Who’s Responsible for My Feelings?Written by Margaret Paul, Ph.D.
The following article is offered for free use in your ezine, print publication or on your web site, so long as author resource box at end is included. Notification of publication would be appreciated.Title: Who’s Responsible for My Feelings? Author: Margaret Paul, Ph.D. E-mail: mailto:margaret@innerbonding.com Copyright: © 2003 by Margaret Paul Web Address: http://www.innerbonding.com Word Count: 664 Category: Relationships/Emotional Healing WHO’S RESPONSIBLE FOR MY FEELINGS? by Margaret Paul, Ph.D. I have counseled individuals, couples, families and business partners for past 35 years and authored eight published books. All this experience has resulted in development of a profound healing process, called Inner Bonding, which anyone can learn and use throughout day (free course available - see resource box at end of article). Inner Bonding is a process that, when practiced, creates ability to take full responsibility for all our own feelings and behavior. One of our greatest challenges is to understand what it means to take personal responsibility for our own feelings and behavior. This is especially difficult when someone is behaving in a way that feels unloving to us -- attacking, blaming, lying, guilting, and so on. It is so easy to believe that our unhappy feelings are coming from their behavior rather than from our own response to their behavior. If we pay careful attention to our feelings, we will discover that it is not another's behavior that is creating our unhappiness but rather our own unloving response. When we respond to another's unloving behavior by getting angry, blaming, withdrawing, complying, or ignoring it, we will likely end up feeling badly. Our own unloving behavior towards another is also unloving toward our own Inner Child. For example, if we respond to another's anger by getting angry back rather than setting an appropriate limit against being attacked, our Inner Child will not feel safe. We have not responded from our loving Adult in a way that leads to being treated respectfully. Instead, we have responded from our wounded self, trying to have control over other's behavior. Since other is likely to respond with more anger or withdrawal, our Inner Child ends up feeling badly from interaction.
| | How to overcome lonelinessWritten by Kerry-Ann Cox
Nowadays majority of people live in very large cities. It is hard to imagine that in cities of millions of people that anyone could feel lonely. However, it is because of huge size of cities that we do feel this way. Twenty years ago, you probably knew everyone who lived in your street, at least by sight. Now you are lucky if you know your next-door neighbors. In a world full of television, videos, computers and internet, it is easy to be isolated in your own house. We don't even have to go out to work or shop any more. It can all be done sitting a desk with a computer connected to net. Sometimes we do not even converse with those under same roof. The violence and crime we witness every day via nightly news and through serials and movies on television, make us afraid and sometimes even a little paranoid of those we do not know and sometimes even those we do know. Years ago, when we lived in small villages, we all felt we had a place we belonged. Everyone had a job that contributed to lives of those they knew and cared about. You knew that you worked for good of whole village. Without television and computers, people would talk, interact, make music, be creative and play games together. Of course, there were some drawbacks, everyone knew your business and at times you may have even felt a little claustrophobic. But there was not this desperate sense of isolation that seems so common today. In large cities, it often feels like we have become nothing more than a number and if we left tomorrow, hundreds of people would be right there ready to take over our place. In times when we are feeling low this may give us feeling that we are unimportant and that nobody cares if we are around or not.
|
