Brave New Kitty

I’ve always thought New Year resolutions were a bad idea. Somewhat like New Year’s Eve is an excuse for reserved people to be naughty, resolutions are a way for people who aren’t in the habit of goal-setting to set goals. This usually ends up being a way to feel bad about yourself; you either realize halfway or so through the year that your resolutions are toast and you have to deal with the fact that you’ve failed, or, when you take stock at the end of the year, which we all inevitably do (whether we’ve made resolutions or not), you realize that you have not met the unrealistic or poorly reasoned out ideals you had for yourself when the year began.

That said, the turn of a new year is a good time to take stock of your life. Particularly if it’s done as part of a regular regimen of stocktaking. So here is my suggestion: if you make a New Year resolution, resolve to set realistic goals and do regular stocktaking. Then spend some time figuring out what those goals would be and how to keep track of your progress.

It’s easy to get caught up in the New Year hoopla. Everywhere you look you find best of/worst of lists and people talking about everything that’s going to be different in the New Year. The promise of fresh hope and new potential hang in the air like electricity. Nobody wants to feel left out, so our impulse is to join in the excitement and make some New Year plans for ourselves. If we do it in the spirit of the moment, because it’s fun and funny and entertaining, that’s one thing. But if we fool ourselves into thinking these resolutions mean anything, we’re setting ourselves up for disappointment.

This cycle of resolution and disappointment is especially pronounced in people who tend toward self-flagellation.

New Year’s resolutions generally don’t work unless they’re part of a larger picture, a systematic approach to accomplishing tasks and getting what you want out of life. Everybody knows that goal setting is imperative to these ends, and the New Year tradition provides a way to feel like we’re doing that when actually, if this is as far as we get, we aren’t.

Don’t succumb to this illusion. Don’t set yourself up to feel bad. Instead, if you really want to make changes in your life, become really clear about your values, the goals you want to accomplish, and the monthly, weekly, and daily tasks required to do so. Educate yourself about goal setting if need be. If you’re not sure where to start, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People is a classic, and there are hundreds—probably thousands—others, as well as websites, compact discs, magazines, newsletters, and television programs, all devoted to goal setting and getting what you want from life.

If you don’t want to feel bad about New Year’s resolutions, there are two solutions. One is to not make any, and the other is to make them within a larger context. I’ll leave it up to you which is the way to go.

Oh, and Happy New Year!

Many people have asked me this question over the years. I always answer an immediate “Yes, of course you deserve to be loved.” I know this is a correct answer, because we all deserve to be loved. But I’ve always sensed it was somehow irrelevant. A dear friend asked me this again recently, and I got to thinking more deeply about the question. I don’t think she liked my answer very much because it goes against the fairy tale that most people want to believe about romantic love. But I think it was a good one, and I’ll share it with you here.

First of all, I realized why the question niggled at me. Asking if you deserve love is like asking if you deserve to be born into a free society, or if you deserve the same opportunities as everybody else, or if all peoples of the world should be treated equally. The answer is always going to be “Of course.” It’s also going to mean very little, or help you figure anything out about why you’re asking the question.

What people might really mean by “Do I deserve to be loved?” could be “Please reassure me that I’m lovable,” or “Do you think I’m attractive?” or “Do you think I’ve done the work necessary to have a healthy love relationship in my life?” “Of course” is a good solid response in all cases, but only because they are all givens. Of course you’re lovable, of course you’re attractive, of course you’ve done the work. I can say this because I see people at all levels of development in romantic relationships. So even at this deeper level, the question means very little. Why?

Because it’s the wrong question. And asking it means you’re not thinking about romantic love very clearly.

The main reason it’s the wrong question is because it assumes no agency. It says you view love as something that happens to you. When you’re thin enough, pretty enough, or emotionally healthy enough, an external entity drops magically out of the sky and it’s going to make you live happily ever after.

That’s not how it works.

Romantic love is not a reward for doing well. It is not a destination, an end point, or an indication that you’ve arrived at some apex in your growth. True, the healthier both people are—mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and even physically—the more likely the love relationship will blossom into its fullest potential. Whether that happens or not, though, has nothing to do with being deserving.

Rather, romantic love is a journey. It’s one of the greatest adventures we can have on our march toward wholeness. It is, like everything else that happens in a lifetime, an opportunity for growth. A romantic love relationship jars us out of our narcissism, throws us into frightening, exhilarating, unknown territory, and demands a kind of work and dedication like nothing else. To become half of a true partnership, to devote your self to its care and nurturing, to consider another person’s needs and desires as you consider your own, is to literally become part of something greater than yourself. In so doing, you confront your fears, insecurities, self-absorption, anxiety, stubbornness, and nearly every other shadow aspect you were hoping to avoid dealing with. Not only is romantic love an opportunity for growth, it is one of the most powerful ones imaginable. As Joseph Campbell says in the Power of Myth (the episode on romantic love), “it’s an ordeal.”

