Finding Your Happy Place

I realized after I spent some time gardening and planting new spring flowers this past weekend, how relaxed it made me feel. I also feel that way about getting lost in a great book. Do you know where your happy place is? Do you go there regularly to re-energize yourself?

When I'm doing life coaching with adults, I always want to find out what they do to relax, play, and recharge. In working with children and teens, I want to make sure they have an area of mastery outside of academics. Play is not just for kids. We all need to play and find the way to relax that feels healthy and right to us. I would like all parents to help their children identify what their natural happy spots are so that when they are stressed they can go there.

Engaging in some activity in which you are focused deeply on what you are doing, and lose awareness of yourself, can be healthy and a needed break for your mind, emotions, and spirit. All hypnosis is essentially self-hypnosis and takes you to a very deep level of relaxation where you aren't worried about anything at all. We take ourselves to that deeply relaxed hypnotic state when we are engaged in something solitary that we enjoy.

Your happy place or activity needs to be something that's easy to access, not unhealthy, expensive or addictive. They are as individual as our fingerprints. Here are some activities that might get you thinking about your own happy place:

Do you enjoy some kind of movement or exercise?

Does listening to music shift your moods? Sometimes I have patients create a playlist specifically to help them downshift and chill.

Do you like to draw, paint, or do some kind of crafts? Do you knit, crochet or needlepoint? Perhaps you could set up a little art area for you to retreat and be creative. This is not about creating great art, it's about the experience of creating and expressing.

Do you like going outside, riding your bike, going for a walk, observing nature or gardening? These activities help us connect with nature and put problems and stresses in perspective. Even Sigmund Freud had a daily ritual of walking around the Ringstrasse after dinner each night when he lived in Vienna (just skip the nightly cigar he smoked while he walked). We can create our own daily rituals that take us outside, like watering plants or a neighborhood stroll with your dog after dinner.

Think creatively about how you liked to play or relax as a child. Finding non-electronic ways to de-stress, shifting away from problems and stressors, even for a short break, helps recharge our human batteries. It helps us to relax deeply, lower our heart rate and blood pressure, and focus our attention outside ourselves and our problems du jour.

Challenge yourself to identify one or two of your happy places and go there this week. You deserve it. If you have children or teens, help them identify their own happy place and it can become a lifelong coping strategy when they are under stress.

Teach Your Children Well

We need to raise children that are strong, resilient, and have good coping skills—just in case Plan A doesn't work out. For these reasons, I enjoyed Madeline Levine’s new book, Teach Your Children Well: Parenting for Authentic Success, or Why Values and Coping Strategies Matter More Than Grades, Trophies, or Fat Envelopes (Harper Collins, 2012). In this succinct book, Levine digs deeper than the tiger parent vs. overprotective parent debate, and helps us take a long-term perspective on parenting, and what type of adults we are hoping to launch.

Helping our children find authentic success means assisting them in learning to love learning, develop their own strengths and interests, find productive and meaningful work to support themselves, become capable, resourceful, and resilient, create loving relationships with family and friends, and contribute to our world in some way. That’s more valuable than awards, trophies, honor rolls, or admission to a prestigious college.

Levine reminds us that there is more than one definition to building a successful life. Sometimes it takes us way into adulthood to figure that out. This book gives us encouragement to define our own version of success, and parent with that end in mind. I have wanted for my own children to grow into responsible, kind, capable adults who contribute to the world in their own unique way. I wanted them to be able to cope with not only successes, but also with loss, disappointment, waiting, and developing enough inner resources to create a Plan B,C or D as needed.

Levine has some interesting views on how an over-focus on self-esteem in parenting has left some young adults unprepared for the rejection and frustrations of real life. Authentic self-esteem really comes from feeling capable, not from awards, recognition, or compliments (while those are nice to receive). By being too child-centered, we can add to a narcissistic trait that can develop in our children. It's important for our children to know what they think/feel/want is important, but so are those of others. Ultimately, we are reminded that as parents, teaching our children and teens life skills to increase their independence and ability to function in the world, and how to relate compassionately to others, are among the best gifts we can give them.

In Teach Your Children Well, Levine does an excellent job of defining some of the developmental tasks children need our help with in the elementary school years, the middle school years, and the high school years.

