Mike Easley's Blog

Words matter and stories matter even more because they are powerful. The stories we tell ourselves have the power to define who we are and who we may become. Our stories can create a bright future or lead us into despair.

These stories can be short snippets, almost captions or thought bubbles that come into our mind. These thought bubbles can string together as we give them our attention, and ultimately create a narrative for our lives.

I have a narrative that runs in my mind and I call it the voice of “I am not”. It goes something like this. “I am not smart enough, I am not good looking enough, I am not happy enough, I am not thin enough, I am not kind enough, I am not strong enough, I am not enough.”

It took me very a long time to understand the voice of I am not, and to tell it to “go to hell!” I truly believe that that is where the voice of I am not comes from.

Here is the deal. If you believe something to be true, it will be for you. That is why the stories that we tell ourself are so powerful.

It takes work, but it is possible to rewrite our stories. Our brains are so good at recognizing and building patterns. These patterns are created to save ourselves time and to make our brain’s processing efforts easier and faster. Good patterns help us and, unfortunately, not-so-good patterns do not help us.

Neuroplasticity is the word scientists use when they talk about how the brain can rewire itself. It is a proven fact that we can change how our brain works and its wiring. Stories that we continually tell ourselves create well-established pathways. Think of this like ruts in a road. The old saying about someone being in a rut really makes sense.

You can smooth over these ruts and take yourself a completely new direction just by telling yourself a new story for your life.

It is not a one-and-done thing. It takes time and energy and it is totally worth it. You can create a beautiful story for yourself with new words, new phrases, new paragraphs and chapters from your life.

You can create a better story for yourself. Journaling is a great way to start building that new narrative and creating possibilities and freedom from those stories that are holding you back.

In Part 2 of the ANTICS, Carence shows you how to create a new story for your life. Just like every journey starts with one step; a new story begins with just a few words.

Today, let your story begin with “I am”.

I am enough.

The post What story are you telling yourself? appeared first on The Antics.

It took me three failed marriages, nearly 30 years of marriage in total, and a good therapist to help me understand what needed to change so that I could break the cycle of relationship dysfunction that I was in. Once I realized that I was the only thing I could really change, I finally began to change.

Our attachment style begins to form in our earliest years of development. This typically occurs from birth to about two years old and some psychologists theorize that this sets the stage for our future relationships. A parent who responds to their child’s needs, consistently and appropriately, will help the child build a secure attachment style. The more consistently and appropriately the parent responds, the more secure the attachment style in their child.

An inappropriate response occurs when a loved one tells you yes, but actually means no. An example might be that a couple agrees to see a movie, and then when the movie is done, one partner is mad that “you made” them go to that movie. Laughing when someone is hurt, scared, or feeling insecure might also be an inappropriate response. These improper responses can be really frustrating as adults, but when it happens to young children it can confuse their understanding of relationships and attachment. Our brains are amazing pattern recognizing systems and these inconsistent and inappropriate messages can create problems in our development.

We may think that inconsistent and inappropriate responses are normal and we are attracted to people who display these characteristics. We may feel like these people complete us, make us whole, are our soulmate, and the person of our dreams. That person of our dreams may soon become something in a nightmare.

It might be easy to blame our problems on our parents and our families, and yet there are so many examples of people rising well above their circumstances. What matters most in our lives is the here and now and having the desire, knowledge, and ability to make meaningful change in the one thing we have the most control over, ourselves.

I have struggled with insecure (or anxious) attachment for as long as I can remember. Some of this started when I was very young. The patterns continued to develop past childhood and as I moved from school to school, sometimes multiple times per year, during grade school through high school.

I continue to work on and struggle with the feelings of insecurity and the fear of being abandoned. I have learned to recognize when those feelings come up that they are very old feelings and not at all related to my here and now.

As we do our work and become more emotionally healthy, we begin to attract people who have done their work and are emotionally healthy themselves. We can break that cycle of attachment styles.

I finally learned that if you dig deep enough that the gold will find you. It did for me, and for the first time I am in a relationship with someone who is emotionally healthy, doing their work, and I am learning how to give and receive a secure attachment style.

You might be in pain right now and I know how bad that hurts. I felt alone, unworthy, and invisible. I also felt like I was in a shame storm when I thought about three failed marriages. Who gets married and divorced three times? Well, I did!

I learned a lot from the experiences, and it led me to writing The ANTICS. My goal in writing this book was to help at least one person. Perhaps that person is you.

