You Are Loved

Your weight, your height, your eye color, your income, your job title and the car you drive. Your wrinkles, your fat, your cellulite, your hair length, your hairline, your bra size, your penis length, and anything or everything that you obsess about when you look in the mirror. Believe me when I tell you that all of it is just noise.

All of those things don’t mean a whole lot to anyone who really matters in your life. It does not matter about your bank balance, or who you are in the world, or even what you look like. You are you because of your heart. You are you because of your unique essence. You are you because of the specific ways that you show up in the world that don’t match up to anyone's way of being.

You are lovable and valuable, simply because you exist. You will be lovable and valuable even if you lose your hair and gain weight. You will be lovable and valuable even if you lose your important sounding job. You will be lovable and valuable even if you make a mistake that feels out of integrity sometimes. You will be lovable and valuable even if you try making a run at your dream job and it takes longer than you think it should be taking.

You will be lovable and valuable even if all you do today is smile at a stranger while you walk past them. You will also be lovable and valuable if you are in such an awful mood that you can barely look up at anyone to make eye contact.

For the love of all that is good with the world, please don’t buy into the socially-reinforced noise that tells you that you need to be slimmer, stronger, sexier, richer, or better dressed in order to be lovable, worthwhile, or valuable as a human being. You are lovable as you currently are, and that will never change.

You are loved, and I promise you will be loved and deserving of love at every stage of your journey...

Looking For Love, and Finding It!

I have been doing a cringe-worthy dance with love ever since grade school when this girl named Sandra came to the neighborhood and became the reason for every erratic beat of my nerdy heart. Of course back then, I had no idea what love was. All I knew was that whenever I saw her, my heart would beat a little faster, I couldn’t remember how to form words, and I miraculously managed to become even more awkward than usual.

I pathetically mooned over her for years, and never once even attempted to tell her how I felt, so it should come as no surprise that nothing ever happened between us. Thirty five years later, I might have figured out how to speak to the opposite sex, but I’m still working on a true understanding of what love is. Not only do I believe that love is something entirely different to every person, but I am also positive that my perception of love is constantly evolving. The love I felt when I was in my 20's and 30's is not a love I would even want today. However, it was exactly what my heart told me I needed back when I was on my own for the first time and trying to figure out what I was doing with my life. It begs the question: Did I get smarter about love, or did my heart finally catch up with my brain?

My therapist really liked to ask: “Do you accept the love you think you deserve?” He would pose that question so often, at first I assumed he earned a commission for each time he worked it into one of our sessions. While his query got under my skin in the beginning, over the past couple of months, I’ve come to realize that the question cut right to the heart of why I was in therapy. My overactive imagination believes that a seemingly infinite number of things have eluded me in life, but my mind can focus just long enough to discern that I was Captain Ahab, and that love has clearly been my great white whale. I’ve searched for it for longer than I care to admit, and I even thought I found it on a few occasions. Yet that one true love somehow remained bitterly elusive.

I kept pounding my head against the wall and wondering why true love was so hard to find. What I should have been doing was pondering my therapist’s favorite question. When I got married, I most certainly did not accept the love I deserved. I settled for the love that was offered and convinced myself that I was the happiest man in the world. We were not a good match but we had latched onto each other, so I was thrilled to lock down ‘til death do us part, the version of love she put on the negotiating table. It wasn’t a shock that the end of my marriage came long before death interceded. After my divorce, I was so lonely and broken-hearted that I made foolish and desperate decisions when it came to affairs of the heart. This led to relationships that no hopeless romantic in their right mind would ever accept. I was not accepting the love I deserved because I no longer thought myself worthy of love.

At the beginning of the year, I decided to make some major changes. I had been unhappy for so long that I simply came to accept it as the way my life had to be. To be perfectly honest, I had no concept of how miserable I became and the effect it had on those around me. I readily admit that change scares me. I am an introverted creature of very bad habits who puts up walls, keeps people at a distance, and is petrified of the consequences of giving love another chance. Sure, I moan and groan to whatever friend was unlucky enough to be within earshot that I wanted to be in a relationship again, but they were empty words. My brain remembered what to say, but my heart had long since forgotten how to give those words any deeper meaning.

When someone so obviously different from anyone I’ve ever known wandered into my life, in my head I was in the absolute worst place to even consider the love that I deserved. As it was my modus operandi, I just assumed she would hurt me like all the others, and without even realizing it, I would fight the love that was being offered, taken it for granted, and scared it away before it even had a chance to change me. Luckily, the jarring loss of what could have been was enough to awaken me from my self-induced coma of romantic stupidity. Apparently, my heart had a great white whale sighting. True love had presented itself and I surprised myself by deciding to chase after it with reckless abandon. Now because I wasted so much time being miserable and ensuring that love could never find me, I was not in a position to be loved, nor should I have been asking anyone to love me in return. 

I finally came to terms with the fact that I needed to change drastically, and not because of the love I wanted, but because I needed to be happy and lead a rewarding life. Luck must have been with me because after I put in a great deal of hard work, which is far from finished, I found my great white whale smiling back at me. After all these years, my search was over. Not only was I finally able to accept the love that I thought I deserved, but she also accepted the offer of my oft-broken heart.

Reflecting back upon it now, perhaps I never accepted the love I thought I deserved because my heart was holding out for the woman who now possesses it. At last I’ve found true love, and I am completely confident that I deserve it...

Taking Responsibility

What is the hardest and most important thing you will ever do for yourself? Well, I’m not going to stall and leave you hanging. I’m going to give it to you right away, and then dig into why this is so important. The most important and challenging thing you could ever do for yourself is taking full responsibility for your life. What do I mean by this? Why does it matter so much? What would that look like in your life? Let's take a look at it.
 

