Creating My Best Life; Emotional Awareness

Seek Knowledge, find Wisdom, live your Truth!

Recently on the Empowering Solutions Community page I'd posted this: "Avoiding my emotions created a teapot effect where I would blow up or boil dry. ~SusanKs". 


The way I described myself in the past was as having 2 emotions; angry to the point of rage and sadness/depression that would debilitate me. In between I lived in a state of numbness where I didn't feel anything. 


Emotional extremes and swings from one extreme to the other was my normal until I understood that I could learn to connect with my body and my physical responses to my life experiences aka my emotions and...


...that there was a full range of emotional experiences not just the highs and lows I was accustomed to.


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I Was Looking for Happy....In All the Wrong Places

Seek Knowledge, find Wisdom, live your Truth!

I remember being asked...

"So when will you be happy?" by those who seemed to have some secret that I didn't know about. My life was miserable. My relationships were often full of strife, my job was never the right job, my boss never the right boss, my hair, my weight, my car, clothes....

Were never just "enough".

I used to strive to be more, have more, do more. My value, my worth and my happiness were determined by people places and things that I could have, be or do.

The thing was - my focus on doing and having really didn't have much effect on my state of being and being happy.

I was happy for a minute if all worked out the way I thought it should work out.

Likewise if there were any snafu's I was not so happy and often sad or angry but not often truly "happy" but for a minute or two - when all was sparkly shiny and new.

Learning to understand that my state of well being was dependent on things outside of myself motivated me to search for the answers to being happy when the people places and things outside of my physical person didn't dance to my tune the way I thought they should.

I sought and I found that in letting go of the outcomes I usually got the outcome that I wanted.

Learning to let life unfold naturally meant learning to recognize when I was seeking my happiness in all the wrong places....

And that when I stopped looking...under the rocks, at the mall, the car dealership, the mortgage company or the boyfriend, husband, kids...

I found it in myself. :)
~

Happiness is (Not Always) A Choice Read here about how by understanding the source of my pain I was able to finally let go of it :)

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This Week on Empowering Solutions Thursday August 18th 2pm EST

Lets talk about "self"; self love, self confidence, self acceptance....and whats that got to do with healing from an abusive past? What is it about "self care" that we seem to always put on the bottom of the list? And - how is this an empowering solution?

Join Darlene Ouimet of www.emergingfrombroken.com and Susan Kingsley-Smith this Thursday at 2pm EST at Empowering Solutions on BTR!

Follow this link: http://www.blogtalkradio.c​om/empoweringsolutions/201​1/08/18/breaking-free-from​-broken-with-susan-darlene

Empowering Solutions - every 1st and 3rd Thursday at 2pm EST (USA)

www.blogtalkradio.com/empo​weringsolutions

Join us at the Empowering Solutions Community page here!

Creator of My Life

Seek Knowledge, find Wisdom, live your Truth!

When I was encouraged to and did identify my normal emotional response to abnormal life experiences as an illness I believed something was wrong with me instead of with my life experiences or dysfunctional relationships. 

This denied the reality of the source of my pain and caused me to become stuck in managing symptoms instead of going through the normal emotions of acknowledging what I survived and learning how to cultivate healthy relationships.

Shifting away from a paradigm of "illness" empowered me to begin to see that what I was lacking in emotional resiliancy and healthy interpersonal relationships - I could learn. 

It shifted me from being an enabled victim to an empowered creator of my life. 

Emotional and Psychological distress is real but treating it as an illness or as symptoms to be managed left me powerless to learn to live beyond it and left me dependent on coping and managing instead of creating and living the life I wanted for myself.
~

Did you miss the live broadcast? Listen to the archives of the most recent Empowering Solutions program at Blog Talk Radio....Christina Enevoldsen and I talk about how we came to understand that were were not the problem but how we could be our own solution. Click here to download or listen! 

From the Archives...

Claiming A New Paradigm For Myself Part 2

This Became My Truth

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Getting Unstuck Sometimes Requires Rocking the Boat

Seek Knowledge, find Wisdom, live your Truth!

 Creating My Best Life:)
Wednesday, April 27, 2011 7:29 AM

From a recent post at the Empowering Solutions Facebook Community page....


Feeling the anger at being violated and having that anger heard can lead to the grief that offers the soothing balm of the tears that allow our emotional wounds to heal. Denying our anger or sharing our pain with those who cannot separate their own issues from ours serves to keep us stuck and unable to move into, through and out of our pain. ~Susan Ks 2011


Getting unstuck sometimes requires rocking the boat. When we are not finding relief from our pain we can take a look at what we are doing with it. 


