Toward Maintaining Four Levels of Balance
-
continued
An essential balancing tool for all four of your levels is to…
Option: learn how and when to say "no" - i.e. learn how to
inner and interpersonal
limits, without undue
guilt, shame, and anxiety. Most unrecovering
have great
trouble with this. Neither kids’ human natures nor our pleasure-driven media promote
delayed gratifications – yet achieving real balance requires us to do just that…
Option: pay conscious attention to what life
feels like, when your
personal, re/marital, and stepfamily balances are each and all stable enough.
Develop comfort with a set of adjectives to describe the feelings, like "light,
grounded, secure, pleasant, harmonious, calm, serene, enjoyable, in synch,
fulfilling, natural,…
Note what the opposite set of adjectives is. Then use this
awareness to help validate what promotes balances among you, and to identify significant
imbalances,
and correct them.
Option: help each other to become experts at nonjudgmentally spotting
and confronting
among
your subselves and in your stepfamily relationships. By definition, if a person says
opposing things ("I love you – go away!), or their words and actions
clearly don’t match ("I’m really angry – heh, heh, heh;")
their
is currently disabled, and they’re out
of personal balance. A relationship can’t be in balance if one or both partners
are significantly controlled by a false self.
Option: help each other to become skilled at
your current
and sharing
genuine
attitudes of "your needs and mine are of
equal value, here and now."
Without
this shared mutual-respect attitude, it will be hard or impossible to
communicate and negotiate
together. That in turn will relentlessly foster
fluctuating imbalances on all levels.
Option: as a couple, experiment with
scheduling each week until you
find a way that feels effective to you both. That implies that you each are
(a)
working at being clear on your personal goals and
(b) can understand and respect your partner’s and kids' goals and priorities clearly,
and (c) are usually willing to
with them to agree on
local ways to meet your respective goals. The seven
mental/verbal
are
essential for this.
Option: forge your own list of "family
factors or
criteria, and refer to it
regularly to take your stepfamily "pulse." Finally,…
Option: acknowledge that you as persons and as stepfamily members
are "works of art in progress." As such, cut yourselves some
slack, and affirm your being "perfectly imperfect" as you grow and
evolve together. "Progress, not
perfection!"
There
are other ways you mates can promote
personal, re/marital, and nuclear-stepfamily balances. In evolving
your ways, note the theme of these representative ideas.
The keys to
Project 12 are...
-
working to keep your true
Selves
of your
other subselves (personalities);
-
co-parental
vs. denial,
distraction,
and/or numbness, and
-
long-term vision,
and plans vs. reacting
haphazardly day to day;
-
shared motivation to stay balanced enough on all four levels; and…
-
as a couple and a nuclear stepfamily.
|
Restated: long-term success at Project 12 hinges on each of your
co-parents deciding to live
on purpose, vs. living passively, aimlessly, or reactively. Does this
describe you recently? |
The
ultimate Stepfamily Olympics challenge: can you adults and kids work at
balancing your version of these
10 or 11 complex, overlapping
and enjoy the
process enough, together?
Let’s take a look at this before summing up.
Enjoying Your Ongoing
Stepfamily Process
Can you clearly describe joy? Do you know when you or others have that wonderful
condition? When did you last enjoy a solitary or social activity? Why did you?
Now think of recent some process or event that you didn’t enjoy (vs. being
indifferent to it). What inner and environmental factors promoted that feeling?
I suspect
that there are some universal enjoyment ingredients
that transcend our individual quirks and personalities. Can you have pleasure and
not feel joy? Can you create joyful situations, or are you (we) stuck just enjoying
joy when it occurs unexpectedly? How does happiness relate to joy? Why
bother with abstract questions like these, anyway?
If you have a choice, would you prefer to increase the joy you share
together while building your stepfamily, or just take what comes?
Did our Ed
Sullivan plate-spinner feel joy while achieving his challenging objective in front
of the viewing millions, or was he anxious, fearful, tense, and apprehensive?
Was he more
concerned with his contract and paycheck, his personal pride, the artistic hand-eye
process of getting all the plates spinning in an entertaining way, or a balance of all
three? Did he only feel satisfaction at the end when all plates were spinning, or did he
enjoy the stimulating process of getting there?
Try
this brief exercise: reflect on a range of solitary, marital, and social events
in your recent life, and see if you can identify core factors that determine your
level of enjoyment. This is what comes up for me:
A
local mind-body-spirit
focus on some set of inner and outer process or event, vs. false-self
distortions
and/or mental distraction. It's hard (impossible?) to experience undiluted
joy
when worrying you’re about to run out of gas in traffic or you have a
bad headache.
