Subscription
Enter your e-mail address to receive this newspaper column each weekday.
My strict privacy policy will keep your email address 100% safe and secure.
-
Emotionally exhausted? Here are some ways to find restoration…
10 Oct 2007 by Rod Smith in Anger, Betrayal, Boundaries, Children, Communication, Differentiation, Difficult Relationships, Divorce, Domination, Family, Forgiveness, Friendship, High maintenance relationships, Listening, Living together, Long distance relationships, Marriage, Meditation, Parenting/Children, Past relationships, Pornography, Re-marriage, Reactivity, Recovery, Sexual abuse, Sexual compatibility, Victims, Violence, Voice / 12 Comments
Are you emotionally out of shape? Psychologically exhausted? Tramped on? Feel trapped? Just as a person can be physically run down, so also can one become emotionally depleted. Here are simple, not easy, steps to getting your internal life into shape. Each will do your internal life as much good as frequent exercise does for a person who is physically out of shape:
Take up your life....
1. Speak up where you might previously have remained silent.
2. Realize that not everything you think and feel has to be said or reported.
3. Focus on your own behavior and not the behavior of others. (This might be the most difficult of the 11 suggestions).
4. Rid your life of all blame.
5. Realize you are where you are as a result of your own choices.
6. Set small, secret goals involving no one but you.
7. Refuse to compromise when it comes to telling the truth no matter how much love may be involved.
8. Forgive where you might have previously have been resentful.
9. Do not function in roles not legally yours (don’t play wife if your are not, or dad if you are not).
10. Grasp the fact that emotional health is an individual journey and no one can be held responsible for your journey toward greater emotional health but you.
11. Clarify, for yourself, where you end and others begin. (This IS me, my issue, my responsibility: this is NOT me, my issue, my responsibility).About the Author: Rod Smith
-
-
Get Rod on FaceBook and/or Twitter
-
Verbal log-jam
When I was a boy I’d endlessly practice the fluent delivery of my name but it seldom flowed easily from my lips. As if it was new news to me, adults pointed out my stutter. Perhaps they thought I was beginning, at that precise moment, for the first time in my life to spit from the mouth, twist at the neck, jig my head back and forth trying to expel some inane statement log-jammed between my gut and my throat.
Idiots – always adults, children were surprisingly patient, – would make me repeat sentences as if a repeat performance of the humiliating uncoordinated gesticulations, my arms and legs flying in all directions, would make for an easier delivery the second time. That I’d just spent every ounce of energy trying to cough it up was lost on them. That I was already thoroughly humiliated was something to which they were blind.“Practice, practice,” they’d say as if stutterers simply didn’t speak enough. “Think before you speak. Now – try that again,” they would declare slowly and loudly as if I was stupid and deaf. These thoughtless people were ignorant of just how much stutterers do think. Too much – which is central to the issue!
If I’d known at twelve or thirteen that the day would come when I’d make a career of public speaking I might have strolled off a high-rise building.
Now it is quite easy to hide. I am very comfortable with crowds.
It’s asking driving directions or ordering food at a drive through where it gets tricky. Sitting in a cozy circle waiting for my turn to introduce myself sends my blood-pressure through the roof. The ticket attendant on the London underground can render me dumb after I’ve just spent days addressing a room full of graduate level adults about Family Systems Theory. I know. It sounds ridiculous.
I was almost immobilized the first time I saw Thulani put himself “on duty” in the event he needed to be my mouthpiece. He did it. No one asked him or appointed him. He just did it.
-
Life in our beloved 122
If the inside of a house (outside, too, I suppose) is a metaphor of the lives of the people who live in it – which is something I once read somewhere – gosh, are we in trouble. Our house is a mess.
I consistently clean it room by room, thinking often of the legend that the Golden Gate Bridge that says there’s some guy constantly painting it. I feel for him. While I am sure the view is wonderful I must believe that the poor guy whose doing it daily from one end to the other must find the wind and the weather quite a challenge.
Our house is the same, but instead of painting from end to end and back again, I am the guy constantly cleaning, – and, it’s hard to tell.