That has been my experience. While there is nothing more satisfying than being with somebody with whom you’ve built a true partnership, the actual building of the partnership is indeed an ordeal. It requires unflinching honesty, difficult conversations, truckloads of patience and forgiveness, and massive amounts of vulnerability and open mindedness. Since very few of us have enough of these qualities going in, we have to learn them in the doing. This is what the great romantic adventure is all about.

You need a lot of willingness because the issues that surface in a love partnership are usually the issues we are least willing to confront. Your worst defects of character will haunt the relationship until you face them and do something about them. If this isn’t a stellar opportunity for growth, then I don’t know what is. And just as our growth in other areas is infinite, so it is in our romantic lives. The partnership is boundless, and thus it never stops providing fodder for your growth. It will ebb and flow, change directions, and take on new dimensions, but it will never stop being a vehicle of personal development. This is the challenge and the fun of it.

So if you go into love with the attitude that it’s something that happens instead of something you do, you’re going to miss the real opportunity it presents. You’re going to think that when things get tough, it means that it “wasn’t meant to be.” Or that if you’re selfish and angry at times, you “aren’t ready.” Or that if you don’t both want exactly the same things all the time that it’s doomed. Or a thousand other little deaths that can happen when you think love is a result and not a journey; a noun and not a verb. But if you’re both willing, kind, and fundamentally honest, and you want to be together, none of those other things matter. The only thing that matters is whether or not you’re willing to grow in the way that a romantic partnership demands of you.

The right question, then, is not “do I deserve love?” but rather, “Am I willing to do the work that building a partnership requires?” Love is a verb. Framing it like this restores agency and makes the relationship your choice and your responsibility. Assuming you have hooked up with another person also willing to do the work, then you’re off to a good start on the greatest adventure of your life.

I know someone who spends a small fortune on personal growth. “Doris” has a therapist, a psychic healer, a qigong teacher, a meditation group, and belongs to two or three additional self-help discussion groups. She reads transpersonal psychology and philosophy. She loves to talk about philosophy, psychology, and human behavior, and she’s well-versed on her family of origin issues. She’s one of the smartest people I’ve ever met. If you think this is someone on the personal growth fast track, you’d be wrong.

For a long time I thought so. But there were things that didn’t add up. One was that the talk about family of origin issues was always about somebody else; she wouldn’t talk about her own, other than to state what they were. Another was that it was very important for her to feel in control at all times. This resulted in extremely limiting, one-sided relationships and hypervigilance about her environment, meaning that she always got to decide where to eat, what to do, when the evening would start and when it was over, etc. Challenging any of this meant opening yourself up to a harangue that could last for hours, explaining why things had to be the way they were; you learned to relent quickly to avoid that.

Doris also had a lot of problems with basic living. She was chronically late, chronically anxious, and chronically worried about money, her career, and her health. But she seemed paralyzed by inability to do anything to change. And talking to her about any of these was impossible because, although she would complain, she would not engage in a discussion about it. Not with me, not with anybody. I had to wonder what she talked to her therapists about…

I learned a lot from Doris. She taught me things I couldn’t have learned anywhere else at that time in my life. She introduced me to meditating. She encouraged me to join a woman’s therapy group. She pushed me to challenge myself in my career. She taught me ways to deal with my own anxiety. But, fascinatingly, Doris wasn’t able to do any of these things for herself. As good as she was at helping others, and as much effort as she seemed to put into her own growth, Doris’ life was a chaotic mess. And in all the time I was close to her—about six years—this never improved. If anything, it got worse.

Doris was tough to figure out. She was interested in personal growth, but more from a theoretical viewpoint than a personal one, it seemed. She was an intense, complicated person, and while I’ll never understand her completely, I think I’ve figured out some of her issues. They are issues we all have to some degree; Doris was simply an extreme case.

What was standing in the way of Doris’ growth? Her self-image. Doris was more interested in seeing herself a certain way than in actually being that way. She believed she wanted to feel better, so she did what people do to accomplish that. She believed she wanted to have deep, intimate relationships with people, so she made herself available for that to happen. But when the time came to actually feel better, or to be vulnerable enough for intimacy to occur, she balked. And not only did she balk, she usually found a way to externalize the reasons for her balking: her therapist wasn’t smart enough to keep up with her, her healer couldn’t relate to her issues, traffic made her late, and you weren’t caring or dependable enough to deserve her intimacy. I watched her repeat these patterns for the entire time that I knew her.

Eventually, I became another casualty of her patterns. Our friendship ended one day when I unintentionally backed her into a corner where the only place she had left to look was inward. She wasn’t willing to do that, so that was it; we were over.

While I learned a lot from Doris, and am grateful to have had her in my life, one of the biggest things I learned happened after our parting, after much deliberation, and it is this: a person’s self-image is the most powerful determining factor in whether or not she will grow.

In other words, if you want to grow, the pride must go.

Arrogance, that is: this is the real deadly sin referred to as pride. Take pride in your work, pride in your loved ones, pride in your growth, pride in your willingness, pride in your accomplishments. But the pride that keeps you closed-minded, vain, and resistant to change is going to kill you. Not literally perhaps, but it’ll keep you stuck and stagnant and miserable, and as long as you look to external sources for the cause (which is what arrogance makes us do), you’re gonna stay there.