What does taking responsibility mean? Simply put, taking responsibility means the state of having a sense of duty to deal with something. If something is bothering you, then you do something about it. 

• Looking down at your body and thinking “I don’t like the way that I look or feel in terms of my physical health. I’m going to drink more water, eat less junk, and hire a personal trainer” is taking responsibility for your health.
• Looking at your bank account and thinking “I don’t like the way that my financial life is set up. I’m going to figure out ways to provide more value to the people that I serve starting today” is taking responsibility for your wealth.
• Looking internally at your life and thinking “I don’t like the way that my relationship looks. I’m going to do something about this until it is no longer an issue” is taking responsibility for your love life.

Taking responsibility is the act of taking ownership of your problems. It is the mindset of “I am going to do something about this because it is my situation to influence.”

Why is taking responsibility for your life so important? When you feel like you can’t do anything about a given situation, you feel powerless, you quickly become despondent, and that will get you nowhere. There are very few situations that we can actually do nothing about. Even if by chance you can’t influence the situation itself, you can always change your relationship to the situation. Here’s an example of somewhere that I recently felt stuck.

I had been feeling stuck and stagnant in my home of Chicago, Illinois. My excuses for beginning to dislike my city were endless, and I spent a lot of time reinforcing them to myself. But do you know what was really hard? Admitting that there was a ton of stuff that I personally wasn’t doing in order to take responsibility for my situation. I wasn’t exercising as often as I wanted to. I wasn’t prioritizing fun as often as I knew I wanted to. I wasn’t writing as often as I wanted to. I wasn’t reaching out to my friends as often as I wanted to. Ultimately, I neglected all of these core things in myself because I was hell-bent on resenting my geographical location. I don’t know if my feelings about the city are warranted, but I will never know whether my feelings are true or not until I take the necessary actions to do my part to remedy the situation. I had to take responsibility first. If you ever find yourself blaming someone else, or blaming your location, or blaming circumstances beyond your control, then that is a surefire sign that you aren’t taking responsibility for something in your life.

Everything in my life pointed back to me not allowing myself to be deeply happy. If I want to write more, I have to create the space, carve out the time and write. If I want to exercise more, I need to hire a trainer and go for it. If I want to prioritize more fun and lightness, sign up for some fun classes and enlist several friends to start having weekly meet ups dinners or whatever appeals to you. The act of planting your metaphorical flag and saying “I am taking responsibility!” is relatively easy, but it is the follow through and taking consistent action that is challenging.

I love people, and I love people a lot. Maybe I love people too much for my own good sometimes. I’m all for compassion to a point, and as much as I am in favor of compassion, I’m even more in favor of self-responsibility and taking action on the things that you know matter to you. It’s impossible to be happy if you are not honoring yourself. You honor yourself by taking responsibility for your life and doing what you know that your heart wants you to do. Lately for me, that has meant writing more because I feel like it, exercising more because I love how it makes me feel, and spending more time prioritizing play and lightness in my life overall. Consequently, I haven’t felt this free, unrestrained, and happy in my life in years.

I am feeling phenomenal, and I want that feeling for you as well. So where in your life do you need to take responsibility? What do you know you need to do, but aren’t doing? Complete this sentence and you will find your answers: “If I were to take full responsibility for my life, I would…”

That’s it, there is the tool, now take responsibility and use it...

Sealing The Exits

Well, I'm getting to the point where I have to acknowledge something I need to do for myself. The single greatest way that I can deeply commit to an intimate relationship is simple: I have to seal the exits. I have worked with countless couples, who had either been dating or married from 1 to 20 years, who hadn’t truly sealed the exits in their lives. What do I mean by sealing the exits, and why is it so vital in my quest to having a healthy, thriving intimate relationship?

Ultimately, sealing the exits comes down to being in integrity with myself. Practically speaking, it is about closing the back doors in my life that I give myself as my mental out, just in case I ever wanted to leave my partner and retreat through my exits. Its really no need to be so judgemental towards me, when you have mental outs of your own. Your exits will be unique to you. You might have one mentally catalogued exit, or you might have fifty of them. 

• Maybe you’ve been with your partner for several years, and you tell yourself that you’re committed, but your life’s reality shows signs of misalignment. 
• Maybe you have half a dozen old hook-ups in your Facebook friends list that are always just a click away in case you need a new warm body, or a sense of sexual validation at a moment’s notice.
• Maybe you complain about your partner to specific friends of yours who you know will always have your back and willingly talk against your partner over a drink when you feel like it (thereby splitting the wedge of resentment further into your psyche).
• Maybe you have a dormant online dating profile (or several of them) just waiting to be restored should anything go wrong in your relationship.

Whatever your exits are, they are unique to you, just like my exits have been unique to me. I could list another twenty examples of what relational exits could look like until I have particularly nailed yours, but my guess is that you already know exactly what yours look like. At a deep level, you already know that you would feel a whole lot better if you sealed them yourself.

When I recommend my clients seal the exits in their lives, they often express a small feeling of panic, like I’m asking them to give up their baby blanket for the first time in their lives. Despite what your brain might be implying, you will feel a lot better once the exits are sealed. There is a very specific kind of deep comfort that comes from actually being committed in your relationship, with both feet in. 

So what exits could you seal to ensure that you are not leaking subconscious energy in various other directions? How could you commit more fully to your relationship? I know it's time for me to seal my exits, and maybe it's time you did the same. You’re more ready than you think...