Born in the Tundra of Minnesota, I have since become a bit of a Gypsy. Currently calling home base the hot sands of Arizona, I do still travel often. Whether the journey is a physical one, or one taken by reading a fantastic book it doesn't matter, the fun is always in the adventure. As always I am an eclectic person that likes a wide array of things and has many passions. Creating, advocating for animals and Mothering just to name a few.


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Dec
28
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I don’t blog. I read a lot though. Thanks Ambrosia for letting me guest post sons information I feel is useful to lots of people. ???

Article one: Displaced aggression

What do you do when you’re stressed, swamped or seriously overwhelmed? Unleash hell on an innocent bystander, of course! But if you’d rather stop displacing your feelings and start facing your troubles head-on, Martha Beck has a game plan for you.

So your best friend at the office is suddenly let go, and you spend the rest of the day dreading that the ax is about to fall on you, too. Later, at home, you hold it together — until your 6-year-old pops out of bed for the fifth time, asking for another glass of water. At which point you hear yourself roar, “Oh for heaven’s sake! Would it kill you to just go to sleep for once?!”

Or maybe as soon as you leave the office, you head to your parents’ house for your second shift. Your mother suffers from Alzheimer’s, and your father recently broke his hip. You manage to stay cheerful with both of them, but at home that night, when your husband innocently asks where to find the peanut butter, you snap, “Figure it out, Sherlock.”

Or perhaps one morning, without even meaning to, you notice a series of intimate texts between your boyfriend and someone named Tiffany. You drive to work, glance through the papers in your in-box, then blast into your assistant’s cubicle like a hurricane. “When will you learn to conjugate the verb to lie? Am I paying you to write like a moron?”

Psychologists call this phenomenon displaced aggression. Often when we feel powerless, we dump our anger on someone else — someone we know won’t fight back. Military folks have a charming phrase for displaced aggression, which, for the sake of politeness, I will euphemize here as “stress rolls downhill.” I’m sure you can recall times when people rolled their stress onto your unprotected head. And unless you’re a saint, I’m sure you’ve rolled your stress onto others’. Learning to stop stress-rolling is one of the best things you can do for your relationships and your general life satisfaction. Let’s start now, before someone else gets hurt.

Know How to Roll

The cause of stress-rolling is always the same: You experience a situation in which you feel too overwhelmed, confused or scared to express your true feelings. You’re fighting for your life, and you’re losing. The enemy may be a change in your work situation. Or your parents’ increasing fragility. Or a shaky relationship. Whatever the problem, if it seems too big to solve, you may believe you have no choice but to internalize your fear and anger.

Unfortunately, feelings don’t want to stay hidden. Like water held back by a dam, they are always pushing, seeking a crack to leak or entirely break through. The “cracks” in our ability to suppress negative feelings are relationships in which our defenses are lowest, our fears smallest. Our hidden feelings seep or burst out when we’re with people we trust or who aren’t in a position to resist us. This dynamic explains why upstanding citizens who never shout at a stranger will scream curses at a lover, and why people who take an undue share of grief from their boss bully their underlings in turn.

To eliminate a tendency to stress-roll, you first have to notice it in other people: the man who yanks his dog around every time he gets the shaft at work; the brand-new ex-smoker who shouts at her husband when she runs out of nicotine gum. Watch these people and get a feel for how disproportionately intense their behavior is. Then honestly identify the same sort of overreactions in yourself. Where does your temper flare? When do you weep hysterically? What situations frustrate you to the point of physical violence?

One excellent sign that you’re stress-rolling may be a hint of sheepish guilt or shame. This will show up after you’ve rolled your negativity onto someone, or even while you’re doing the rolling. Deep down, your conscience will be whispering, “I’m not being fair. This isn’t about Priscilla eating all the toast. I’m just venting because no one’s watching my kitten video on YouTube.”

Unfortunately, many people, embarrassed by this tickle of conscience, actually increase their stress-rolling as a method of self-defense. They’ll bring up old arguments and mutant grievances to justify the stress-rolling. For example, you might follow up your outburst toward your son by saying, “You’ve got to stop bothering Mommy all the time.” You might keep pounding your husband: “If you ever cleaned the kitchen, you’d know damn well where to find the peanut butter.” You might point out every grammatical goof your assistant has made since the day she was hired. This is like a general who opens fire on his own troops, then decides he’d better shoot a few more so they’ll be too scared to stand up to him. Don’t be like that general. Instead…

Identify the Real Enemy

No matter how much stress we roll downhill, no matter how we justify the rolling, ultimately we still have to deal with the situations that caused our discontent. The only thing stress-rolling accomplishes is the creation of new enemies out of old allies (or potential allies) — a classic lose-lose situation. So the moment you get the slightest inkling that you’re stress-rolling, excuse yourself, take some deep breaths and figure out what’s really bothering you.