You must ask yourself this: Do I really want to grow, or do I just want to see myself as someone who wants to grow? And you must be ruthless in answering honestly. Here are some follow-up questions that will help:

Do I tend to blame others or do I take responsibility?
How willing am I to face parts of myself I don’t think I’ll like?
How willing am I to feel out of my comfort zone in order to grow?
How willing am I to endure the pain that often accompanies growth?
How willing am I to do the work?

If you answer these questions honestly, the result will be a better understanding of how your self-image helps or hinders your growth.

But be warned: Such honesty is hard to come by. Arrogant pride (aka narcissism, vanity, conceit) has a self-reinforcing nature that makes it extremely hard to recognize, much less do anything about. Confronting someone else’s narcissism can be unpleasant, but confronting your own will be one of the most difficult things you’ve ever tried to do. This is one time where you may have to abandon gentleness and give yourself a good loving kick in the ass. In other words, when in doubt, err on the side of taking responsibility for the problems in your life. Cultivating this habit will accelerate your growth more than anything else I can think of.

If you find yourself habitually stuck, or resistant to the ideas I’ve presented here, or frequently blaming external sources for your problems (be honest now), take a deep hard look at your self-image with as much honesty as you can muster. You can never entirely free yourself of arrogant pride, vanity, and narcissism (we all have some of these traits no matter how far we’ve come), but you have to be willing to do so. Truth will set you free, but willingness is the vehicle that will get you there.

Stand before the people you fear and speak your mind – even if your voice shakes. –Maggie Kuhn

Why do we lie?

We’d like to believe, if we consider ourselves decent human beings, that we lie only to spare someone’s feelings or protect them. But for most of us, this is just not true. We are also likely to lie to spare or protect ourselves, or even just to make our lives easier. When we lie for these reasons, we do ourselves and the universe a grave disservice.

How many times have you agreed with someone or fudged your opinion because you didn’t want to “get into a big thing” about what you really thought? Or because you didn’t want to make the effort of explaining your position? Or because you wanted someone’s approval? Or to spare yourself the vulnerability of putting your true thoughts and feelings out there where they could get trounced on? How many times have you said the easiest thing instead of the most honest thing?

Such lying is largely socially acceptable. We learn early in life to be indirect, to hint and insinuate rather than state clearly. We may even learn that clearly stating our wants, needs, and opinions is rude. While in certain settings indirectness may be good etiquette, in the vast majority of situations, it serves only to create chasms of miscommunication and misunderstanding between people. If this is true, then why is dishonesty, particularly in the form of indirectness, so rampant in our culture?

I believe the real reason is prophylactic. When you speak your truth, you risk a lot. You put yourself out in the universe at large, and everyone and everything in it has an opportunity to take a poke at you. It makes sense that you would want to avoid this possibility.

It makes sense, that is, if you haven’t thought it through very well, because the prophylactic nature of this tactic protects you not only from embarrassment and humiliation, it also protects you from good outcomes. If you are not willing to risk bad outcomes to experience good ones, you end up not having many important outcomes in your life at all, because you’re not fully living.

“Speaking your truth” means to share what’s important to you. To state clearly what you want and what you need. To talk honestly about your values and your goals, your opinions and your thoughts, your dreams and your deepest desires. You don’t do this all the time with everybody, but you also don’t back away from it when doing so is the right thing for you. And it goes without saying (but I’ll say it anyway) that speaking your truth is not about hurting other people. Thoughts and opinions about others have nothing to do with our personal truths. Sometimes people don’t like what you have to say, but you ought never say things to be deliberately cruel.

Speaking your truth slices to the core of living a meaningful life. It is SO important to your integrity and your authenticity. Your truth is all you really have. If you’re not sharing it, you aren’t really sharing yourself, and you aren’t participating fully in your own life.

Not speaking your truth diminishes you. It’s like saying you don’t believe you matter enough to speak about, share, or defend your self. That who you really are is too much effort to try to explain. But if ever there was an effort worth making, it’s being honest about your wants, needs, values, and desires.

Perhaps most importantly, you must be vulnerable if you want to have real connections with other people. You must be willing to put yourself out there if you want any sort of responses in kind. The only way to do that is to share your truth as authentically as you can. As scary as that may be, not doing so is, I strongly believe, far scarier.

Habitually not speaking your truth reverberates throughout your psyche, infecting your self-image, your self-awareness, and your relationships with insincerity. If you wonder sometimes why you feel disconnected, from yourself or from other people, start here, with your own truth. It may take you awhile to figure out what it is, but it’s there. And once you start paying attention, more and more awareness will bubble to the surface. It’s a simple process, but not an easy one; few things worth doing are.

Knowing and speaking our truth has no stopping point. We are always defining our truth at ever deepening levels of understanding, always working to state it with more conciseness and clarity. This process of deeper and deeper self-awareness is the very essence of personal development.

Learn to speak your truth. Say what’s on your mind, gently but with confidence. It’s where all authenticity starts; in fact, individual truth is the only real source of authenticity there is. It’s also, thankfully, the one thing we all have complete control over.

