The Fear of Failure

Apr 29, 2018 | Blog, divorce, fear, Kristen

Failure, what a weird, small word that packs a powerful punch to the gut. I mean a sucker punch to the gut that knocks us completely off our feet. When we want to try something, but worry about ‘what if it fails”…and we are completely crushed. We can’t move, can’t get out of bed, don’t know what to do next. I don’t know about your gut, but my gut hates thinking about failure, or really the fear of failure. I’m thinking about this because I have started thinking about taking this journey towards being in private practice now that we have been open for one year. I am facing some fears most of us face when we are in any profession or relationship. We may fall flat on our face, but many of us, don’t think that we could also fear success, that we might not fail, or maybe someday I might fail when I’m entrenched in my profession. Failing doesn’t mean I am not worthy of being treated with respect, or that I am not valuable. Failure simply means, I am in a place to learn and grow from this experience. Thinking about it in those terms does not come easy, especially when it feels like I am going to DIE in those moments. You have thoughts of, “WHAT? You expect me to, what?? Learn? I am only trying to make it to the next hour today.” I am here to say, yes, but it is a process. A process of being willing to look into that abyss of fear and failure and still having the courage to take that leap (A GIANT LEAP), knowing that there is actually a bottom to the abyss. The courage it takes to make that leap is not something anyone else can tell us about or something anyone else can do for us. Sometimes we are so crippled, we can’t even get to the edge of that cliff to make the leap beyond fear.

What we can do for each other is support one another through that process and ask the questions that we are either afraid to ask, or don’t even see. For example, we might be at a fork in the road about whether to take a job or not, whether to leave our spouse or not, whether to leave/stay in a profession. Questions in those moments can be, which way seems easy in the moment? “If I just divorce my spouse, I’ll be happy, we’ll be happy,” “if I just get a different job, I’ll be happy,” “if I just don’t drink and drive, I will be happy.” These thoughts may be what is needed, but what if it’s fear holding us back from taking that leap to where I can be happy in my marriage, I can be happy in my job, I can be happy with myself? All of these questions swirl around the abyss, keeping us from seeing the bottom and how far our fall may actually be if we don’t reach the other side. The harder in the moment decisions are the ones that require work put into ourselves, into our relationships, into our jobs, requiring courage to take that leap across (and yes, I am talking about a leap across a black abyss we can’t see the bottom of yet).

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Man, oh man, how we wish someone could just tell us what to do in those moments, but the reward for making that decision on our own gives part of that inner feeling of peace, meaning our gut is no longer churning, that sucker punch doesn’t keep us from breathing, and we can see the bottom of that abyss, even if our world is crumbling around us. We can overcome that fear. It doesn’t always happen alone. Sometimes we need help to see through the fog of questions to see what is really going on, but once we do, the view is amazing and we are not necessarily no longer scared, but we are ready to take the leap across, and sometimes we find that the fall isn’t as far as we feared and we can breathe again, we can stand again, we can move, we can leap.

How about you? Are you ready to take that leap? Do you want peace in your marriage? Do you want peace with yourself? If so, what would happen if you braved the fear of failure? Took that leap? Remember, it doesn’t have to be done alone. Call if you would like help through the process.

The Benefactor Of Forgiveness

Apr 4, 2018 | divorce, faith-based living, forgiveness, grace, Uncategorized

I just settled in with my favorite…Wild Mountain Blueberry coffee…and it’s time to chat with you all again today, about forgiveness. I want to talk about the true benefactor of forgiveness. Who really benefits when we go about the business of forgiving someone?

It is widely thought that forgiveness is for the offender. If I’ve wronged you, I need you to forgive me in order for me to feel OK again. While receiving forgiveness from someone can go a long way toward repairing damage in a relationship, it is not necessary for healing in either direction, because each person has the ability within themselves to heal with or without it. The relationship may not be able to heal, but each person can.

What about the other side of that coin? How does forgiveness heal the forgiver? I think of it like having one of those huge grappling hooks that climbers use stuck into the middle of my chest. The end of the hook is piercing my heart. Forgiveness is the process of removing the hook, and it involves a lot of grieving. If I refuse to undergo this process, if I refuse to forgive the person who wronged me, I am agreeing to let the painful hook stay put in my heart. Then all anyone has to do to hurt me again and again is give a little tug on the rope and I’m instantly screaming in pain.

If I undergo the process of forgiving, and remove the hook from my heart, I am no longer attached to the pain or trauma that caused the hook to be there in the first place. I have released it, or let it go. Sounds wonderful, and like a much better way to live, but yet it is very hard to do. Why? Why do we want to hold on to these painful hooks in our heart?

