Forgiveness

I'm writing about something that I have tried to do unsuccessfully over the years and I want to let you know that it hurts. Only forgiving someone half way is a real killer. When people hurt you and you can't forgive them, it will eat you alive, destroying friendships, relationships and more. The stress from holding on to those things is something that can actually reach the ability to crush you and destroy you emotionally. When I faced a person cheating on me, I tried to forgive her. I am a strong man emotionally, but I couldn't handle that. I acted as if it never happened, but it kept coming back up. It seemed like there was nothing I could do to right the ship.

Now many people say forgive and forget, that is only partially right. When you forgive, you don't necessarily have to not do something about it, i fact there should be action to make sure that it doesn't happen again. Letting go is one thing, if you continue to hold on to the hurt then you won't be able to have a normal life. The funny thing is, I've mostly forgiven the people who have cheated on me but it has taken a lot longer than I would have liked. You don't just hand your trust back to those people, when you love someone, you have to have trust, otherwise you may as well be sitting dead in the water. Love is nothing without trust. That's where I started to make my mistakes. I wanted so badly to stay in the relationships, that I didn't do anything about the incidents that happened, and tried to just forget about it.

First off, you have to find out why it happened. No one who is happy with you will intentionally hurt you. That is a fact. So find what you have to do to change your behavior. This is the first step in making sure it doesn't happen again. You can't just laugh it off, many times when we do that we are just trying to bury the issue. You can't do that. Talk it out, make sure the other person knows what they did to hurt you. That is the only way they can truly apologize. I'm not saying you can't lighten the mood, but it is often not possible. When you do this, you have to be calm and talk, not yell, what is going on. I know that whenever my significant other starts becoming angry at me, I start keying in on what she is saying and I (and I really need to quit this) begin playing a tit for tat game. She hates it, in fact all it ends up doing is making us fight harder and longer, causing more hurt feelings and sooner than later, resentment. Don't intake it, let it out.

The next thing you have to do is know why it hurt you, many people in this world are on some sort of medication to help level their mood. I've taken paxil on and off for many years. You can't just cover this stuff up. I can't say that enough, a great life should never include you having to take a handful of happy pills first thing in the morning! Real forgiveness offers this opportunity to step away from these things, it isn't forgotten, it is learned from. When you love someone, forgiveness comes easier, and when you resent them, it is a big deal to get through.

Now is the kicker, you have to decide if the situation can be avoided again. Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice...well you understand what I'm saying to ya. If there is real change, and you can truly forgive them then by all means, continue on the path. Happiness takes patience. If you can't, don't stay in the relationship, part ways, it maybe for a short time, and it may be for good. I've needed to part ways from the past in order to get to the point where I can let go of some of these things. It has left me jaded and scared, but I am a stronger person for it. I have also learned a lot over the years. I saw a sign on Saturday night that said, "Every sixty seconds you spend frustrated, is a minute of happiness that you cannot get back." Love the people that are around you and don't make your decisions based on a fear of being alone.

I can make you a promise, if you remember these things your life will be better. Put your time into something a little more worth it and let go of the pains that others caused you.

Apologizing

Today I'm going to tell you about something that I am not necessarily good at. I have said I'm sorry so many times in my life it is ridiculous. The problem I ran into was being sorry wasn't good enough. Now I can see that as being very true, in fact I can think of many times I was saying I was sorry based on an excuse, "I'm sorry I can't help myself..." etc.

This is the problem for so many of us, we say that we are sorry, but either we aren't sure about what to be sorry for or we aren't really sorry. If you want to live a great life it is important to know how to apologize to those you love. It isn't about getting all emotional about it, it is about being humble and knowing what you are saying.

The steps I try to take to an apology start with me figuring out exactly what I'm apologizing for. When doing this you have to realize your own actions, not just the circumstances. You have a choice in how you behave towards another person, and it really is that simple. When you hurt another person you typically are not taking their feelings into consideration. That is easy to do when you get angry or frustrated. Know what it is, if you said something that you shouldn't have then admit it, be prepared to admit that you were wrong.

The next thing you have to do is ask the other party to forgive you. This can be tough. When you do this, you will find that you are laying all the action from that point on to the other person. This takes a great deal of humility and bravery, they may not make the choice to forgive you. The words 'I'm sorry' by themselves carry no weight, they are a knee jerk response. If you never actually say those two words you'll be so much better off. Quit copping out and just do it.