If you want the world to be a better place, start with your own truth. It’s all you have, and all you really need.

…Because straight is the gate and narrow is the path that leads to eternal life, and few there will be that find it…

When I graduated from high school and moved from my small town to the big city, I left behind friends I thought I’d have for the rest of my life. Many I saw once or twice, then lost contact with. After living in the city for a year, I found I had little common ground with my small town friends anymore. Seeing them turned out to be sad and depressing.

When I started a new job, I started hanging around with co-workers and didn’t see my old friends as much. When I did get together with them, it didn’t feel like it used to.

Every time I changed boyfriends, I hung out with the new guy’s friends and family. With each boyfriend I made new friends, some of which I kept and some of which faded into the past with the relationship.

Then when I got sober, a sea change occurred. I had to cultivate a new crop of friends; it was literally a matter of life and death. If I made sober friends, I lived; if I stayed with my drinking buddies, I died.

This phenomenon of changing friends sort of came home to roost in the lonely, in-between world of early sobriety. I had to consciously contemplate the friend-changing process because understanding the why of it was so crucial to staying sober. It wasn’t a matter of drifting from an old group to a new group because of circumstances or coincidence. I had to actively distance myself, turn down invitations, and focus on making sober friends and finding new activities to occupy my time. Doing this while struggling with the mental, emotional, and physical upheaval of early sobriety was challenging, to say the least. But it cemented an important concept, one that has helped me tremendously along my path: we leave people behind as we grow.

This process didn’t stop for me in sobriety. If anything, it accelerated. Because my sober friends were also on the personal growth fast track, our relationships changed rapidly, and we sometimes grew in different directions. Some had lessons to teach me, but turned out to be not so good for me, or me for them. And that was just fine, I realized, because people can have a net positive effect on a life without becoming a constant in it. Although I believe that everyone who comes into my life has something to teach me (and I them), this doesn’t mean I need to cultivate long-term relationships with all of them.

As I grew, the process of leaving people behind took on more dimensions. The more I loved myself, the less willing I was to put up with shoddy treatment and people I had little connection with. I weeded my garden, so to speak, removing the crabgrass and dandelions that hindered my blossoming. Sometimes this meant having candid conversations I would rather have avoided, but that was okay too, because it helped me along my path (in fact it was huge), and helped them along theirs, too. Honesty always does, even if people don’t always like what you have to say.

There were also people I didn’t want to leave behind and tried to maintain relationships with: my family, for example. But the dynamic of these relationships changed, and even if the change was for the better, a lot of people did not like it. I got into a lot of power struggles with people who didn’t like the new improved me and tried to push me back to my old ways. Eventually (in most cases, after many years of confusion and grief), I stopped engaging in these struggles, and these relationships either ended or settled into a superficiality that proved the only sane way to connect with these people.

As sad as leaving people behind can be, it is almost always validation of being on the right path. The nature of growth is such that the higher you go, the fewer fellow travelers there will be. According to Abraham Maslow (of Maslow’s Hierarchy), only about one person in ten thousand achieves self-actualization. And this is true no matter what the area of development, from education to spirituality to athletics. The greater the depth, the narrower the span.

Thus, growth can feel quite lonely at times. Even if I engage in familiar activities with old friends, they don’t feel the same, and I feel separate from my friends with whom I no longer share an outlook. But I know why I feel separate, that it’s for the right reasons, and going back is not a possibility.

And yet, while there may be fewer people I feel connections with, those connections are more solid and more satisfying than any I’ve ever had. Doesn’t that make sense? For if I’m on the right path, then I should encounter people with common values and interests. That has been my experience, and it is one that I recommend highly.

Last but far from least, leaving people behind doesn’t always mean cutting people out of your life; you can’t just refuse to associate with folks who aren’t as healthy, educated, or developed as you; your world should be expanding, not contracting. You’ve weeded your garden and reestablished the dynamics of relationships you want to keep. Now, you have to figure out how to have satisfying relationships with people who aren’t quite your peers. And the way to do this is often to become a teacher.

I would hate for this to sound arrogant, so I hope it doesn’t. And I would also hate for you to think you should go around pontificating your knowledge, because that’s not how it works. But if you’ve achieved some measure of wisdom and serenity in your life, then you have something to offer others. As those wiser than you offered their hands when you needed help, you in turn must offer yours to those coming up behind you. As the old saying goes, you’ve got to give it away to keep it. This is probably more true for personal growth and spiritual development than for anything else, because these are the very things that determine the quality of our relationships with other people and with the world at large.

When is leaving people behind not validation of being on the right path? When you leave people behind because of your growth, it’s typically a gentle and bittersweet process. You wish it could be different, but you know it can’t be. If you’ve had a falling out that doesn’t feel finished or if you’re harboring resentments, the separation is probably not about your growth. It’s more likely to mean you’ve got some work to do. It may be the right decision to move on, but you can’t really know until you figure out what your big feelings are about.