Because the core issue is often so upsetting that you push it out of your consciousness, you may not be able to articulate it at first. Luckily, you have a built-in problem-pinpointer: discomfort. Identifying your deepest emotional triggers is like finding where a bone has broken; you poke at the general area until you find the epicenter of the pain. Ask yourself the following questions:

1. “What’s really bothering me?”
2. “What’s the worst thing about that?”
3. “What’s the worst thing about that?”
4. Repeat question 3 until you reach the source of your distress.

You’ll know you’ve hit upon your real issue when all your irritation with innocent bystanders disappears in a flood of fear, sorrow, or despair. You’ll probably feel helpless about coping with the core dilemma — that’s why you displaced your aggression in the first place. Looking squarely at overwhelming problems requires extreme courage and honesty. Solving them takes even more. You may feel you don’t have such valor in you, but that’s okay. Just look around.

Align Yourself with Your Allies

To find courage you don’t possess, all you need to do is share real facts about your real problems with people who may be able to help. I reiterate: people who may be able to help. If you’ve stress-rolled onto someone who holds less social power than you — say, your child or your assistant — simply apologize. These are not the people you should ask for counsel; doing so would leave them feeling even more overwhelmed than you feel. Find someone who, from your perspective, has at least as much power as you do.

For example, after yelling at your child, you might say, “Honey, I’m so sorry for shouting at you. I was worried about something completely different, but I’m getting help with that.” Then you could call an adult who’s survived hard times — your father, a coworker, your best friend — and talk about your career uncertainty. Or you could offer your husband a peanut butter sandwich—and the truth about your physical and emotional fatigue. Or you could admit to your assistant that you were out of line, then close your office door and call a couples counselor to discuss your relationship.

Are you seeing the pattern here? Apologize, tell the truth, get help from someone who’s not below you on the power pyramid.

You may feel awkward being this honest and open. Suck it up. If you don’t want to be the general who shoots at his own troops, you need to consult experienced, educated advisers. Make no mistake: You are the one and only leader of your life. But you’ll be amazed by how brave, learned and resourceful the people around you can be. Honesty and humility will help you solve both the problems that create stress-rolling and the problems stress-rolling creates.

Keep Enlarging Your Circle of Advisers

As you begin to stop rolling stress onto others, you’ll also start to gather crucial information that will help you face any problem without feeling overwhelmed: You’ll learn whom to trust and in what capacity. Not every person you ask for help will be able or willing to give it. Your work friends may amplify your fears with their own. Your husband might shut down the moment you start talking. Your couples counselor could be a complete idiot. It happens. Just keep consulting different people until you get a response that feels genuinely helpful. The great thing about total honesty is that once you are grounded in it, you immediately know when someone’s advice to you is wrong.

Lao Tzu said, “All streams flow to the sea because it is lower than they are. Humility gives it its power.” Every time you avoid rolling your negative emotions downhill, and instead admit the places you feel lowest, you’ll find your power paradoxically growing. As you feel less overwhelmed and more balanced, you’ll lift the people who look up to you until they, too, stop stress-rolling and start leveling with you about their own issues. In time, the very people you once dumped on may join you in solving any problems you face. Rolling on together, you’ll be unstoppable.

Article 2: Taking stress out on others and why it sucks

Taking Your Stress out on Other People & Why it Sucks
By Cheer Squad member michine

Have you ever been so stressed that you’ve lashed out at someone around you?

Many of us have. But why do we do it? Well, in stressful situations we are not our normal selves. We allow our negative emotions to overrule our sense of judgment and change the way we normally act and behave, to become someone who acts on impulse and raw emotion. It is in these times that we are most likely to take out our stress and frustration on the people around us.

Stress can accumulate from a number of different sources, including:
being emotionally overwhelmed by certain events
being under the pump with study or work
worrying about the future and different outcomes
when things just aren’t going our way.

To get a clearer understanding of stress and when it is out of control have a look into managing stress.

The ways in which we may take our stress out on other people can be both direct and indirect. Direct ways of venting to release our stress and frustration can involve lashing out at people by
being physically or verbally abusive
saying and doing things that we would never normally do
putting other people down to make ourselves feel better.
This can appear in varying levels of severity for example making snide remarks about someone to swearing and personally attacking someone’s certain physical characteristics, beliefs or orientation.

In an indirect method we may take out our stress on other people by more subtle methods including being very short with people, having a short temper or ignoring a friend that we would usually talk to. In some cases we may not even be aware that we are doing it!

While taking our stress out on other people can temporarily make us feel better, it can also seriously damage relationships, particularly if someone is hurt physically, emotionally or mentally as a result of our actions and behavior. Ultimately, taking our stress out on other people will not only put those around us in a worse state but it also means we put ourselves in a difficult spot. At the very least we end up feeling guilty about our behaviour, and in some circumstances there are consequences to our actions which we have to face.

So how do we manage our stress such that we don’t take it out on other people?

There are a lot of different ways to manage stress levels, such as listening to music, going for a run, having some chill out time, or even playing games. In cases where we aren’t able to manage our stress by ourselves, it may be best to take a step back from the situation to clear our head and keep in mind that we cannot let our emotions control us. Rather than taking it out on those around us, we can talk to others about it in order to relieve our tension.