I wanted to share the story of Carence and Narcy to help people understand they are not alone, and that they can find a way to begin their healing journey. Meet them in The ANTICS and begin your journey to a more fulfilling life.

Dig deep, and the gold will find you!

The post Can I change my insecure attachment style and cycle of dysfunctional relationships? appeared first on The Antics.

There seems to be quite a few people asking how to break the cycle of dysfunctional relationships. The good news is that there is only one person who you can change, and the bad news is that you can only change yourself.

Let’s not kid ourselves, relationship dysfunction is terribly painful. Just look at my friend Carence in Part One of The ANTICS. You may see things that are familiar to you, even if you are in a healthy relationship.

All relationships experience problems. Problems may become dysfunctional when they cannot be resolved. If we are unable or unwilling to actually resolve problems, they do come back to create pain and suffering. It happens over and over, just like being on a merry-go-round.

These unresolved problems can create feelings of anger, frustration, depression, disengagement and detachment within ourselves and towards others. If you are experiencing these problems more often than not, and the feelings are impacting important parts of your life—like sleep, work, and your important relationships—it is time to do something.

When this was happening to me, I spent my time and energy trying to change someone else, or to accept things that went against my core being. Frustration and resentment would build and I would use work and exercise to cope, escape, and numb. Eventually, I would exhaust my ability to contain this negative energy and the same old arguments and fighting would flood right back in, just where we left them the last time.

Rinse, repeat, hello dysfunction.

It does not have to be this way. You don’t have to be on the merry-go-round of relationship dysfunction. My therapist helped me to realize that I was on the merry-go-round and she helped me to get off, and stay off that crazy-making thing.

This can be pretty scary stuff because we feel like we might be the only person who has ever gone through it. We might tell ourselves that “Nobody’s pain and crazy could be as bad as mine”.

This is the very reason I wrote The ANTICS. Once you meet Carence and Narcy you will understand that you are not alone in your relationship pain. Knowing that, and deciding to do something about it, is the first step in the process of change.

If you are in a dysfunctional relationship, if you know someone in a dysfunctional relationship, or if you want to avoid being in a dysfunctional relationship, then reading The ANTICS might be helpful to you.

You can break the cycle of relationship dysfunction by increasing your understanding, learning you are not alone, and taking that first step on your healing journey.

The post How can I break the cycle of dysfunction in my relationships? appeared first on The Antics.

You hear a lot these days about having boundaries, but what does that really mean? For many people, a boundary is something we might move or adjust to make someone happy, please our partner, or just avoid feeling uncomfortable. If we are continually moving our boundaries, or letting people blow by them, chances are we might find ourselves in a state of internal conflict. If this happens in an intimate relationship, we can find ourselves building resentment, and over time this resentment can build until we can’t hold it in any longer, and something gives. Usually, it’s our temper and we can lose our cool when our fight or flight reflex kicks in.

Being able to maintain solid boundaries is an essential part of being our solid self. If we are unable to establish and maintain boundaries, we are expressing our pseudo self. Solid self and pseudo self are terms that therapists and psychologists use to describe how strong our sense of self is. If your sense of self is strong, your solid self is showing up, if it’s not, hello pseudo self.

When I show up as my pseudo self, especially in relationship interactions, it often feels like I left a piece of myself on the floor. If you do that too often, you can feel empty, ungrounded, and full of holes.

A good first step in having good boundaries and in showing up as your solid self is to have your own list of non-negotiables. You can have non-negotiables for your intimate relationships as well as your day-to-day. Non-negotiables are the things that you are not willing to give up or compromise on. That does not mean you can’t change your list. After all, it’s your list and after some thoughtful consideration it’s perfectly fine to adjust things. The intent is that you don’t change things on the fly by engaging in people pleasing, or out of fear of standing up for yourself. You also don’t have to be aggressive with your list.

If you have met my friend Carence, then you know what can happen and what it feels like when you are so insecure in your relationship that you lose yourself to people pleasing and compromising your values. The crazy thing is that when you are doing it, things feel so right, until they don’t.

Going through life with a solid self is so much better than going through life with your pseudo self and feeling full of holes like a piece of swiss cheese. You can begin your healing journey with one step. Grab a piece a paper and pencil and make your first draft of your list of non-negotiables. If you don’t know how to get started, send me a message from the ANTICS website or message me on the ANTICS Facebook page and I will share Carence’s list of non-negotiables with you.

It’s an easy step, and I am here to help!

The post Why do I need non-negotiables? appeared first on The Antics.