I remember my first sponsor talking about the loneliness of becoming Christ-like and not understanding what she meant until years later. If you want to become Christ-like, or realize your own Buddha nature, or come to know the god in yourself, or whatever else you want to call it, you will leave people behind. Understanding this fundamental spiritual principle helps you stay your course as you seek higher and yet higher plateaus of growth and the people to share them with.

If you are on a path of personal development and spiritual growth, then I’m sure you’ve had the experience many times over of something coming into your life at exactly the time when you were ready to receive it. I know I have. When it happens it has a sense of destiny, like god or your higher power or your higher self is sending you miracles and affirming for you that you’re on the right path.

When those things start happening, you’re on the right path, no doubt, but I don’t think anything supernatural is occurring. There’s a much simpler, much less exciting explanation for it. I realized this several years ago when I began healing from one of my central issues: emotionally distant relationships.

Throughout my teens and twenties, I had one bad relationship after another. Sometimes the men were abusive, sometimes simply emotionally shut down, but they all had one underlying commonality: no possibility of a future. They were all poor raw material.

After I got sober and began my personal development journey, this slowly began to change. One day, something happened that caused a mutation in my evolution, moving me forward a couple of epochs.

I was sexually harassed at work. It had happened before, but I had always kept it to myself, secretly believing that I had somehow provoked it. This time, I didn’t keep it to myself. I told my supervisor, Tom, and was amazed when he took it seriously. Very seriously. He told me that no one had to put up with that kind of treatment and that he was sorry it happened. We spoke privately until he was sure he understood the situation. Then he set about rectifying it, swiftly and discreetly, careful to protect me from further embarrassment and humiliation.

I was so touched by Tom’s caring and sensitivity, I went home that night and cried. I felt a deep, aching sadness that went much further back than the work situation. I grew up with a father who would never have done that for me, indeed, who never did do that for me. That I had to first experience such tenderness so late in life, from a boss, in a work setting, made me so sad, I cried for days every time I thought about it.

My experience with Tom was a systemic shock. What Tom did was right, what my father had always done—blame me first and ask questions later—was wrong. But I realized that I expected my father’s reaction from every man I encountered. I must, or Tom’s reaction wouldn’t have shaken me to my core as it did.

I had no choice after this. I was practically forced to begin noticing kindness in men. Doing so meant going against a deeply ingrained belief that I didn’t even know I had: that “kind man” was an oxymoron. I’d been thrust into a situation that proved this was not the case, and I knew I had some work to do if I was to really believe it, to believe it in the same way I believed that all men were like my father.

I talked and journaled and read and thought, until my feelings began to match my new belief. More than that, I started attracting a different kind of man into my life. It took a while, but today I take a man’s good will and kindness as a given unless proven otherwise. I still hear that old message, but I almost never listen to it.

The student had been ready, and the teacher had appeared. Or had he? Because really, the teacher had always been there. There had been many kind, caring men in my life before Tom came along. My seventh grade science teacher, my college humanities professor, and a number of ex-boyfriends who never made it past casual status because they were just too “boring.” The teacher hadn’t suddenly appeared; I had just suddenly noticed him.

So it’s not really a matter of teachers dropping from heaven into our lives. They are already here. We are surrounded, inundated, deluged with them. They are always tugging at our sleeves and tapping us on the shoulder, trying to get our attention. But if we haven’t done the work we need to do, we won’t notice them.

I find this comforting. It means, once again, that my growth is up to me. There is no external force governing how much or how well I do; only me. I firmly believe that if I do the work and have an open mind, I will learn the lessons I need to learn.

What is that work? It’s different for everybody. Usually it involves ferreting out negative beliefs, and paying attention to events that jar us out of our complacency and challenge our worldview. Often these are painful events, things we would rather avoid than experience.

It isn’t that pain is necessary to grow. But pain is part of life, and our attitude towards it determines to a large extent whether or not we do, in fact, grow. Some people become shut down and bitter from their pain. Others triumph. It’s largely a choice we make. If we learn to see pain (as well as everything else) as an opportunity to learn, we can continue to grow in every stage of life. If we learn to be ready, teachers will never stop appearing, and we will never stop growing.

I learned from my experience with Tom that the teacher was there all the time, that he wasn’t placed on my path by a power beyond my own when I was ready to see him. While this thinking removes the magic from the event, it doesn’t remove the spirituality. In fact, this view validates its spiritual nature: Teachers are always and already present, no matter what I do, no matter where I am, no matter what’s going on. I need only be open to them.

If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him. –Sheldon Kopp

Never believe something simply because it comes from an authority figure. Observe and study, and decide for yourself if it makes sense. In the Kalama Sutta, Buddha says, “Do not accept anything because it comes from the mouth of a respected person. Rather, observe closely and if it is to the benefit of all, accept and abide by it.”

Buddhist doctrine aside, this is an important idea. Authority figures can be wrong. And they are, frequently. Consider all the bad decisions made throughout history. Viet Nam. Communism. The Spanish Inquisition. The Crusades. The Reagan administration’s response to AIDS. Iraq. The Edsel. Just to name a tiny few.