Where I cleaned and swept and dusted and vacuumed and sponged and sterilized yesterday there are scooters and bicycles (boys), mail in piles (me), books (boys and me), newspapers (me), magazines (me), and socks (boys and Max, the Chihuahua).
Turn my back and the boys and Max are at it again – enjoying life as boys (and a dog) while I find being a cleaning lady quite an exhausting challenge.
There is a point of no return, I’ve noticed, or at least a point of the chaos where I feel compelled to let it all go for a while and I throw up my hands and join in the fun of trashing the place.
But when I clean I like to think I’m just like the guy painting the Bridge, which I can only imagine must be a slow and methodical task.
I do it room by room, starting at one end, the front, in the event that I soon lose interest – then, at least, the front room is somewhat in order. I push it (trash, magazines, books, socks, clothes) all back from the living room, through the piano room, then into the TV room until everything lands up in the kitchen.
Once it hits the kitchen I separate out what’s Max’s – he’s has his own set of toys with which he ruins the house – what’s Nate’s, what’s Thulani’s, and what can be recycled, dumped, restacked on bookshelves, placed in drawers, hung on a hanger, or filed in the “important documents” file I keep losing.
We moved into “122” (creatively named for its street number and which has had very few updates since it was built in 1886) when Thulani was about two – and I have been getting it in order ever since. Nate joined us in 2002. Max, in 2009. The house- attachment, at least for the boys and Max, is strong. When I talk of selling Thulani reminds me that Rhino, the husky that was on the run for nine months and returned to die within a few weeks after we reconnected, is buried in an Air France first class cabin blanket just outside of the kitchen door. Nate reminds me of where the fat goldfish is buried and Thulani ends the litany with his inability to think of living in a house without the large tree in the front yard where he has his brother (and Max) have “peed like boys” (and a dog) for the past several years.
So. I’ll go on painting and, before you send me letters about giving the boys chores and responsibilities and assigning daily tasks and getting on top of it before it gets on top of me let me advise that you are barking up the wrong tree (sorry, Max for the dog metaphor) because we do have all that in place and it does work here and there and off and on.
I know, I know. Consistency is the name of the game for parenting and let me tell you, the ONLY thing that is consistent here is the need to keep going room by room with or without the boys (and Max) to get this little bridge painted one stretch at a time so the world can see just how organized and decent our lives are here at our beloved “122.”
-
Being a white South African can come with complications
Being a white South African reared under Apartheid is no simple matter. It permeated everything for me. While I do not pretend to have been a political activist, I was always cognizant that my privileges, simply a result of being born white, were unmerited, and most unfair especially when enjoyed at the expense of others who were not. I think this unsettling truth (for I took advantage of my station in life) was somewhat of a companion to me from the age of about six or seven.
I am regularly aware that:- I was discouraged from playing soccer in the “front” yard (in view of the neighbors) with the servant’s children. While this may seem insignificant in the light of other much more severe problems rising from racism, it was huge for me as a child on several fronts. I loved the children and I loved soccer even more. They were excellent soccer players.
- I did attend a segregated school as did almost all white South Africans while there did exist some church schools that were integrated even under Apartheid. I vividly recall my school principal scolding the entire student body (over a thousand white boys) because a domestic worker (a black adult man) was seen walking in the neighborhood wearing a school blazer.
- Although, by no means wealthy, I was waited on hand and foot by a full-time servant.
- In the late 80s I was warned not to pray publicly for Prisoner “Nelson” Mandela from my church pulpit.
- A member of my family did balk at my request that I bring black children to his home-swimming pool to swim.
- Even as late as 1987 I was embarrassed that a young black boy whom I’d “helped” in his squatter camp had shown up at my door unannounced. I recall wondering what the neighbors would think seeing a child arriving at the home for a social visit and not to work in the yard.While I am aware that these are piddly problems in the light of what millions faced under the Apartheid regime, I am also aware that these factors in my immediate environment “shaped” me into believing perverse things (like in my own superiority and in “their” inferiority) about persons of other race groups. More significantly, I am frequently reminded that my children and I could not have shared life as we now do if we were still living in the era of Apartheid.