Popular culture, media, and folklore hold up this grand idea of finding one’s “soulmate”. This person is the one who completes us, the one who makes us feel whole, the person who is our other half, our soul mate.

Throughout my life, I have written songs and poems about being completed, finding my other half, and feeling whole. I have searched high and low. It has been a constant in my life and, unfortunately, it is the root of three failed marriages and enough relationship anxiety on which to float a cruise ship.

In my last blog, I talked about having an anxious attachment style and continually dealing with the need to have affirmations to fill the hole and to relieve a horribly uncomfortable feeling. I shared this mental trick whereby you can recognize that feeling and use it to feel brave rather than feeling weak. That was huge progress, but it does fall short of really understanding what is going on.

If you need someone or something outside of yourself to help you feel complete, chances are you are experiencing dependency on someone or something. Psychologists might call this co- dependency. I am not sure what the right word is for it, but I can tell you the feeling sucks. It is uncomfortable at best and frightening at worst.

If we need someone to complete us, we are going to be in for a really hard time, just like my friend Carence in The ANTICS book. Feeling incomplete to yourself and being dependent upon others—yes, your soulmate—to complete you can put you into crazy-making situations. The feelings of emptiness, aloneness, and incompleteness can be so powerful that we may set aside our values, our friends and family, as well as our own identity just to keep those horrible feelings in check.

We may buy into false narratives about ourselves. We embrace these narratives out of fear of feeling less than whole and our fear of feeling incomplete. As we lose pieces of ourselves, bit by bit, we feel even more incomplete. The cycle goes on. Rinse and repeat.

It takes work, real work, to rediscover yourself. You don’t have to find the missing pieces because the incompleteness you are feeling is just that, a feeling. Feelings come and feelings go. You are, and always have been, complete. Somewhere along the line, you just forgot. Perhaps you set it aside or maybe someone fooled you into thinking it was gone.

You can do your work, or your work will do you.

Doing your work means reconnecting with yourself. You can start by developing a practice of just moving. Perhaps it’s walking, hiking, or exercising. If you move your body regularly, you will

begin to reconnect with yourself. Sometimes our past trauma has been so powerful that we may need a counselor or therapist to help us fully reconnect with who and what we are, and that is okay. Every journey starts with one step. Even the smallest step matters.

This is scary stuff and it can be really hard, but you are not alone. Carence can tell you his story and show one way to do the work before it does you. You can also download a free companion journal to complement The ANTICS book. This journal can be the starting point in rediscovering those pieces of you that you thought were missing.

No, you don’t need a soulmate to complete you.

You are already complete. You are already enough. You might, however, need a guide or someone to show you a way.

The ANTICS book and companion journal might be a good first step. Why wait?

The post Do I need a soulmate? appeared first on The Antics.

We hear a lot about trauma these days and the impacts of trauma on everyone. I think we have all experienced some type of trauma in our lives. I was learning about trauma in a book called “The Body Keeps the Score” by Bessel Van der Kolk, MD. I was surprised to find out that two people could experience the very same traumatic event and one person can have immediate problems and the other does not. What is even more interesting is, sometimes the person who had immediate issues related to the traumatic event does not have any long-term issues, and the person who seemed unscathed can suffer for years.

I truly believe that if you can’t feel then you can’t heal. Often, our response to trauma is no response because somehow, we are unconsciously and unknowingly protecting ourselves from experiencing too much emotional pain. We may also have been slowly disconnecting from ourselves over time as we try to cope with situations and circumstances that have no alternatives except to endure.

If we don’t process the traumatic event, or the series of compounding events, Dr. Van Der Kolk tells us that this trauma is stored in our bodies and can manifest as ongoing stress responses in the future. We have all heard of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. This is when someone begins to process stored trauma through various difficult, painful, and potentially dangerous symptoms. Stress responses related to unresolved trauma can manifest as depression, anxiety, and other psychological and emotional problems.

Recently, I was having a really horrible day. I was feeling worthless, pathetic, weak and even shameful. Fortunately, I was able to sit with these feelings and observe them. This is a big change for me because just a few years ago I would be reacting rather than observing. It was a very uncomfortable and painful day as I kept trying to view my present state through these feelings. How could things be so bad when just the day before things were going so well?

I had someone who I could trust enough to share these feelings with and what was going on with me which helped me get through the day. The next morning these feelings began to creep back into my emotional state and for some strange reason I got to wondering about the date of the mediation and settlement from my last divorce. I found the settlement offer and it was exactly two years ago from the day before. Upon this realization, the dam broke and all those stored feelings which I did not process (feel) from two years ago came rushing in. I cried, I cussed, I yelled, I trembled…I was a hot mess.