People in power are as fallible as everyone else. The only difference is that when they make mistakes, they tend to be big ones. The history of mankind is full of errors in judgment, short-sightedness, and the fallen mighty. Powerful people might, in fact, be even more prone to poor judgment because they often have issues of hubris to deal with.

If you think back through your own history, you’ll remember things you were told by teachers, your parents, and television that have proven to be completely wrong. I remember being told that by the time I was an adult, Americans would be wearing disposable paper clothing, driving cars powered by uranium, and using the metric system exclusively. We all know the rest of those stories.

If you want to make sound decisions, you must separate from the herd and think for yourself. “They” may be right and “they” may be wrong, but trust your own judgment to decide.

Your inner voice is never wrong. Never.

Don’t look for greatness in other people. We tend to seek greatness outside ourselves. There are a couple of problems with this. One is that our hero’s human fallibility lets us down, and we feel betrayed. This is almost inevitable, as the image people portray often has little to do with who they really are. It’s very, very difficult to get an accurate picture of someone’s insides from an outside view, particularly if that view is from a distance. There’s nothing wrong with admiring people’s good qualities, but be fully aware that these people are no less human than you.

Another, more detrimental problem is that, when we project heroism onto other people, we fail to realize our own heroic nature. Usually the traits we admire in other people are traits we already possess, but have disowned or repressed. They live in our shadow, and when we recognize them in others, we are really recognizing them in ourselves in a way that feels safe.

Shadow is so much more than our dark side. It’s our unbridled creativity, our deep emotions, and our power. But these positive qualities can be scary in their intensity, and hero worship is a way to distance from them. So, whenever you find yourself admiring someone from afar, remind yourself that what you are really admiring is your own good qualities.

If you don’t make this hero-shadow connection, hero worship can be quite limiting. Being unaware that your admiration is really recognition of your own greatness can keep you feeling chronically less-than. You are forever on the fringes of fulfillment, having never delved into the deeper, more intense parts of yourself. And that ain’t no way to live, my friends.

So…

Be your own hero! Strive always to see the best in yourself. Eradicate excuses. Do things you feel good about. Live by values you admire. Follow the clearest path you can see. Believe that you possess as much greatness as anybody else. Trust your inner voice, and pay attention to its call. Own your power and creativity. Accept all your higher self has to offer. Breathe life deeply within, and flourish.

It isn’t always easy; the high road never is. But the alternative to cultivating your heroic qualities is, well, not to. Don’t give your power away by denying the greatness in yourself. Admire and love others, but be your own hero.

Christmas was a weird time in my family. My mom shopped and baked lots of cookies, and my dad drank and did lots of yelling. He was always tense, but in December, his volatility cranked up a notch or four. He had his own little Christmas Eve tradition of heaving the Christmas tree, lights and all, across the living room or out the front door. I remember his face one year right after he did it. It was puffy red, heaving and contorted with liquor and rage, his glasses cocked at an odd angle, his eyes watery and dark as he looked directly at me. Was he trying to come up with a reason to direct his rage at me, or was he wondering about his little girl’s reaction to his violence? I’ll never know.

One year, he capped off the tree-throwing ceremony by punching my mother in the face and breaking her nose. We all bundled up, piled into the car, and spent the rest of the evening in the emergency room. I was little, but I still remember the mortifying looks of pity from the nurses. My mother came home with a small white bandage over her nose, a slight nasal twang, and a cheerful mood—my father was so remorseful, he was being nice to her, and that made her happy.

Every Christmas morning, we all made a stab at normalcy. We opened gifts piled under the slightly askew tree and pretended everything was fine. We spent the day playing with our new toys and reading our new books, eating cookies and whatever fine meal my mother planned, and it was nice. But by the first week of January, you could feel the collective, unspoken sigh of relief throughout our house. Thank god the holidays were over.

To this day, I experience a sense of relief when January 1 rolls around. “I survived another holiday season,” my little voice seems to be saying. “I don’t have to worry about it again for a good ten and a half months.”

I know I’m not alone in this. The holidays are a tough time of year for a lot of people. Some feel stressed by all the stuff they have to do. Others feel financial pressures. Some who don’t have families feel terribly, horribly alone. Others feel obligated to spend time with a family they don’t like. For still others, it’s a time of feeling all-encompassing hopelessness and utter, suicidal depression.

For me, it was hopelessness and depression. Before I got sober, I self-medicated through the entire season. From the middle of November ‘til the last week of December, I was high, or drunk, or coked out pretty much constantly, from my waking breath to that sweet moment of unconsciousness. And even so, I was hard to be around. I hated Christmas and everything about it. I couldn’t escape it, and I couldn’t tell anyone how I felt for the shame of it. I have never had serious thoughts of suicide, but for six weeks out of the year, I understood how people could choose that route.

I’ll never forget my first sober Christmas. I walked into an AA meeting shortly after Thanksgiving and was met by a sea of glum faces. One person talked about his difficulty with the holidays, and it opened up a floodgate. Everyone in the room—everyone!—was feeling holiday pain. And through my despair, I experienced an exhilarating sense of connection. “I’ve found my people,” I thought. “I’m home.”