Now here is the most important step, when and if the other party does forgive you, you have to NOT repeat the action that led to the apology in the first place, if you are truly apologizing, then you have to change your behavior. The only person who can change you is you. There is no motivation out there bigger than possibly loosing someone or something you love because you wouldn't change.

Sometimes we don't know that something said or something we do will hurt another person, but that is why we have to apologize the right way and then use it as a learning experience. If you don't know what it is like to have the heart ripped out of your chest then you will never understand what you might have done to the other party. When you do go through it, you will want someone to truly ask you to forgive them.

Next time I'm talking about forgiveness, so stay tuned for part two.

Pick Your Battles

Too often times you find yourself fighting, whether that be against your freinds, family, your significant other whoever. These fights cause a lot of stress in our lives, and I know that many times they really aren't worth it. I've seen break ups happen over the silliest things, I've seen families destroyed over it. Fights can ruin days, weeks and lives.

When you approach one of these situations you always have the oppertunity to make a choice, I can't sit here and tell you that you can always avoid it, but it is the reactions that you have during the beginning of the fight that depends on the level of drama that is created by it.

Now I hate drama, but it isn't that I haven't had my fair share of it. I don't know how many times I heard my ex-wife say "whatever" and that was always a key word that seemed to turn it on like donkey kong. It was a cop out word, to my ears it almost sounded like "bite me, your not worth comprimising with." That was my issue. The thing that has taken me so long to understand was that at times she was picking not to fight the battle with me. It isn't unlike me saying "Fine".

In fact the word "fine" created a nasty fight between me and my girlfriend this last friday. The fight wasn't worth it, strangely enough about halfway through she asked me why I was fighting her because by tomorrow it wouldn't really matter to me anyway and what was the purpose of hurting her in the process. She was right, I need to think out a little better what my battles that are worth fighting for.

When you love someone sometimes you want them to follow your "advice" sometimes you watch them do things that make you cringe because they aren't doing it the way that may be best, at least in your mind. The reality is we are all people and we have all had diffent experinces in life that creates us as who we are. When we love someone we need to take the time to walk in their shoes. We need to realize what is really worth it, and there is very little in this world that is worth escalating a conversation to a full blown screaming match.

I know that it seems hard to image but when you are living a great life then you won't spend nearly as long fighting with anyone. The fight will be minimized to what is really worth it. You cannot allow someone else to rule your emotions. There will be fights and disagreements in every relationship, but some of them just aren't worth fighting. Everyone comes with baggage, it is a fact, all of us are tainted in some way. We have to choose how we take the pressure of life, we have to agree or disagree, but we don't have to take it to the level of a relationship ending arguement over something that "really won't matter later". I try to use this as a measuring stick when I decide to fight, is it worth running this person out of my life over?

I know that our pride and our tempers have the ability to get in the way of rational thinking, when that happens you better know how to apologize if the answer to the above question was no.

Trust Me

I have spent the last couple of years since I separated from my ex-wife learning again what it means to truely trust someone again. Trust is a little word that means so much more than anything else. Think about all of your relationships and you will easily find that the best ones all happened while you were able to trust someone else. Trust is something that you give to some and others have to earn. Without trust you cannot have a good relationship with another person.

I will admit I have trust issues...wow big secret huh...Those issues have put a huge damper on my relationship with the woman I've been dating for the last few years. She is great, she is open and honest with me and she is everything I really ever wantedin a woman. The problem is that when I'm not around her the jaded side of me gets the better side. The first thing that we have to accept is that we all have our own lives.

If you are living your life simply trying to make someone else happy, YOU WILL FAIL!!! Most of us do this because of trust. I tried to do this with my ex-wife as our marriage was crumbling, and when the split finally happened, I was miserable, until I started to learn how to live life for myself again. That was only one scenario though. When we start dating a person, we don't spend a lot of time worried about what they are doing, we trust them. Some where along the line we change that way of thinking. Be very careful of this.

I have watched some very successful relationships in my life and one thing I have found is that those successful couples have a fairly common theme, they share their lives together. They have three sets of friends his friends, her friends, and their friends. They have the oppertunity to get away from one another to breathe, but they love spending time with each other. Without it being this way one partner or the other will end up smothering the other one and this could lead to a disaster. Honestly I can admit at times I am guilty as charged.