Thankfully, I have learned to let those emotions in, to feel them, to learn from them, and then to let them go. Sometimes, I have to let them go several times.

Our bodies truly store trauma that we can either process now, or suffer the mental, physical, and emotional effects of not processing them. These feelings can come up when we are triggered with similar situations, smells, sights, circumstances, sounds, songs, thoughts, etc. They can also sneak up on us, just like what happened to me.

Yes, we all have experienced trauma in our lives and it’s likely that we have unprocessed stuff that is waiting to come out. It may even be working its way out as you read this blog. Please know that you are not alone. Talk to a trusted friend, or counselor, and share your feelings with them. Sometimes the load is crushing, and we can feel like no one will ever understand what we are going through.

Sometimes we think we deserve what happened to us. Sometimes we feel shame. You are not alone. You did not deserve what happened to you. You are not a bad person. Sometimes shit just happens.

If you have been in a dysfunctional relationship, chances are you have experienced trauma, and if you have a pattern of these types of relationships, you may be struggling with compounded and unresolved trauma. Seek help. Know that you are not alone.

Join The ANTICS Community, read the book, download the free Companion Journal which is my gift to you.

Remember, if you can’t feel, you can’t heal. A healing journey begins with just one step — perhaps Carence and The ANTICS can help you begin your healing journey.

It might be time to try.

The post Have I been abused and traumatized? appeared first on The Antics.

If you have done any research on attachment styles you probably know there are three main types: secure, anxious, and detached. We develop these attachment styles when we are young and they follow us through our lives and our close relationships. Models that we learn about in psychology and other sciences tend to take complicated systems and simplify them so we can better understand them.

The truth is that no models are perfect and the attachment style model is not perfect either. More than likely, our attachment styles may vary across the range of possibilities. If you have done your work, chances are you experience secure attachment, perhaps most of the time. But at times, any of us can experience the horrible feelings of anxious (insecure) attachment. We can also experience detached attachment. In my own personal experience, a detached style is more of an aloof ‘I don’t care state’; but just because we are not feeling pain that does not mean things are well for us. However, anxious attachment feelings can really get to us.

In my experience, feelings that accompany anxious (insecure) attachment are very uncomfortable, sometimes painful, and really frustrating. Until I wrote the ANTICS book, I suffered from these feelings all the time; and over the past few years, I have figured out ways to work through and, eventually, overcome these feelings.

When I am feeling anxious about a relationship, I feel as though I need affirmation to calm the anxiety. For me, this manifests as a feeling of uncertainty with my stomach churning and my heart aching. When it’s really bad, I can sense my heart pounding and feel my breathing speeding up. Dare I mention sweaty hands and the urge to just run and scream?

It’s a swirling mass of bad energy circulating throughout my body. Ultimately, I end up with a feeling of sadness and weakness; and I do some self-shaming as I wonder why I am so worked up over needing some kind of affirmation. For men, feeling weak is the biggest shame trigger there is. Women might find themselves being shame triggered by wondering why they don’t look better than their friend or why their partner won’t give them the affirmation they need. No matter who you are, feeling anxious attachment sucks.

Why hasn’t my friend, or partner, responded to my text? Did they not see the email I sent? Why haven’t they called me back? Damn, what is wrong with me?!

You can find mindfulness techniques that can help you calm yourself and become more centered. They worked for me, but still this crazy feeling would come back, until I figured out a way to turn the tables on these feelings and claim my power over them.

Turning the tables on anxious attachment takes some serious self-work, much like what Carence did in the ANTICS. Ultimately, you have to be able to hold space for yourself, to be able to have self-awareness of what is going on inside, and to overcome your fear of not being enough. My blog on the Three Legged Stool of Self-Love can guide you on how to be enough. As you heal and realize that you are enough, you can then apply some simple thought techniques to shift your thinking away from being anxious to being empowered.

Here’s how!

1. Realize that you are enough and that you can count on yourself; by thinking you are capable in your own right, you can take care of yourself and meet your needs.
2. Realize that the relationship you are thinking about (be it a friendship or intimate partner) is your choice and you can and will survive if you change your mind; and the same if they choose to change theirs.
3. Understand that it’s okay to give and receive space, and realize that being alone with one’s self is nothing to fear.