It was liberating to talk freely about my holiday angst without worrying about being looked at funny. Even so, it was tough getting through the holidays sober. Nothing to cushion me from my brutal depression. People were relapsing all around me, and I understood the powerful attraction of oblivion. But I made it through, mostly by gritting my teeth, going to a lot of meetings, and trusting my intuition that even this awful feeling was better than getting loaded.

After the fourth or fifth year of white-knuckling my way through the Christmas season, the pain started to ease up a bit. I gave myself permission to not visit my parents, even if I had no boyfriend to spend Christmas with. Even if I had to spend the day alone. I was an adult and could make my own decisions, and I decided to stop going home for Christmas.

Well, this was a huge paradigm shift for me, and with it came an amazing new perspective. I realized that the social norms and expectations governing the holiday season did not have to govern me. I didn’t have to do anything I didn’t want to. I could ignore the whole damn thing if I wanted to, and nobody could stop me.

With this new perspective, I started noticing some of the things I actually liked about the holidays. The lights and decorations, the great food, the time off work, the excitement of children, and going to Asian restaurants on the Big Day with the Buddhists and Jews. So I drove around and looked at lights, enjoyed the cookies and goodies, reveled in my time off work, tried to buy good presents for the children in my life, and ate Chinese food for Christmas dinner with a fellow Christmas hater, or sometimes an entire group of us.

I also resolved to avoid the things I disliked about the holidays: the pressure to spend money, the obligation to spend time with people I don’t like, the commercialism, the crowded malls. I learned to do what felt good to me and let the rest of it go.

In the past couple of years, Jim and I have started a new tradition of traveling over the holidays when we can afford to, and I don’t mean to visit relatives. Two years ago, we spent Christmas in Las Vegas, the most unsentimental spot on the planet, and it was the best Christmas I ever had. Being gone for a couple of weeks in December might be the best present I ever gave myself.

In short, I learned to do the holidays on my own terms. And I realized that the degree to which I am able to do this is the degree to which I remain relaxed and stress-free.

Now, I know that if you have kids, your choices may not be so simple. You have an obligation to give your children a happy Christmas. But you can set limits, and you can come up with un-traditional traditions, and you can be creative in providing a good holiday for them. You don’t have to traipse the malls and max your credit cards just because everybody else does. You don’t have to cook a big meal. You don’t have to bake cookies. You don’t have to have a tree. You don’t have to visit relatives if you don’t want to. If you give it some thought, you’ll come up with ways to simplify the whole ordeal. And your kids will benefit from your example of independent thinking, even if they don’t appreciate it at the time.

The point is that you, too, can do Christmas on your own terms. There’s nothing stopping you! It’s the answer to all holiday stress, from spending money to suicidal depression. I’m living proof of it.

My painful childhood memories of the holidays will always be a part of me, but they no longer control me. I get through the holidays just fine now, sober and alert, and if I can, anybody can. It’s all a matter of what you choose to focus on.

Do you carve out alone time? Time to reflect, daydream, journal, and just be with yourself? If not, you ought to. It’s a very self-loving thing to do. All great thinkers and creators spend abundant amounts of time alone with themselves. Such time is essential to creative development.

I’m not talking about self-nurturing activities that involve other people like classes, working out, and getting together with friends. Although these things are important too, they fall into a different category.

I’m talking about shutting out the rest of the world and turning your focus inward. I’m talking about making a date with yourself.

Some people love solitude. They need it to recharge and refresh, and so they don’t need much encouragement in this area. Others, though, recharge from the energy of being around other people. These types are less inclined to take time to be with themselves.

Whichever type you are, though, solitude is important, and cultivating the habit of spending regular, introspective time with yourself is something from which you will reap invaluable benefits. Benefits such as:

• Deeper self-awareness
• Deeper self-love
• Deeper appreciation of relationships and the miracle of life
• Heightened creativity and time to develop ideas.

If I’ve convinced you that alone time is important, then you may be wondering how to make the time and how to spend it.

Making time is a lot simpler than you probably think, even if you have a family. Choose from the following: Get up before everybody else, go to sleep after everybody else, forego watching television, eat lunch alone, go to the library on a weekend afternoon. Once you make it a priority, it isn’t hard to find room in your schedule.

You can take the time as often as you want, but I suggest a minimum of once a week. The fewer the days, the longer the time should be. For example, if you take your alone time every day, half an hour is sufficient, but if you take time only once a week, spend at least an hour with yourself. If you can spend more, do so; it can take half an hour just to get relaxed enough to let go and really get into it, especially if you’re new at it.

How should you spend your alone time? Creatively, and totally free of judgment. Do whatever you love to do. Write, read, sew, paint, daydream. Make notes on a short story you want to write. Muse about a problem you’re trying to solve. Focus on a painful issue you’re working through. Connect with your Higher Self. Meditate…

This is important. If you aren’t already meditating, I suggest spending the first fifteen or twenty minutes of your alone time doing so. Meditation is a wonderful practice with an array of astounding benefits, from lower blood pressure and cholesterol to higher IQ scores. Whether you are meditating elsewhere or not, all periods of alone time should start with some form of meditation. It is the best way to shift your focus inward and let the rest of the world fall away for this brief, wonderful time.