There are many benefits to this situation in your relationship, if you do everything together all the time there isn't anything to talk about, which leads to a lack of conversation which leads to the break down of a main component of a great relationship and that is communication. So you have room to breathe, you continue having a network of friends who can support you when things go wrong(believe me this is very helpful), you have solid communication, and you have oppertunities to do things that your partner may not appreciate having to do with you. For this to all happen there has to be trust.

Trust is what keeps you out of your partners cell phone, diary, purse, whatever. I have a theory, the second you feel like you have to go through your partners stuff, is the very second that that relationship should be over!!! If you want to have a great life then do not be in a relationship where there isn't that level of trust. Without trust there is no intimacy, there is only the oppertunity for bad feelings to arise. What happens when you do find something? You get heartbroken, or hurt, you are ready to fight. There isn't anything good that comes of it. I will never be flexible on this point ever again, I will not let a relationship continue if there is that level of mistrust.

I have to trust my friends to be there when I need them, I am very fortunate that my freinds are there. I also have a very loving and supportive family, we have our issues, but it doesn't mean that when worse comes to worse that we turn our backs on each other. Trust is a very difficult thing for many people to give away, and deservedly so. I will trust most people until they giveme a reason not to. Real friends will not cross that line, and your family...well you can't just get rid of them so you have to decide what you are going to do about that.

Without trust there isn't love, and without love there isn't trust. Remeber that when you are trying to decide how to really have a great life.

The best things in life

I know that I sound like someone who likes instant gratification. I've mentioned going after what you want and making things happen, but the reality is not everything that makes a great life is something that just happens over night.

I remember when I was a kid saving my money from my birthday and mowing yards and tossing papers to buy a Nintendo Entertainment System. It was the first time I really waited and saved for anything. The funny part of it was that I hid the money from myself so I wouldn't spend it. I ended up losing over one hundred dollars for quite a while, in fact it was a couple of months until the year ended and I pulled my calender down and the money that I had lost fell out.

I went and bought my NES and I felt really good about the fact that I had bought it, it quickly became my most prized possesion and I spent a lot of time playing it, making sure that I beat every game that I could lay my hands on. I tell you that to make this point, some things in life are worth waiting for.

Love is one of those things. You cannot just jump in to the relationships that you would truly want by jumping in to them. You have to take your time finding that right person, someone who will enhance your life, not that you have to live for, someone you want to do anything for. Real love is something that cannot be faked, and it is something that is very true.

When you work hard to accomplish something if feels good to finally get it. The relationship that you wait for, will be something that you will cherish and enjoy when you finally have it. Sometimes it is worth the wait.

Now there is a point that needs to be said, it is one thing to wait on someone, and another to put your life on hold for someone. Live life while waiting on those things that are worth waiting, never stop moving forward. This is the thing I m really trying to point out that when you don't live your life you can't enjoy the gift you are given. If you don't live your life then you are doomed to ruin the things that you are waiting for. Things can be great, but you will be let down if you have all of your eggs in one basket.

I am not a patient person, but I do know the value in holding on to someone who is really worth it. Just make sure that it is worth it, don't wait for something that you like, wait for something that you love. Never try to change a person, the only thing that you can change is yourself.

Go for it‏

I've been thinking for a while about what I should really say. There are so many things I want to accomplish and there are so many things that seem to stand in the way. Well its time that I stop allowing things to stop me from accomplishing what I want to do. Too many people let little things stop them from doing the big things they want to accomplish or do. When thinking of this I think of the movie the bucket list. A man on his death bed makes a list of all the things he wants to do before he dies. Why do we have to wait until we are dying before we try to get all that stuff done. That is why so many things that I have mentioned on this blog are so important.

When my daughter was born I fell in love with that little girl, it facinated me that I was a father, and she didn't have to do anything to earn my love. This is a beutiful statement, but the matter of the fact is that I started putting off things after she was born. She wasn't in the way, she didn't stop me, I just didn't do them. Yes there is a thing called priorities, the problem that I had was that I never made myself a priority, I wanted to make everyone else happy and quietly on the inside I started resenting everyone that was in the way. It wasn't anyone but myself who was really in the way.

How often do we get in the way of ourselves. What makes it worse is that we blame it on other people. My ex-wife really took a beating on this subject. I spent too much time saying no to things that I wanted to do when in reality I needed to just talk with her about these things. I'm not saying over do it and spite everything else, I am saying just don't let it stop you from at least trying. For years I have said that I wanted to study a new martial art. I wouldn't do it because I was always making excuses of why I couldn't, I was too fat, I was too old, I was too busy. These statements were just excuses to my reality. To say that my ex-wife didn't want me to do it may have been true, but I never talked to her about it, she may have loved me doing it, the excersize that I would have gotten and the health benefits would have done wonders for my body and my self esteem, just like it is doing for me now.