It might also be helpful to remember that coping with anxious feelings by feeding off of multiple relationships, being aloof, acting numb, or creating a sense of indispensability in that person are, at best, temporary bandaids; and at worst, codependent crazy-making things like Carence experiences in Part 1 of the ANTICS.

Finally, let your feelings teach you something. If you are feeling anxious, chances are it is a sign that you care about someone enough to like them or even love them. Then realize that in order to have these feelings one must be vulnerable.

Then, remember that vulnerability is actually bravery in action.

Yes, vulnerability is bravery.

You can release your anxious attachment feelings by accepting vulnerability and seeing it for the courage that it truly is.

Anxious attachment feelings tell you that you are caring deeply for something or someone. You have to be vulnerable to care deeply, and only by being brave can you experience vulnerability.

Claiming your power over anxious attachment is a matter of realizing how brave and courageous you are to be vulnerable in the first place.

You are enough, you are not weak or unlovable – you are being brave and courageous. Feeling brave and courageous is much better than feeling the anxiety of anxious attachment. It’s a journey you can make.

Start your healing today, meet Carence in the ANTICS and join him in claiming your power.

When I first realized that I was in, and contributing to, a dysfunctional relationship I knew that something had to change. Unfortunately, that something was my partner. Why do I say “unfortunately”?  After a few sessions with a great therapist, I came to realize that while I truly wanted my partner to change, the only thing I could change was me.

We all have what a therapist might say is our ‘core fears’.  These are fears that gripped us when we were very young and much, or perhaps most, of our early developmental energy was focused on dealing with these fears. For me that fear was about being alone and unloved.  There are as many fears out there as there are people to have them. Understanding them and facing them is no small task. The first step in doing this is coming to understand that you can only change yourself and that you can once you assume personal responsibility.

Fear takes away our power and it wants us to feel like a victim. In our victimhood, it is someone else’s problem. We think to ourselves, “If, and when, this person changes (or this thing changes) then I will be okay.” We may chase this thinking and try to manipulate people or situations in the hopes of changing the situation and resolving our fear.

Fear is powerful and it is immobilizing. Have your ever felt the tingling of fear run up and down your spine when you heard strange noises at night?  Have you felt amused when kids might fear what is under the bed or in their closet? Fears like these can be resolved when we shed light on the situation, and we discover a branch rubbing or tapping on our window; or when we shine a flashlight to show a child there is nothing under the bed.

The core fears we bring with us into our relationships are much the same. Oftentimes, we think our relationships will resolve our fears—make us whole and complete us. The reality is that we are already whole and we are already complete; but our fear tricks us into thinking otherwise. My core fear, of being alone and unloved, stemmed from experiences in childhood.  We moved at least every year from the time I was in kindergarten through the fifth grade. I was continually breaking and remaking relationships through my formative years. I was not aware of the why about my core fear. I only knew that I felt like I would die if I were left alone and unloved.

Because of this fear, I would rush into relationships in order to fill the hole in me that this fear had created. To make matters worse, the women I found seemed to use this fear to perhaps try to resolve their own fears and issues, thus creating drama and major relationship dysfunction. Once I learned about fear and taking personal responsibility, I was able to shine the light on fear and clearly see my Road to Freedom.

What about you? Are you looking for someone or something to complete you? If you are, you might have some underlying core fear and trauma that you are trying to resolve. Is your happiness dependent on someone or something else?

In THE ANTICS, you will meet Carence and see how fear may be keeping you from your healing journey. You can learn how to face your fears, name them, take personal responsibility for yourself, and create the future that you want to live.

Your personal Road to Freedom is only one step away.

I did not understand that a person could lose their sense of self much less lose it from being in a dysfunctional relationship. The term ‘dysfunctional relationship’ is thrown around quite a bit as well as the term ‘toxic relationship’. I know that I was in relationships that you might call toxic or dysfunctional, and for a long a time I felt like that relationship was something that was being done to me. Yep, I claimed my victimhood, at least at the very beginning of my healing journey.

Whether a relationship is dysfunctional, toxic, or whatever negative label we put on it, chances are something is keeping us in it. We are getting something out of it. Shame is a powerful force and it too can work on us and keep us in a relationship that is not good for us. All relationships have their ups and downs. There are glorious mountain-top experiences of joy and connectedness and the valleys that are so low that we wonder if it will ever be possible to see the light of day.

Functional relationships are those where people can effectively deal with problems, truly forgive each other for the hurts, and move on together. More than likely, there will be problems again but they won’t be the same problems, coming up time and time again.