I believe that the answer many times is because we equate saying “I forgive you” with saying “What you did was OK.” We learn that when we’re kids, don’t we? And if the offense is truly minor, like spilled milk, the effects of the offense really aren’t that dire. We can honestly say, “It’s OK.” But what if the effects of the offense ARE dire? In fact, what if they are so devastating that we will never be able to say to the person who hurt us, “That’s OK.” If we equate saying “I forgive you” to saying “It’s OK” and what happened means we will never be OK ever again, (for example perhaps the offense meant the death of a loved one) then we can’t forgive.

The truth is, you can unhook your heart from the pain without saying “It’s OK.” Those two phrases aren’t equal at all. In fact, you can say, “I forgive you, what you did is not OK, and I still want you to have the natural consequences for your actions.” All of that can be true at the same time. Grace in this way has the opportunity to stop a cycle of revenge and wrongdoing, and correct a humble heart. It may not save a relationship, but it can save a soul, or two, from all kinds of suffering.

There Is No Substitute

Jun 15, 2014 | Blog, divorce, grace, making changes, Uncategorized

What a beautiful morning! There is a bird singing outside my window and the sunrise was breathtaking. While it is not my norm, I am more of a night owl, I woke up early this morning and couldn’t go back to sleep, so I thought I’d blog awhile. The subject I want to tackle today is of vital importance to not only successful therapy, but is, in my mind at least, vital to a successful life. And for this amazing thing, there is no substitute and no faking, you have to have the real thing.
So what is this magical stuff? It is one of the simplest things to understand, yet one of the most difficult things to actually pull off. It is humility. Why, you may be asking, is humility of all things the most important thing when it comes to life and relationships? Humility seems like it would be for cowards and wimps, right? If I lower myself, I’m beneath everyone else and that’s a bad place to be, right?

I love to find the wisdom in paradoxes. As is many times the case, particularly in relationships, the way up is down. The way to a fulfilling, vibrant, and connected relationship is not to be the loudest and most insistent that you get your needs met, or that you know what the problem is with your partner. Almost everyone tries it, but alas, it doesn’t work. The real key to having a safe, intimate, and caring relationship is to humble yourself, and ask the question “How can I grow and change so I stop hurting you?”

When I have two people on my couch asking this humble question, amazing and beautiful things happen. (Even one person will do, to make some positive changes…if your spouse won’t come, don’t let it stop you from making an appointment for yourself.) It is breath-taking to behold when this kind of humility happens, like watching a lovely flower bloom. Couples become therapy buddies and work together to build a strong and vibrant relationship.
Do your marriage, your family, and yourself a favor. Don’t wait until your relationship is hurting so badly that you can’t find your humility beneath the anger and reactivity. If you’re relationship is suffering from pride, as most are if there is a lot of conflict, come in before it’s too difficult to find the humility to ask the question “How can I grow and change to stop hurting you?” When both partners approach therapy this way, the prognosis for a full recovery is good. When partners are pointing their fingers at each other, saying “He/she needs to change this so we can be happy…”, we’ll have some hard work to do to change each partner’s focus before we get down to the business of healing.

I wish you all the best in finding the courage to be humble. It’s not for wimps. It does, however, breathe life into a hurting relationship. Thanks for reading!

Nancy Eisenman, MSW is an individual, marital, and family therapist. She specializes in couples and marriage counseling, individual counseling, group and family counseling. Nancy serves the surrounding areas of Carmel, Westfield, Zionsville, Fishers, and Noblesville. E-Counseling available for residents of Indiana.



Nancy Eisenman, MSW, LCSW is a therapist at Peace Counseling Group, serving the greater Indianapolis area. Surrounding communities include Carmel, Westfield, Fishers, Geist, Noblesville, Brownsburg, and Avon. For more information, please use the contact form or call Nancy directly at 317.605.7015.

Address: 9640 Commerce Drive
Suite 413 Carmel, IN 46032

Phone: 317.605.7015

Email:

nancy@peacecounselinggroup.com

Peace Counseling Group

Contact Me

What’s So Amazing About Grace?

