Making Nothing Wrong

Does it ever look to you like something in your life is wrong? Just wrong, wrong, wrong. Shouldn’t be happening. Shouldn’t go this way. Wrong.

My kid shouldn’t have gotten that grade. My ex should have given me more money. The tree shouldn’t have fallen on my roof. My car should be cleaner.

It’s obvious, right? These things are wrong and life would be better if they were righted.

Do you start off judging the thing or the other person? Fixing and surviving the things that are wrong is a favorite pastime for most of us. We give advice. We manipulate and control. We avoid and gossip. We do lots of things to the people and events that we judge as wrong. But let’s take a look at what we do to ourselves.

Do you go to work telling yourself what to do? Do you go to work fixing yourself? I should have made sure she did her homework every night. I should make more money so I don’t rely on my ex. I should have trimmed the dead limbs so that the windstorm didn’t blow the tree down on my roof. I should clean my car.

And then (here’s the really juicy one for me) do you go to work judging yourself? Do you make the things you did or didn’t do wrong such that it means something about who you are as a person? I’m a bad mom. I fail at relationships. I’m not trustworthy. I’m a mess.

Whoa.

How did we get from our kids grades to “I’m a bad mom. I fail at relationships. I’m not trustworthy. I’m a mess.?”

And even more importantly, what can we do about it? Because here’s a not-so-secret secret. When you or I are in our stories about being bad parents and failing at relationships or being an untrustworthy mess, we live as though those stories are true. We love to be right.

More than being happy or fulfilled, most of us are committed to being right.

So we will behave in ways that back up our stories. We will behave in ways that show ourselves and other people that we are untrustworthy messes. And then we’ll bemoan the fact that no one wants to give us a raise or get in a relationship. Or our kids won’t talk to us. Or the passion has gone out of the partnership. And we’ll use that as more evidence of the fact that we are right and we are untrustworthy messes. The cycle spins itself and keeps getting deeper.

Unless something interrupts it.

Do you want to interrupt your story of wrongness? Which really means, do you want the world to feel right to you? Do you want to feel right with the world? Do you want harmony and belonging or do you want to keep being right about how the world is a scary place that you’re lucky to survive? It’s your choice. Really. And it’s a big, vulnerable scary choice. I am in awe of my clients making that choice over and over again. To say with their bodies, time, and money that they are not willing to settle for the life and the nervous system that life handed them. That they are not willing to live the rest of their lives being the person they wound up being. They know they are more than that. They feel a longing in their hearts, a whispering in their minds, something calling them forward something saying “your life can be bigger than this! You can feel more joy and freedom and love than this. There is more! Go for it.”

Something whispers to them from their own soul and they come to work with me.

To feel at home in their own skin. To feel love. To notice what they want. To value, trust, and communicate what they want and to see how over and over again that uplevels their lives. Over and over again tuning in to their bodies, minds, and hearts with a caring loving facilitator opens up worlds of connection and possibility that just weren’t there before. One of my clients has often said to me, “I really like how you are on my side even when I’m not.” I get to affirm and reframe his stories so that he can learn from them rather than judge himself as a failure.

Would you like to stop judging yourself as a failure? Would you like to stop invalidating yourself? Would you like to stop surviving your life and actually live it? It’s all possible.

What are you willing to give up?

Are you willing to give up being wrong? Are you willing to give up being a bad mom? Are you willing to give up being someone who fails or someone who lies? Are you willing to give up on the stories you’ve told about your limitations?

No one likes to give up anything. We’re worked hard for everything we have especially our survival strategies. So if I say you need to give up some of the ways you’ve survived your life so far so that you can live more fully, you’ll likely agree with me while thinking it’s impossible. Or you’ll say yes outloud while thinking “she don’t know what I’m talking about”. Or maybe you stopped reading this article a couple of paragraphs ago because what I’m talking about seems so far out of anything you’d want to do. For all of you who are still here, I offer you my love and curiosity. I offer to help you find your place in the family of things. Come talk with me.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things. (excerpted from Wild Geese by Mary Oliver)

Come sit with someone who practices loving people just as they are while seeing them as bigger than they wound up believing themselves to be. It’s a great deal of fun. It’s risky. It’s alive. It’s having a sense of being “up to something” with your life and taking on being who you are. There is nothing wrong with you.

There is nothing wrong with your life.

You have the ability to live the life you have and to love it.

I can help. Reach out today.

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