If you have experienced stress affecting your actions and behavior (or someone else’s) and would like to learn more, watch from the sidelines or share your own experience – join us for the live Getting Real session Monday, September 3rd 8pm AEST.

Article 3: Pyscology today

We are ocial beings, we define who we are in part, by, and through the relationships we have. Most of us interact with an assortment of people on a daily basis, from our most intimate relationships to strangers on the street. Obviously, how involved we are with certain individuals will color the level and intensity of our interactions with them. There are those people with whom we get along quite well while there are those who may be harder to connect and communicate with, who may give us an emotional run for our money. While some people have a tendency to take things personally a lot of the time, with almost anyone, the focus here is on relationships where a significant attachment has been formed.

We are often dependent upon others for our happiness, our security (emotionally, financially, and any other way), and sometimes for our safety. We often look to others to fill our needs. When these others are supportive, encouraging, caring, and giving we may feel fairly satisfied in our life. But when those we are attached to are judgmental and critical, even aggressive and abusive toward us, we may find ourselves in conflict, caught between the need to have these people in our life for whatever reason, and satisfying our own needs. Sometimes, we make a “bargain with the devil” and end up giving a lot of ourselves away in order to placate a significant other, to make them happy, to keep the peace, to make them stay in our lives (because we think we need them).

Taking things personally is often a by-product of this bargain. When we take things personally we are giving certain individuals more power over us than they deserve or should ever be allowed to have. In effect, you are allowing someone to question what you feel and believe. You are trusting someone else to tell you who you are, instead of relying on what you know to be true about yourself; what really defines you as a person without any outside influence. In essence, taking things personally keeps you tied to someone else and, in the extreme, can even make you feel like a victim.

So, instead of just reacting when someone pushes your buttons, these are some things to consider when you find yourself caught up in an interaction/confrontation where you feel your personal integrity is being challenged.

Focus on what this relationship really means to you. How heavily invested are you in this individual? Do you always need to be agreeable, to make no waves, to go along in order to please this person and to keep the peace? Do you perceive that there may be a high price to pay if you disagree or challenge them? Do you really need this person’s approval? Is all the trouble keeping them happy, as they challenge you, really worth the effort?

Change the focus of the interaction by putting yourself in this other person’s shoes. Try to understand what the other person is feeling/thinking/trying to convey to you. Is this the way they interact with many people, not just you? Is it their usual way to be critical, to insult, to blame or shame? Maybe that person hasn’t mastered how to communicate in a healthy way. Perhaps they lack certain social skills and feel the only way they will be heard and paid attention to is by being rude or aggressive in their language, or by bullying to get their way. Perhaps, they have issues with relationships in general, with boundaries, with seeing things as either all good or bad, right or wrong.

Don’t jump to conclusions too quickly when you are being confronted. Don’t make assumptions about judgment or criticism seemingly directed at you. Maybe it’s not about you at all, but rather about them and their own perceptions projected onto you. In fact, it’s almost always about them, their issues, their needs, and their desire to control you and/or a situation.

A corollary to this is to know what makes you feel vulnerable. When you are aware of your sensitive spots, the things that trigger your emotions and reaction, you can prepare yourself if an interaction arises that attempts to draw you in.

Create a space between yourself and your reactions. Your initial response might be to react emotionally. If possible, don’t follow that kneejerk reaction. Take the time to rein in your emotions and assess what’s really happening before you respond.Ingeneral, it’s a good idea to create a healthy personal space around yourself. (A good visual is to imagine yourself in the middle of a meadow with a white picket fence surrounding it. That’s your space. No one is permitted within it unless you allow them to enter into it.) When you create a space/buffer between yourself and another person, personal boundaries have less of a chance of being crossed and/or blurred.

When you are ready, respond in order to gain clarification. Hopefully, your emotions will take a back seat while you ask this individual to fully explain what’s on their mind and what they want from you. Listen carefully so you can discern what makes sense and what doesn’t based on their fantasy or need to have you behave in a certain way. Tell them how what they’re saying/doing makes you feel. In some instances, they may not realize how aggressive, rude, insulting, bullying, and insensitive they are being; that their words are hurtful and that what they’re asking of you is unreasonable. Explain that if the goal of the interaction/confrontation is meant to be conciliatory they’re going about it in the wrong way. Perhaps, give them a way out by suggesting an alternative solution.

If it becomes clear that this person can’t respect you and your space and insists on creating a situation over and over again that’s meant to make you uncomfortable, feel badly about yourself, personally attack you, devalue and belittle you, and constantly attempt to bait you, you need to rethink the relationship. If it’s family it may be hard to divorce yourself from them but you can limit your time and the nature of the relationship you have with them. If it’s someone else, break off all ties with this person for your own sake.

Finally, learn to rely on yourself. Of course, relationships will play a prominent role in your life. But the more you know about yourself the less you need others to tell you about yourself. When you develop a life orientation that is based primarily on your own personal resources, rather than on external influences your dependency on outside forces is diminished.

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