May 5, 2012 | anxiety, Blog, boundaries, codependency, cut-off, divorce, enmeshment, faith-based living, forgiveness, grace, shame, Uncategorized

What’s So Amazing About Grace? is actually the name of a book authored by Philip Yancey. Back when I was going through my divorce a few years ago, it was extremely important to me to be able to leave it without any leftover resentment or anger. I didn’t want any residual bitterness or unforgiveness to continue hurting my heart. To that end, I did an intensive study on grace and forgiveness, including reading Yancey’s book, among several others. I think that grace and forgiveness are important concepts to understand when working on presenting concerns in therapy practices such as anger management, codependency, and anxiety. One of the things I liked best in Yancey’s book was this list of qualities of forgiveness. He states that forgiveness:

Halts the cycle of blame and pain.
Loosens the stronghold of guilt in the perpetrator.
Allows the possibility of transformation in the guilty party.
Is not the same as pardon…you may forgive the one that wronged you and still insist on a just punishment for that wrong. If you can bring yourself to the point of forgiveness, though, you will release its healing power both in you and in the person who wronged you.
Has it’s own extraordinary power which reaches beyond law and beyond justice.
Places the forgiver on the same side as the party who did the wrong. p. 103

The simplest way I can think of to define grace is ”forgiving someone who doesn’t deserve it.” Forgiving someone who deserves it is easy; they are sorry, repentent, their heart has turned, and you can sincerely believe them when they say that they will not do it again. Forgiving someone who doesn’t deserve it is extremely difficult. They are not asking for forgiveness, they may not care that they hurt you or may be straight-up oblivious, or they may be justifying their hurtful actions. You may even know quite well that, given the chance, they would make the same decision to hurt you again.

The difficulty in forgiving someone who doesn’t deserve it comes with the message we think we’re sending to the other person if we forgive them. We think we’re saying “it’s OK what you did” and even further, “go ahead and do it again.” Um, NO! What they did was absolutely NOT OK, and it is absolutely NOT OK for them to do it again! Continuing in this mindset that forgiveness equals saying it’s OK will keep anyone from forgiving. The truth is: Grace is a paradox. It requires that I get on the side of my enemy, not by defending their actions, but by defending their humanity. The attitude we have sometimes is “Forgive and the atrocities will repeat themselves.” But the opposite is true. Don’t forgive, and they will repeat themselves.

Other things that may keep us from forgiving is the notion that we are giving up our right to “get even.” If we forgive, we don’t get to pass judgment or inflict retribution. This is a black and white over-reaction where we see the other person as “all bad.” That’s cut-off (a.k.a. negative enmeshment). We may think that if we seek just consequences for someone who has hurt us that we haven’t truly forgiven.

As Yancey says though, this is a myth. Forgiveness does not equal pardon. We can still have rock solid boundaries with someone who has hurt us. That may even include a “geographical boundary” as Cloud and Townsend would say in their book Boundaries, because that person who hurt you is unsafe. We can say “what you have done is not OK, I will have a different relationship with you from now on with good boundaries, but I can forgive you in my heart so that I do not keep the negative connection with you alive in me.” Can I respond to this event by not accepting the painful behavior, perhaps even requiring just consequences; but also by not denying the humanity of the other person?

In any relationship…in a couple, between friends, with co-workers, in families…anywhere, hurts are inevitable. We are imperfect folks, and we will hurt others and they will hurt us. What we do with those hurts is what counts. When you hurt someone, can you humble yourself and apologize, or do you need to justify what you did? Deep shame feelings may cause people to be unable to admit they’ve hurt someone. Do you care for others’ feelings, or trample them to your own end? When someone hurts you, can you forgive them? Do you need to have a good boundary with them…meaning, can you protect and insulate yourself from them without attacking their worth has a human being? If you can’t bring yourself to forgive, ask yourself what the payoff is. What do I think I have to give up in order to forgive?

Check out Phillip Yancey’s book, What’s So Amazing About Grace?. It really helped me let go of resentment and bitterness years ago, and is still doing so today. The world has recently given me several huge opportunities to forgive people who’ve hurt me badly and not asked for forgiveness. I will be having strong boundaries with them, but I’ve also chosen to see them through the eyes of grace, because I want to be forgiven when I screw up too…and oh, honey…I do, holy cow. I try very hard to give what I want to receive, and treat others the way I want to be treated. The peace in my heart that comes from letting the negative connection go (lack of anger and anxiety) and developing good boundaries (no more codependency) is always worth the effort.

Thanks for stopping by. I’ll close up with a quote from What’s So Amazing About Grace…

“The world thirsts for grace. When grace descends, the world falls silent before it.” ~Philip Yancey

Nancy Eisenman, MSW, LSW is an individual, marital, and family therapist. She specializes in couples and marriage counseling, individual counseling, group and family counseling. Nancy serves the surrounding areas of Carmel, Westfield, Zionsville, Fishers, and Noblesville. E-Counseling available for residents of Indiana.



Nancy Eisenman, MSW, LCSW is a therapist at Peace Counseling Group, serving the greater Indianapolis area. Surrounding communities include Carmel, Westfield, Fishers, Geist, Noblesville, Brownsburg, and Avon. For more information, please use the contact form or call Nancy directly at 317.605.7015.

