Internal and External Supports

OMG. Aren’t friends the best!? There’s nothing more reassuring, more comfortable, more regulating to our nervous systems than friends. While that’s true, it’s also why friends are the worst enemy of Change. When we have something happen that makes us want crawl out of our skin and change our ways, and then we tell a friend about it…what happens? They listen, hear us out, calm us down again, and we lose that “imetus” energy gets dispersed and lost. And we don’t change anything. When it happened enough times to me, I went digging and found my answers from the neuroscience of how our Nervous systems work. We NEEEEED that impetus energy to shake up our automatic system of operating (called our Default Neural Network). Otherwise, we sink back into the lull of mindless action and/or rumination, and NOTHING CHANGES. But don’t worry, you don’t have to get rid of your friends! They’re vital and will be important for a different reason I’ll explain below.

So in the final Part of the Series: Change Aids, I offer these options to select from:

“Befriend” Journal

Again, here I’ll recommend journalling! Why? Because not all of us have that good of friends who wish to hear us voice our “Grievances” or want to hear us voice our “Wins” to them if we caught them on a bad day. For this type of situation I like to use Journaling in 3 ways:

1. Vent Journal, Decompression Journal, Comnplaint Journal, Give it Voice Journal, Grievance Journal, whatever you want to call it is fine. But the practice is to simply decide that instead of picking up your phone and venting to a friend or a parent, just grab a pen and freely “Purge to the Page” as I call it. The point of it is to learn to BEFRIEND YOURSELF 🙂 to offer yourself the space that a friend would to vocalize what’s troubling you. That said, don’t just purge it and toss it out, forgetting it forever. That’s just self-expression, that DOES feel good. Don’t get me wrong. I know it feels great, and it’s important to honor your need for self-expression! (___I, of all people know that too well…you can read some of my backstory HERE.______) If you keep it and revist it it in a month or so, this “purging” becomes a Change Aid when you look back and see how often your annoyance at something or your habit of complaining about something instead of using that frustration to hunt for a solution is holding you back! So the result of a Grievance journal can become a Hurdle-blusting journal.
2. Emotion Journaling: also take the time to revisit it. Ideally to use it for CHANGE, you want to go back and mark it all up. Maybe if you’re wanting to use it as an emotion log, you can go back at the end of the week or month, and HIGHLIGHT each feeling you express in a certain color. Or, I simply used to put a DOT by each emotion of how something that happened “made me feel * freightened” or was feeling so *nostalgic. There might be a pattern that you see emerge that around certain people/stories you enter into your journal they always get colored red (anger) or blue (calm) or Pink (peppy) or Green (safe/open), etc. You’ll be amazed at what you see over time.

I wanna hear from you…what do YOU journal about? How would you use such “visual” cues in your life to create positive changes and improvements in your experience of this thing called life?! Reach out to me at ReadersRespond@CairnMyLife.com

Metaphysical/Higher power/Prayer

I mention these in an effort to be thorough; however, I can’t say that I’ve found them all that effective. Sorry.

Unless you’ve grown up with a specific bedtime routine and have kept it into adulthood as a habit, these aren’t likely to do much more than offer you emotional support, like a friend listening to you might.

Friendship as an Aid

I’ll share a harsh truth, that I’ve learned from my lived experience: venting has LITTLE place in adult friendships! Sure, venting/ranting/complaining in our childhood friendships was developmentally appropriate and necessary. However, mature people don’t use their friendships as the forum in which to just vent for hours. I mean sure it makes you feel better, but as a Change Aid it puts your gears in reverse, not forward! If you find that as an adult, your friendships are time spent complaining together, commiserating about the PTO or about Politics beyond your control, try instead to use the Befriend methods above, to get it out, and get it on paper! Then return to it after a week or a month, and REFLECT on what irritates you; that’s where the real Self-Discovery happens! You learn about yourself by observing and reflecting upon how your brain works, what it focuses on, where it spends it’s time…

(So if you’re left wondering “What IS friendship good for?” It’s good for Water & Life Rafts! Metaphorically speaking, when you’re feeling low and discouraged, or you’re feeling lost or adrift, good friends are like the water that fills up around you and lifts your cork again. They’re like the life-raft to give you a break from frantically swimming and slipping under, until you are feeling up for swimming in the choppy waters of your real life again. Some friends, really special ones, are downright gifts from the heavens, the ones who encourage you to get out of the water, hold still for a bit, or rest up on their “boat” for a bit, when something needs healed up before being able to jump back in and “swim” again.) While friends and love are what makes the world go ’round, and you should cherish the good ones, try to avoid using/abusing the friendships which you really would feel the void if you lost them. Ultimately learning to be an adult, a mature independent one is about learning to be your own friend, your own parent, your own partner in life. An analogy I love is: you’re an adult when you not only look like a full-grown tree and need little/no support of other trees around you. And you’re really thriving if you have wide branches and bright leaves to provide shade to those in your life who need your protection.

Interpersonal / External Accountability

Now, external accountability is the ROCKET FUEL of Change Aids, but I’ve listed it last in the entire series because it’s EXPENSIVE. If you’ve looked at hiring a therapist or a life coach or a personal trainer or a dietician, you’ve seen how expensive they can be! Let’s say you’re trying to be more responsible with your finances and tried using just a casual friend, paying them just $20 to let you call them and chat every time you wanted to grab your phone and buy something on eBay or Amazon, Poshmark or ThreadUp? If retail-therapy was your vice, what would the bill be at the end of the month? Any sort of 1-1 Accountabilty aid is going to be out of reach for most people. So I list it here as one of the last options because it is a last option. And let it serve as a deterant to have you really try out every ChangeAid you can do on your own to create the life you want an dbreak old patterns of thinking and doing and being, BEFORE resorting to hiring out an expensive expert.