So please, give yourself the gift of solitude. Make a regular date with yourself and keep it. Learn to love spending time with yourself, and you will never be lonely again.

I write a lot about self-love, self-nurturing, self-forgiveness, and self-acceptance. These are central issues to people interested in personal growth, especially those of us who got a rough start in life. Since I expect most of you reading Brave New Kitty fall into this category, it hasn’t occurred to me to make very many qualifying statements around the necessity for radical self-acceptance; I would hate for any disclaimer to discourage anyone feeling bad or despondent to quit trying, so it’s important to make the self-love message unconditional.

But just because somebody gets a rough start in life doesn’t guarantee they’ll have the same issues we do. One of the mistakes we make when we don’t know how to love ourselves very well is to attribute our traits—sensitivity, emotional neediness, a desire to be understood, for example—to people who may not have them, merely because we share a similar background (or whatever). I found this out one day, many years ago now, while sitting in my therapist’s office. It was a revelation for me; it completely changed the way I look at people, and I hope it will for you, too.

I was talking about my father, and I don’t remember the specific issue, but the gist, as was the gist in all conversations about my father, was my struggle to have a meaningful relationship with him. I said something about how he didn’t let people get close to him because he was hurting so much inside. My dear therapist, probably tired of using the soft sell on me, responded, “You have no evidence of that.”

I didn’t know what he was talking about. “What do you mean?” He said it again. “You have no evidence of that.”

“Evidence of what?”

“That your father is hurting inside. You have no evidence.”

I slumped into his sinky couch, probably looking puzzled.

Richard continued. “You have evidence that he’s a narcissist, an alcoholic, rageful, angry, abusive, cruel, and has horrible sexual boundaries, but you have no evidence that he’s hurting inside.”

“Sure I do,” I said. “He wouldn’t act that way if he felt good about himself.”

“How do you know?”

“That’s just not how people act if they feel good about themselves.”

“Maybe that’s not how you’d act, but that doesn’t mean everyone is like you.”

We went a few rounds like this, then suddenly the clouds parted and a golden beam of awareness shone into my brain. I grasped what he was telling me, and it was a tremendous moment of clarity for me.

My father may have been hurting, and he may not have been. I really don’t know because he never talked about it. But whether he was or wasn’t is beside the point. The point is that his actions were all I had to go by to decide if he had my best interests at heart. And his actions indicated that he did not.

As obvious as this appears, it was news to me. I grew up with a drunken, raging father and a mother who made excuses for his bad behavior. Somehow, no matter how awful he was, he always saw himself as a victim, and my mother did too, even though he hit her, called her unspeakable names, cheated on her, blamed her for everything he was mad about, and ruined holiday after holiday. She’d say things like “Your poor father doesn’t like himself very much,” and “Daddy had it really hard as a kid.” As if that somehow justified his terrible behavior! But in her mind, it did, and I guess I believed it too.

That’s how I learned to empathize with toxic people.

Born into it and raised by its credo, I knew nothing else. And it never occurred to me, until that day in Richard’s office, that there was something wrong with an outlook that saw self-centeredness at its worst as requiring sympathy. I thought I was being, I don’t know, open-minded. Understanding. Tolerant. I thought putting up with other people’s rage was normal. I thought it meant a person was deep and complex and interesting. And I played it out in several relationships with men just like my dad.

By “toxic person,” I mean a person who puts his own interests above all else, a person who can justify any dishonest, cruel, mean-spirited, and abusive behavior to get what he wants. We all have self-centered moments, but a toxic person lives here, and tends to not be introspective about his questionable behavior and values. A toxic person doesn’t have to be nasty and mean all the time; toxicity comes in many forms. He—or she—just has to be chronically unconcerned about the feelings of his “loved ones” to a degree that causes them emotional pain.

When we haven’t learned to love ourselves very well, we seem drawn to partners who don’t love very well, either. Sometimes, they’re like us, sensitive and guarded, and we need only to believe in each other and be willing to work at intimacy. Often, though, we hook up with predatory types who take advantage of our sensitive nature and seize control of the relationship. It makes sense; toxic types aren’t interested in partners who will stand up to them. Our bumps fit into their holes perfectly, and this is why we must work so hard to understand and quell our attraction to toxicity.

I can’t say if my father likes himself very much or not. My belief is that he does not. But it just doesn’t matter. All that matters is that, if I want to take good care of myself, I must steer clear of toxic people. After that day in Richard’s office, I understood what that meant. What had been a painful lifelong mystery became as clear as a desert sky. My radar tuned into another frequency. My family legacy lost all power over me, and I simply stopped empathizing with toxic people. As with many emotional blocks, what I thought was a big scary monster turned out to be not much of anything, and a simple awareness was all that was required to move beyond it.

Don’t empathize with toxic people. Don’t excuse bad behavior, and don’t accept the blame for it. Judge people by what they do and not by what they say they’ll do. Hold people accountable, including yourself, and watch your relationships blossom. And keep working on your self-love until you feel it to your core. When you have that, toxic people become a moot point.