-
Location, location – remembering winter in August
We live very close to our school and church, so close we can hear the school bell from our kitchen and the church bells in my bedroom.
Sometimes we walk to both and we don’t see the car for days.
I like it. I like not having to get in and out of the car. I like not having to negotiate traffic, something as synonymous with life in the USA as Disney, Fast Food, and the Fourth of July.
That’s the upside.
We are a 10-hour-drive to the nearest coast – and, most of the east coast beaches are not worth the drive. The west coast, which has many wonderful beaches comparable to where I was reared, takes three full days of driving to reach.
Being landlocked is one thing but another is the weather. Indiana weather is erratic, neurotic, and downright psychotic.
Days ago I could’ve (but I didn’t) ice-skated across the street. Now, as I write, there’s a small lake in the street next to the sidewalk from last night’s rain. The weather is so brutal and extreme (it is as hot as blazes in the summers) that when we do drive anywhere (there are no grocery stores in walking distance) the streets are often full of potholes making some of America’s finest suburban streets resemble stretches of road you’d find in a rural stretch of South Africa’s Wild Coast. So, I am exaggerating but really not too much. Washington Boulevard is a challenge to drive right now, you have got to dodge potholes and loose pavement or, unless you drive a tank, you stand to severely damage your suspension.
But I do love living here. My neighbors are some of my best friends. My children are free and safe in the neighborhood and everyone knows everyone’s children. Even as I write Joseph (born a week or so before Thulani) from down the street has wondered into the house and it is quite likely he will eat with us, stay the night, and then wander down back down the street to his home sometime in the morning. His mom and I will talk sometime between now and nightfall unless he of course chooses to wonder off home and be gone just as quickly as he showed up.
Potholes and crazy weather won’t send us running, although we will drive to church in the morning – even though it is really close. I’m not sure I want to brave the elements which could be a snow-storm, an ice storm, the threat of a tornado – or a little or a lot of each. What else could you expect during March in Indiana?
-
Ready to adopt?
If you wait until you are ready to adopt a child you never will because you will never be ready. The baby, and only the baby, will make you ready. Reading the right books will be helpful, but “ready” magically comes upon you when a real baby is sleeping in your arms or crying in the middle of the night. If you are not ready to change diapers – and I always am amused at the big deal about this non-issue – being unprepared will last only as long as a clean diaper. Of course you can go baby-stuff-shopping, get a room painted, stencil yellow ducks on the wall – if you know long enough in advance your child is coming. But painting a bedroom with ducks and rainbows and a pot of gold, and getting a truck load of stuff from your local one-stop baby emporium will only fill your home with a lot of weird and wonderful, and mostly unnecessary, equipment.
Children interrupt everything. It is the child who is really ready to teach you, whether you are or not. Once he arrives he will become the hub of all your scheduling. You will be fine with this because the child is not an interruption to your life but rather, from this point on, central to it.
The baby will make you ready and you can’t really prepare for the baby until he is breathing in the crib right next to your bed.
Life inside the Smith household
-
12 Comments
Nancy
Rod – I am curious about the power of “do’s and don’ts” in life. When I follow the biblical model of “do,” I am reenergized. Another do – “Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors for you where there were only walls.” Joseph Campbell, author of The Hero with a Thousand Faces
11 Oct 2007 10:10 am
Galen
Forgive….or accept. I have forgiven my father for years for his abusive acts on me as a child, only to have him “go after” my daughter. One can only forgive those that ask forgiveness and earn it.
29 Oct 2007 09:10 am
smd1985
Many times it’s better to keep your mouth shut.
14 Nov 2007 08:11 am
Sheilah
There is a difference between forgiving and forgetting. One can forgive and not forget the lessons that were learned through the tough times. We can forgive others for the harm that they caused us but not forget it so that we may keep our own loved ones from suffering like we did in the past.
