get a grip on your own mind: if you won’t do that work, you will live in distress.
Do you think you are ruined? That thought will ruin you. Think you are unworthy? That thought will diminish you. Think the world is a cheat? That thought will disempower you. Your distress is not only held firmly in place by the thoughts that you think, but it also is those thoughts.
Imagine a day without inner commentary about everything that is hard, everything that is scary, and everything that is wrong. Wouldn’t that be a better day?
7. Heal the Past
We are not so completely in control of our mind, our emotions, or our being that we can always prevent old sore points and the residue of trauma from returning with a vengeance. They have a way of pestering us as anxious sweats, nightmares, sudden sadness, and waves of anger or defeat. They remain not only as memory but as personality as well, woven into our fabric. But we can nevertheless try to heal the past by thinking through how we want to relate to these deep memories.
What will you do when you are struck by a flashback? What tactics will you employ when you well up with rage or regret? From what reserve will you call up the energy to move through the pain? Healing is not a metaphor: it is a call to action.
8. Flip Off the Anxiety Switch
Anxiety can ruin our equilibrium, darken our mood, and make all the challenging tasks of living that much harder. There are many anxiety management strategies you might want to try — including breathing techniques, cognitive techniques, and relaxation techniques — but the most effective thing you can do is locate that inner switch that controls your anxious nature and flip it to the “off” position. With that one gesture you announce that you will no longer overdramatize, no longer catastrophize, no longer live a fearful life or create unnecessary anxiety for yourself.
Anxiety is part of our warning system against danger. By flipping the switch inside you that controls it, you declare that you will not live under siege and under threat. Threats will remain and return, but flooding the chemicals of anxiety through your system is not a helpful way to meet those threats. Being calm is better.
9. Make Meaning
It’s important that we realize that meaning is a psychological experience and that by identifying and adopting strong life purposes we help ourselves create those psychological experiences, causing life to feel meaningful. We have probably never thought through our personal requirements for determining meaning. We can have much more meaning in our life if we stop looking for it, as if it were lost or as if someone else knew more about it than we did, and realize that it is in our power to determine meaning for ourselves.
By making daily meaning investments and by seizing daily meaning opportunities, we hold meaning crises at bay and experience life as meaningful. Meaning problems produce severe emotional distress, and learning the art of making meaning, according to our values, dramatically reduces that distress.
10. Focus on Life Purpose and Meaning and Not on Mood
You can decide that the meaning you hope to make and the life purposes you intend to manifest are more important to you than the mood you happen to find yourself in. Rather than saying, “I’m blue today,” you say, “I have my business to build,” “I have my novel to write,” or “I have my personality to upgrade.”
You start each day by announcing to yourself exactly how you intend to make meaning on that day, how you intend to deal with your routine chores and tasks, how you intend to relax — how, in short, you mean to spend your day — and you consider all of that, the rich and the mundane alike, as the project of your life, one that you are living with grace and in good spirits. You reduce your emotional distress by focusing more on your intentions and less on your mood.
11. Upgrade Your Personality
You may not yet be the person you would like to be or the person you need to be in order to reduce your emotional distress. You may be angrier than you would like to be, more impulsive, more scattered, more self-sabotaging, more undisciplined, more frightened. If so, you require a personality upgrade, which of course only you can undertake.
You embark on this upgrade by choosing a feature of your personality that you would like to upgrade and then asking yourself, “What sorts of thoughts and what sorts of actions align with this upgrade intention?” Then you think the appropriate thoughts and take the necessary action. In this way you become the person you would like to be, someone actually capable of reducing your emotional distress.
12. Deal with Your Circumstances
Would you experience more distress relaxing at the beach or enduring a long jail sentence? Would you experience more distress if you hated going to work or loved going to work? Our circumstances matter to us: our economic circumstances, our relationships, our work conditions, our health, whether our nation is at peace or occupied by invaders.
Many circumstances are completely out of our control, but many are within our control. We can change jobs or careers, we can divorce, we can reduce our calorie intake, we can choose to stand up or keep quiet. As a result of these improvements, we will likely feel emotionally better. Reducing our emotional distress requires taking real action in the real world.
Emotional health and pain-free living are not the same things. You can be as emotionally healthy as a person can be and still reel from the pain of losing a loved one, judging your occupation meaningless, or finding your intimate relationship falling apart. You can still have real troubles every single day accepting your mortality, dealing with your lack of income, or tolerating your chronic pain. We must not judge emotional health by the amount of pain a person experiences. A moral, mental, and emotional giant may still be plagued by sadness.
What is emotional health, then, if it isn’t the absence of pain? It is a kind of vibrant wisdom, a dynamic executive awareness coupled with a powerful resistance to humbug with a bit of philosophical wryness thrown in, a vibrant wisdom where you acknowledge your human nature and the facts of existence, see your life as your loving and deserving project, and live according to your life purposes, making meaning according to your values. You are completely in the fray and just enough above the fray to see what it is all about.
Does pain still come? Of course it does. You haven’t learned how to walk on water — what you have learned is how to walk on fire. This wisdom will help you — and it will help your family too!
©2017 by Eric Maisel. All Rights Reserved.
Reprinted with permission of New World Library, Novato, CA.
www.newworldlibrary.com or 800-972-6657 ext. 52.
Article Source
Overcoming Your Difficult Family: 8 Skills for Thriving in Any Family Situation
by Eric Maisel, Ph.D.
The book serves as a unique “field guide” to common types of dysfunctional families — authoritarian families, anxious families, addicted families, and more — and how to thrive despite those dynamics. You’ll learn to maintain inner peace in the midst of family chaos and create a better life for your whole family.
Click here for more info and/or to order this book on Amazon.
About the Author
Eric Maisel, PhD, is the author of more than forty works of fiction and nonfiction. His nonfiction titles include Coaching the Artist Within, Fearless Creating, The Van Gogh Blues, The Creativity Book, Performance Anxiety, and Ten Zen Seconds. He writes the "Rethinking Psychology" column for Psychology Today and contributes pieces on mental health to the Huffington Post. He is a creativity coach and creativity coach trainer who presents keynote addresses and life purpose boot camp workshops nationally and internationally. Visit www.ericmaisel.com to learn more about Dr. Maisel.
Watch a video with Eric: How to Make a Meaningful Day
Watch an Interview with author, Eric Maisel
