Overcoming a Dysfunctional Litter
OR Revenge: Maybe Not So Sweet In Sarcasm Is the Enemy of Healing, I wrote that “while it is true that sometimes it just takes awhile to let go of angers and slights..that doesn’t mean it’s okay to lash out at other people, or blame them for how I’m feeling; and this goes double for [...]
Do not weep; do not wax indignant. Understand.–Spinoza If you understand that all behavior is strategic, that everything people do is a result of their desire to further some personal want or goal, then from there it should be easy to understand how pointless it is to feel resentment, rage, or hate for anyone. Lashing [...]
26. But it is so very hard to be an on-your-own, take-care-of-yourself-cause-there-is-no-one-else-to-do-it-for-you grown-up. (from Sheldon Kopp’s Eschatological Laundry List) One of my earliest posts on this blog, back in November 2007, was The Mark of Mature Thinking. The point of the post is that mature thinking is the ability to hold two contradictory ideas simultaneously–freedom [...]
(Note: This is a new revision of a post from February, 2008.) Learn to forgive yourself, again and again and again and again. — Sheldon Kopp Forgiving yourself is hard. We tend to hold things against ourselves, forgiving only after much struggle and anguish, if at all. We must feel much guilt and remorse, we [...]
To understand all is to forgive all. – French proverb When I was a kid, my mother was always acting like a victim. She would sigh deeply and whimper and wring her hands, and she was always complaining about different maladies, some real, some imagined. One time she pretended to be unconscious just to see [...]
To understand all is to forgive all.–French proverb In The Healing is in the Doing, I wrote that it’s important to do hard things like forgive the people who’ve hurt you and let go of any bitterness you may be hanging onto. I neglected to mention one of the hardest–and most important–persons of all to [...]
Forgiveness is not a natural state of mind. It’s something you have to work at. Just as you must learn to read, ride a bike, and do math problems, you must learn how to forgive. And just like those other skills, you have to use it regularly if you want to become good at it [...]
Sheldon Kopp’s last item on his Eschatological Laundry List is, “Learn to forgive yourself, again and again and again and again.” I think all the agains say it best: it’s important to forgive yourself. In our culture, we tend toward the opposite. We tend to hold things against ourselves (and others), forgiving only after much [...]
There is a tremendous difference between accepting an apology and truly forgiving somebody. It’s like the difference between a map and the territory the map covers. If you accept an apology but feel hollow about it, you still have unresolved issues, and you have not truly forgiven. Not because you’re a bad person (as we [...]