Another example of just going for it that I have seen in my life is when a guy is interested in a girl or vice versa. Many times nothing happens between the two people, but not because there isn't any chemistry, but because there isn't even a chance for chemistry to happen. How are you supposed to find your perfect match if you don't try. Many people are afraid of rejection, but the reality is that you won't always be rejected. I know it hurts to ask a girl out for dinner and she says no, it like she says to you, that she finds you so vile she won't even have a free meal with you, I know thats messed up. But I do know that I never took a girl out without approaching her and at least saying hi.

But that is so common across the board that it is painful. So many people give up because they are afraid of rejection. Rejection is something that happens to even the best of us. But it is part of life. There are some levels of rejection that are tougher than others, divorce is a big pill to swallow, when you are going through a divorce often times you feel like the person who promised never to turn their back on you, to be by your side for the remainder of your lives, is giving you the ultimate form of rejection. I know this feeling, but I don't live with this feeling. I believe that marriage is a very serious commitment, something that no one should ever take lightly, but the reality is you never know the circumstances that cause a divorce until you go through it yourself. The reality is that it doesn't matter how much game you have or if you are good looking, or have a lot of money, the thing that really matters is that you are just being you.

Being you is very hard if you aren't trying to do the things for yourself that you need to do. You can't love yourself, or appreciate life if you don't do these things. It even makes it hard to find out what you want if you don't go after it. You will never know what you are good at or what you love if you never do it. How often times I have met people who sit there and say I wish I had done this or that and carry the regret their whole life because they weren't willing to try. Live life because we only get one shot at it,

It reminds me of a poem I once read on a sign, about how the man never drank, never smoked, and he really didn't do anything, and when he died his insurance wouldn't pay because he never really lived. If you want to have a great life then you have to live, just sitting on the couch and living through the screen in front of you isn't really living. Do something with yourself, don't wait on everything else to fall into place make it happen. One of my favorite movie quotes is spoken by Andy Dufresne (played by Tim Robbins) in The Shawshank Redemption is "Get busy living, or get busy dying".

Cleaning out the Closet‏

When you are trying to live the great life that you desire you have to pay attention to the relationships that you keep. There are two types of negative relationships that you really need to shed if you are to be able to take your life to the next level. Sometimes it is very hard to get rid of relationships that you have already invested a lot of yourself into.

As I look back into my past there have been a lot of relationships that I've dealt with as being one sided. This is a relationship that is beneficial to one party and not to the other. These people aren't bad people, they just don't give back to the relationship. These relationships can be very hard to identify because most of the time these are people who have been around along time and may have never done anything wrong to you. "Don't bite the hand that feeds you." Words to live by when you are one of these people. Some times they do things that is beneficial to them, but describe it as something that they did for you.

I personally had difficulty realizing how much these relationships were effecting me. I would make the attempt over and over to get them to realize that the door needed to swing both ways and it wouldn't happen. I would spend a lot of time being frustrated because things wouldn't change. You CAN NOT change a person, if you are spending a lot of time anyone, a friend, a significant other, or a relative, you have to remember this just isn't possible. That is why you have to sever the tie so they don't have the ability to drag you down.

I know it is hard to sever the tie with family, that is why you have to minimize the damage by removing other negative relationships completely. You can reduce the situation by limiting your exposure to those people. I'm not saying that you just don't care about these people, you just create distance so you can move forward.

The other type is the relationships you have with people who are always negative. Sometimes it is good for a friend to help you look at both sides of a situation when you are making choices, but there are times when they should just be supportive. Some people are just negative all the time and these people can really drag you down. This can be a touchy subject, because all of us have times that this happens to us. Here again I'm not saying don't not care about those people but create distance from them. You don't need someone always telling you that you can't do something that you want to do.

The negativity that can be brought from these two types of relationships can be very difficult to cope with. Don't let other people bring you down, frankly I asked people to just get on board with the things that I am doing or get off the train. That is where the title of this blog came from, I personally am not going to let people hold me back. Good friends are something that we need to gather around us and the others we need to at least hold at arms distance.

The next post I will talk about those friends, but for now it is time to just clean out the closet.