Becoming mired in "doing" the work or doing it "right", following someones "model" or therapeutic theory, accepting unsolicited advice from well intentioned but unenlightened folks who are still working out their own pain by fixing and rescuing others....


serves very simply and quite often as busy work that allows us to deny our feelings of anxiety and distress allowing us to put off doing the "hard work" of emotional healing.


Learning to identify "stuck" as a signpost of denial or bargaining where we are still looking for someone to... 


"rescue" or "fix" us...


tell us what to do or what we are doing wrong....


can create the momentum that will allow us to move into, through and out of that place of stuck.


Emotional healing requires making that shift from "doing" to that place of "being" where we connect with and engage in emotional healing.


The only way out...


is through.


Trusting the process requires trusting myself.


We all hold the light and the wisdom.


It was when I stopped trying to find it in others that I found it in myself.


Read about what that was like for me here. 

~


From the archives...


This is How We Do It...The "Hard Work" 


Pain Is Pain


Intellect and Insight 


"story"? Or "Story"?


~

Happiness Is (Not Always) A Choice

Seek Knowledge, find Wisdom, live your Truth!

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One of the things that I hear from survivors around the world is how the "positivity" movement neglects to take into account the reality of the traumatic experience.

Its as though somehow magically if we paste a smile on our faces and do the infamous "fake it till you make it" thing that our pain and distress will just....

poof!

Disappear.

And to those well intentioned folks who continue to tout the idea that the past has no impact on today I'm going to respectfully say...

Not. 

Over at Emerging From Broken trauma survivor and Coach Darlene Ouimet has posted yet another article on learning to live beyond broken and how happiness for someone who has been given the burden to make everyone else happy by discounting their own pain - is really not a choice.

Read up on this post here at Darlenes Blog....

It is only by understanding the source of our pain that we are often able to let go of it.

The benefit of this is that we can finally begin to see that we truly do hold the power over our own lives - but only after we give responsibility for others lives and happiness back to them.
~

From the archives...

Being Positive vs Being Pollyanna and Part 2 here is a guest post by Danni of Positively Present that discusses the difference between positivity that denies reality and that which honors it.

Seek Knowledge, find Wisdom, live your Truth!

A quick note today to bring y'all :) up to speed with the happenings over at Empowering Solutions on Blog Talk Radio this month on August 4th and 18th....

This Thursday August 4th 2pm EST (USA)

Guest: Christina Enevoldsen from overcomingsexualabuse.com

Our topic: Survivors of childhood oppression/abuse/neglect often find themselves in abusive relationships in adulthood. A false method of “empowerment” is to accept the blame for the abuse. The truth is that we are empowered to stop the abusive cycle, but only by realizing that though we aren’t the problem, we are the solution. Coming up this week on Empowering Solutions we’ll be talking with Christina Enevoldsen, Co-Founder of the online resource overcomingsexualabuse.com and  would like to invite you to join us this Thursday, August 4^th at 2pm EST at Empowering Solutions on BTR!

Tune in again on August 18th at 2pm EST

Topic: Breaking Free from Broken!

Join myself and Darlene Ouimet from Emerging From Broken as we continue to discuss the issues connected to learning to recognize and overcome the many subtle issues faced by many who are seeking to discover how they too can emerge from - and live WAY beyond - that place of broken! 

PS....

Have you joined the ES community at Facebook? Click here to get there! 

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May you have a most wonderful time creating your own "best life" this week!

Click here to get to the show at BTR this Thursday at 2pm EST!

Creator? Or Constant Victim? Yeah...I was done with that!

Seek Knowledge, find Wisdom, live your Truth!

Victim? Rescuer? Perpetrator or Troublemaker?

We all play these roles at different times and sometimes in the same situation. 

Learning to recognize this is how I learned to change it.

The benefit was that learning this helped me to learn how to cultivate healthy vs dependent relationships.

This empowered me to begin to stop recreating the pattern of abuse in my life that left me feeling powerless over my own life yet feeling responsible for everyone else's life.

On top of that this knowledge helped me to feel more confident about life and the world in general.

Why?

Because I was now in creator of my best life vs. a constant victim of life. :)

~

Psssst!


Keep your eyes open! Things are a growing and changing here in my world and I've got some irons in the fire! 


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With love and appreciation for sharing the journey,


Susan Ks.