This is very relevant in typical multi-home stepfamilies, which are steadily complex,
noisy, and distracting – unless some balanced person says compassionately
"Sshhhhh…. Get quiet. Be still… Slow down…" Of course
there are events like concerts, parades, and family gatherings that are joyful partly
because they are noisy, dynamic, and pleasurably stimulating and satisfying on many
levels.
A
second component of any joyful experience appears to be…
The ability to feel
current emotions and sensual feelings fully vs. numbing, repressing, or
without any judgments (e.g. "I
shouldn’t
feel so glad!"). Many
co-parents been partially or
largely numb most of their lives - and they don't know that. Other
have been
perpetually
enraged,
and/or
Either way, such wounded people don’t know what they have never experienced, so
they can only guess what joy feels like – and maybe fake it, to be one of
the crowd. They may equate absence of fear
or shame as joy, and not know
that a whole other level of feeling is possible. Sadly, this is often true for their kids,
too. Personal
helps
wounded adults learn how to
experience some repressed feelings, or the whole range of human emotions,
without
feeling guilty or scared.
A
third ingredient of joyful experiences is that they magically and often
unexpectedly…
Meet our personal criteria for
good
(or, better, excellent), right, pleasurable, and
satisfying.
Discovering a glorious sunrise or sunset can bring momentary unexpected joy because it and
the whole scene in our visual field (and the current mix of sounds and smells) meet our
inner criteria for beautiful, or even breathtaking.
Because ho-hum and special social situations (like everyday stepfamily life)
cause complex webs of overlapping spiritual, mental, emotional, and physical
(discomforts),
the more core needs satisfied in the more people involved, the more likely people will
feel periods of joy, vs. something else.
Option:
discover the differences between pleasure, relief, comfort,
fulfillment,
satisfaction, bliss, contentment, happiness, serenity, ecstasy,
excitement,
fun, and joy. It may help to rank-order these from …
[relief / comfort]
[fulfillment / contentment
/ happiness / fun / …]
[ecstasy /
joy / bliss]
You co-parents
can choose to consciously promote and savor enjoyment
– however you define it – as you evolve your stepfamily roles,
rules, rituals, and relationships. together. Or you may just endure this
multi-year merger process
as a series of onerous chores or tasks to "do." In this mode, achieving
periods of personal, re/marital,
and stepfamily-system balance can still feel boring, empty, and joyless.
Premise: you can choose to see your day-by-day stepfamily-building process
as a priceless opportunity for you co-parents and your kids
and relatives. The opportunity is to maximize your personal healings and growth, find your
and relish
your version of these stepfamily benefits together
a day at a time.
Option: invest undistracted time to identify your core
attitudes are about your personality,
relationships, family, parenting, and problem-solving. Is each day a
lock-step drill in overcoming an endless series of risks and obstacles to survive?
Or are your days more often a grand solitary and social adventure filled with
uncertainties, surprises, triumphs, disappointments, risks, setbacks, treasures, and
increasing wisdom and compassion? Do your
ruling subselves feel your (their) glass is half full or half empty?
Recap
This two-page article explores both halves of capstone Project 12:
(1) you co-parenting partners consciously striving for
frequent balance in your personal, re/marital, household, and nuclear
stepfamily daily lives, while working patiently at up to
ongoing Projects
plus "daily life." The article
suggests a buffet of specific attitudes, choices, and activities that
you can pick among to promote balance, and to (2) enjoy your
stepfamily-building process. Four key ingredients in this buffet raise your odds of staying contentedly balanced
enough
together, over the years. They are:
Care enough
about yourself and each other to patiently (1) raise your personal
and (2)
your true Selves
to guide your personalities (Project 1); and...
Invest
time and energy
developing effective communication
and...
Choose to live your lives
on
purpose, rather than numbly, passively, reactively, and defensively, and
you co-parents steadily...
Invest
significant priority, time, and effort in all 10 other ongoing co-parent Projects, with steady,
cautious optimism.
|
Option:
use the three Project-11 worksheeets periodically
to help you assess your balances along the way and make adjustments as
your stepfamily adventure unfolds. |
Bon Voyage!
Pause, breathe, and recall why you read this article. Did you get what
you needed? If so, what do you need now? If not - what
you need? Is there anyone you want to
discuss these ideas with?
Who's answering these
questions - your wise resident
or
<<
Project-12
index
/ Prior page
/
Add to favorites
/
Print page
/
Email this article's address
>>