Parenting isn't, as Levine writes, one job. It's really more like different jobs at different developmental points, and we need to make intentional shifts as parents in order to help our children and teens move along on their own path to an authentically successful life of their own. We don't want to become so child-centered, overprotective, over-scheduled, or allowing of dependency on us that we fail to help our children prepare to launch. Taking a long-term perspective helps. Our long-term goal in parenting should be to work ourselves out of a job, and launch a well-balanced, strong young adult who can live, love, work, play, and cope well. Teach Your Children Well has some great ideas for the journey.

Coping With The Narcissist In Your Life

It is painful to love somebody with Narcissistic Personality Disorder.You can't change it. You didn't cause it. You can't make it better. NPD is a pervasive way of looking at the world that is thought to develop in early childhood,and most often continues throughout one's lifetime.As with other kinds of personality disorders,people that have them rarely come into treatment. Most narcissists blame OTHER people.It is the people who love and work with narcissists who more often come for counseling,because it causes a great deal of pain for the people close to them. Aproximately 70% of narcissists are men, and 30% are women.

In romantic relationships, it is very difficult for partners of narcissists,because they are completely self-absorbed.It's all about them at all times.The relationship won't have the intimacy or safety to be vulnerable with each other that it should have.There is a lack or respect and sincere interest in the partner.Narcissists can sweep you off your feet with charm, gifts, and charisma when you are courting,and then promptly be disinterested in your life. It's as if they feel they are the sun and the moon both, and your little auxillary planet rotates around them.They like to tell stories and dominate conversations. Narcissists like to devalue others.They may have a need to criticize and pick at you.They will have trouble celebrating your accomplishments,or anyone else's besides their own.They don't like your family and friends.They wish to make decisions for you. Your partner tries to change you,and has trouble accepting you.Your partner feels they are more important and valuable than you are,and their wants and preferences are,too. You begun to feel beaten down,exhausted,and intimidated by their relentless self-absorbtion.And surprise, the sexual relationship can be expoitative and all about their satisfaction as well,with little concern for their partners' fulfillment.

It is also horrible to have a narcissist as your parent. They can't see you as a separate person,but instead as part of them. You don't get accurate amounts of deserved credit for what you accomplish.Narcissistic parents demean their children in sevice to their own bloated ego.For example," I had a better GPA/career/girlfriend/appearance than you do". Narcissistic parents won't validate any concerns that their child has about when the parent is out of bounds or over the top.Basically,you can't win with a narcissistic parent,so you have to figure it out for yourself. Children of narcisstic parents often don't have the confidence or belief in themselves that they should have, based on their skills and accomplishments.Nothing is ever good enough that they do, as their parent saw it.

At work, narcissists take all the credit and need to be the one shining star.They would sooner die than honor other peoples' contributions.They can easily exploit others or demand special privileges.They have tremendous lack of understanding for other peoples' feelings or experiences in the workplace.If you work with a narcissist,you will need to take precautions to independently document your contributions(quick,before they take credit!) Setting limits and boundaries will also be key with a narcissistic boss.

Watch out for the famed narcissistic injury.This happens when you poke the narcissist's fragile,puffed-up ego and you get a huge,out of proportion reaction.You will know when you hit it. It is unhealthy to not like yourself,just as it is to be a narcissist. Somewhere in between those two extremes there is a way to repect and care for yourself and also have empathy and genuine concern for other people.

In the meantime,with the narcissist in your life,you can learn to cope quite nicely.Take very good,extreme care of yourself. Spend some time alone. Cultivate your own interests, hobbies, career, friends, and faith. Keep a sense of humor about how absurd the narcissists' demands can get.Set firm boundaries about what you will and won't do. Don't take it personally---it's really about THEM. Use loving detachment when necessary.Evaluate how close you can really be to the narcissist and keep your emotional balance.Keep yourself safe. Loving or working with a narcissist can be challenging,and cause you to become a stronger person yourself.

Take back your power,and remember that you don't have to feed this monster,and may be able to be happy despite the narcissist in your life who wishes to suck the life out of you!Getting some counseling can make a huge difference in providing you with some fresh perspective and tools to deal with this beast.