Dysfunctional relationships are those where we repeat the same problems and issues over and over again, where nothing gets truly resolved. Are you still paying the price for a mistake you made years ago? Are you so afraid of being alone that you ignore things in hopes to keep the peace? Do you experience unrelenting feelings of shame when you think about another failed relationship or marriage? Have you changed yourself so many times to try to make your partner happy that you feel like a block of Swiss cheese full of holes?

I did, and it Sucks!

Losing yourself does not happen all at once. It is a series of small decisions or compromises that you make where small pieces of you die—slowly and over time. Compromise is part of all relationships, but unhealthy compromise is soul-killing and crazy-making; and it results in you feeling lost. Your feelings can tell you what is killing your soul, what is driving you crazy and what is unhealthy. Perhaps you drink too much in order to make your partner happy. Perhaps you stop seeing family members that your partner finds annoying. Perhaps you are afraid to stand up for your core values in hopes to keep the peace. Maybe it is forms of intimacy that leave you feeling like an empty used shell.

If you are like me, you end up asking yourself “How did this happen to me?”

Losing yourself in a dysfunctional relationship starts to happen when you stop listening to your gut, and then when you find a way to numb that nagging feeling that is telling you something is wrong. There are so many ways to numb ourselves and some of them even seem to be positive. Some of us use our careers to numb ourselves. We work harder and harder to provide; all the while hiding from our problems at home. We may seek substances and other behaviors to help us feel numb… slowly, over time, until we no longer know who we are.

And, if things could not be worse, we think we are the only person who has ever lost themselves in a dysfunctional relationship. Shame tells us we are bad and it freezes us in our tracks and silences our small and quiet pleas for help.

You are not alone. Talk to a trusted friend. Find a counselor.

Be brave and take that first step on your healing journey.

I was there too. I took that first step, and then another, and another.

Allow Carence and THE ANTICS to help show you how.

That is a tough question and one that I have been asking myself, perhaps too often. My heartfelt thoughts and prayers go out to the families and friends who have lost loved ones due to this devastating virus and related illnesses. Experiencing loss is part of the human condition, but that doesn’t make it any easier.

As I look back over the past 18 months or so, I feel like the entire world has been involved in a massive game of 52-card pick up. (If you don’t know the game, it’s when you take a deck of cards and throw them up in the air, and then proceed to pick them up off of the floor.) Prior to COVID-19, it seemed we all had our values, priorities, and life plans all neatly stacked in our respective “decks”, then BAM! Those cards got tossed in the air and we are now looking around at this jumbled assortment of cards and nothing is in order, and nothing is the way it used to be. Our world has changed and we are trying desperately to make sense of it all.

As we go about the process of picking up our cards, we are giving them a closer look and determining that many cards that we thought were important, no longer seem that important. Values, priorities and life plans are shifting, getting reprioritized, and maybe just set to the side.

Maybe cards that were important to you are no longer important to your partner and vice versa; and the stress of these changes has snowballed to a point where you find yourself alone, wondering who are and how you can go on.

The restacking of my deck, and the impact on my relationship, started before COVID but the process continues today. The loss of a relationship, loved ones, our routines, hopes and dreams, and a future we thought was ours is traumatic. It hurts, its sucks, and it can take our energy and zest for life away.

There is hope. You can start your healing journey with one step.

Healing can take a long time and it is not a straight path. Just when we think things are beginning to settle down, or perhaps even start to get really good, we experience thoughts that Brene’ Brown calls ‘foreboding joy’. It’s where we imagine a worst-case scenario right in the middle of something that is starting to give us joy. Foreboding joy can take us off our healing path and give us a detour into rumination and anxiety. If we ruminate enough, we can even put ourselves into a fight or flight (panic) mode and thereby shut down our rational brain.

At the height of my relationship problems, my mental ruminations became a substitute for real conversations with real people about how my deck of cards was changing. I felt alone. I felt like no one would understand me. I felt shame and dread about the idea of failing in another relationship—being alone, by myself, and with no one to love or to love me. Unloved and undeserving of love was my biggest fear.

In Part 1 of THE ANTICS, we experience this crazy-making relationship, the pain of rumination and foreboding joy. Then, in Part 2, we learn about a healing journey—how to take that first step and how to begin to truly heal.

We can learn how to use our feelings as a guide to our true selves, as we embrace vulnerability and allow it to bring us to real courage—the courage to heal, the courage to grow, and the courage to change. We can begin to change when we finally understand who and what we are instead of trying to be who and what we are not.

Start your healing journey by reading THE ANTICS and joining THE ANTICS community.