Address: 9640 Commerce Drive
Suite 413 Carmel, IN 46032

Phone: 317.605.7015

Email:

nancy@peacecounselinggroup.com

Peace Counseling Group

Contact Me

I’m The One! (or How to Stop Fighting)

Mar 28, 2011 | Blog, codependency, counterdependency, cut-off, divorce, respect, Uncategorized

A couple of months ago, I went to a therapist training seminar for Imago Relationship Therapy. This is the theory proposed by Harville Hendrix in his books “Getting the Love You Want”, “Keeping the Love You Find,” “Receiving Love,” and “Giving the Love They Need”. They are good reads…I totally recommend them. I had the pleasure of hearing lectures from Dr. Hendrix himself for one of the days of the seminar. He said something that resonated with me, and I thought I’d share.

Dr. Hendrix was discussing how in the womb we are connected, to our mothers and the universe. Then that connection is severed. We are born without any psychological walls into an imperfect world. We then learn, from our first experiences in this world, to disconnect with others….that everyone is here to serve us! We cry and we’re changed, cuddled, fed, burped, or whatever. Our every need is met by someone else, and for the most part, pretty promptly! We learn to see others as objects to meet our needs. We learn to be self-centered. We learn that it’s our world, and everyone else just lives in it…to serve us! We learn to objectify people instead of connect with them.

Through adolescence, we start to take care of ourselves some, but as little as we can get away with, usually. Eventually, we may learn to take pretty good care of our physical needs. Some of us even become very other-centered in our actions; but, are we really selfless? Even being other-centered many times has selfish motives underneath: we want to be loved, accepted, looked-up to, good enough for God, etc. Many people stay quite openly self-centered throughout their lives, too. We see others as objects, there to meet our needs.

This happens in particular in our marriages. We find someone who matches the (usually worst) characteristics of our primary caregivers growing up, someone who will be specifically ill-equipped to meet our deepest needs, and then we try to squeeze blood from the proverbial turnip. Deep down, we really haven’t given up the idea that the other person’s mission in life should be to meet our needs. That’s why we get married, right? “Now we’re together, so start coughing-up the need-meeting!” We also believe that after 20-30-40-50 some years on this planet, that we have the absolute truth, and best way to live, figured out. How I see the world is the right way to see it!

Dr. Hendrix described this attitude like this, he said married couples see each other as if “You and I are one, and I’m the one!” Isn’t it the truth! After all, I know who my lover is down deep, how he/she should act, how they should meet my needs, how they feel about me, and the best way for us to live together….”WHY CAN’T HE/SHE JUST SEE THAT I’M RIGHT?!!” Come on, you’ve said that one, at least in your head, admit it. “If he would just do this for me…” “If she would just…then I would be happy, and our lives would be great.” Right? Now let me ask you this…what would happen if you were to say…”If I would just…”? Think about that one for a minute. (You are the only one you can control anyway.)

Have you ever answered a question about how your spouse thinks or feels and been dead wrong? That’s because we project what we believe onto our spouses, sure that we are right, and they look at us like we have no idea who they are. We all do it, until we learn otherwise. Being able to realize that there are TWO people in the relationship, each with different world views, and developing a healthy curiosity about our spouse’s world/reality is the first step out of fighting hell. Fighting is really about going to war over which one of your world-views is going to win out as “the way we do things in our family.” I’m the one, so we do things how I want, and we meet MY needs! Get with the program, lover! We are all still two-years-old when we act like this. If you are not collaborative with your spouse, and instead attempt to annihilate their world-view to conform to yours, you will succeed in living in fighting hell until you kill your marriage/relationship.

Being able to accept that the other person has a different world view than you do is essential, as is defending it as valid. (Yes, defend THEIR world view as valid! Try that one on for size.) You probably don’t know them as well as you think. Find out. Be curious about them. Avoid negativity like the plague. Invite them to share how they REALLY think with you. Be open. Be vulnerable. It’s not easy. Digging in our defenses will not create changes in our relationships. It will pour cement over things the way they are. It’s a paradox. Acceptance and curiosity will invite collaboration, safety, love, connection, AND changes. Sounds good, doesn’t it? It is. Give it a try.

I could go on and on about this (I already have)…but I’ll stop here for today. Try being curious next time you’re about to fight with your lover. See what their world view is all about. After they pick their jaw up’n off the ground, you will have a MUCH more productive chat! They may even be curious about your point of view. Wouldn’t that be something! Who’s going to be the one to drop their defenses and be vulnerable first? Can you say, “I’m the one?”

Thanks for stopping by. Have a great week!