One of my clients has been writing down thoughts from her reading and reflection. Here they are:

~~~

You must treat yourself with great care and manage yourself with the understanding that you are a very important person.

You teach people how to treat you. You need to make a life decision that you would rather be well than treated badly.

If you continue to do what you have always done, you will continue to have what you have always had. If you do different you will have different.

If it’s unfair, it’s unfair but you still have to deal with it.

Is what I have what I really want, or is it what I have settled for because it was easy, safe or not as scarey as what I really wanted?

When you choose the behaviour, you choose the consequences.

You did what you knew how to do, and when you knew better you did better.

You are accountable for your own life. You are not a victim. You can actively, purposefully choose to change the results and experiences you create.

You will never fix your problems blaming someone else. I didn’t say you are to blame for everything either, but you are accountable.

If you are in a prison, you have to be the one to open the door. Claim the right to the feelings you have and then claim to live with dignity and respect.

There are payoffs we receive for the behaviour we live by. Discover what they are.

I can become addicted invisibly to the sense of security that comes from avoiding pain, risk, intimacy or simply living.

You depend on yourself to straight shoot with yourself, you can’t change what you don’t acknowledge. Be ruthlessly truthful with you. It take courage to move out of denial and defensivensess. We don’t require lip service acknowledment or just insight but real commitment to change behaviour of what we don’t like or what is not working in our lives.

You are not trying to drag yourselves down but trying to be real. You have to give yourself permission to have distorted feelings, thoughts, accumulated baggage in your life.

People don’t care about your intentions, they care about what you do. What matters, what determines your life is what you do,

Pain can be something you use to your benefit, don’t deny, mask or mislabel pain. Use the pain to reach for something different. It may be the very motivation you need to change your life.

Identify the filters through which you view the world. Acknowledge your history but don’t be controlled by it.

Most of us know what we don’t want but we don’t know how to name what we do want.

Rowland Croucher November 2001