23 Dec 2007 10:12 pm
Belinda
I’m in a relationship for years. My friend is struggeling with depression and gets treatment. On sick leave now for 4 months. My problem is that in this 2 years I allways have to understand what he is problem. His mood can change within a second from good to bad. Most of the times in the evening when I need support & love or just want to be myself he will get a way to bring me down, everytime. This happens mostly in the week and he will never do this before family or his friends. I told him and I feel that I’m just good enough to look after him and I must be there whenever he needs me, because if I ask something he will get a way to be spightfull or change his mood. I also told him that in 2 years, I’m to afraid to be myself. I’m a very spontanious person and cant be myself with him. He’s trying from his side and everytime it has happened his sorry and wants to start over. I asked him the other day if he ever talks to anyone else as he talks to me, because I always talk and treat him better than anyone….
Emotionally I’m very down. To get back from work, everyday and facing this is breaking all my hope I had for this relationship. I do love him very much, but I don’t like what he is doing to me emotionally…
24 Jan 2008 05:01 am
louis love
my girlfriend and i recently broke up after two years together. ilove her more than anything, and i am trying desperately to fix our relationship, and make it better. she said i did not want to be a father to her 5 yr. old daughter. i love her daughter as much as my own. my way of parenting is wrong and i am taking drastic steps to fix them. what can i do to fix our relationship and show her that i will do whatever it takes for us to be one happy family.
05 Apr 2008 11:04 am
moira
you know wat i have a very abusive relationship.my boyfriend has a 8 years old daughter and i have a 3 years old boy. We are living together with his daughter but he doesnt want my baby and i cant leave him cause we opened a company together but i am scared i wil lose everythin i have if i leave him.eish
02 Jul 2008 01:07 pm
inhale, exhale, feel, breathe » Emotionally exhausted?
[...] Are you emotionally out of shape? Psychologically exhausted? Tramped on? Feel trapped? Just as a per… [...]
vicky
i’ve been married for a little more than a year. i’ve experienced verbal abuse from my husband and even caught him with another woman. i almost left him. since that time, he has learned to treat me better. my siblings have only heard about his other woman and they’re angry. i’m caught in between because while i understand their anger, i’m presently in a better situation with my husband. i get emotionally drained having to absorb and be the middle person between my husband and my family. the hardest thing for me, i guess, is to admit that this was my choice and now i have to live with it. someday, i pray, things will become better. i wish i knew better what to do.
04 Sep 2008 05:09 am
Susan
I don’t agree with number 5.
22 Nov 2008 08:11 am
Rod E. Smith, MSMFT
…. well, Susan, if you’d perhaps enlarge, I’d be able to make a comment…… Please write more…..
Rod
22 Nov 2008 09:11 pm
Leslie
I agree with Susan: I too disagree with number 5.
Although one can direct or influence one's life circumstances, one does not have absolute control over the environment and other people. We therefore have limits as to how far and how quickly we can move from circumstance A to circumstance B, and others can put us in undesirable circumstances that we wouldn't choose to be in.
An analogy might be the time I was t-boned while driving. The other driver simply did not see my car and darted out from a stop sign. My braking influenced the collision so that she hit my left fender and wheel rather than my driver door, but no amount of acceleration, swerving, or braking on my part would have prevented the collision. I do not think that my choice to be on the road counts against me.
I would also point out that number 5 certainly does not apply to emotionally exhausted victims of child abuse, and I would point out that number 5 is arguably contradictory to number 4.
My suggestion for a rewording would be: "Consider your own choices in your present situation and in how you can find your way to emotional strength."
As for me, I'm emotionally exhausted on a couple of fronts, and I'm doing everything I reasonably can to find my way out. I have placed multiple irons in proverbial fires, but I simply cannot snap my fingers and have both love and a healthy job in an instant.
Do you understand the concept of "carrying capacity?" Apply it to a person. If one's resources are depleted faster than they can be replenished, one crashes. I know this from experience, and I'm running at reduced capacity now. I'm doing what I can to change my circumstances, but there's no quick fix and I cannot make others love me, hire me, or be my customer when I start my business.
22 Aug 2009 11:08 pm
Leave a Comment