Building Trust~

10 Fundamentals of Trust

1. The glue or cement of relationships that allows you to need others to fulfill yourself.
2. The ability to let others into your life so that you and they can create a relationship built on an understanding of mutual respect, caring, and concern to assist on another in growing and maturing independently.
3. The sense that things are fine; that nothing can disrupt the bond between you and the other.
4. The inner sense of acceptance you have of others with whom you are able to share secrets, knowing they are safe.
5. Assuming that others will not intentionally hurt or abuse you if you should make an error or a mistake.
6. Placing confidence in others so that they will be supportive and reinforcing of you, even if you let down your "strong" mask and show your weaknesses.
7. Sharing your inner feelings and thoughts with others with the belief that they will not spread them indiscriminately.
8. Letting others know your feelings, emotions and reactions, and having the confidence in them to respect you and to not take advantage of you.
9. Opening yourself up to let others in on your background, problems, concerns, and mistakes with the assurance that they will not criticize or judge you because of these things.
10. The act of placing yourself in the vulnerable position of relying on others to treat you in a fair, open, and honest way.

Why is that people have trouble trusting? I read the 10 fundamentals of trust and see that in my marriage I actually have very few of these. I know and feel that my husband has conditional love, he does not have the ability or desire to love unconditionally. He is not accepting of bad choices or mistakes. For reasons I cannot understand he believes that I am not allowed to make mistakes, and if I do.... he is not understanding.

There are many reasons why people have trouble developing trust:

People have trouble developing trust if they have:

• Experienced a great deal of emotional and/or physical abuse and/or neglect.
• Been chronically put down for the way they feel or for what they believe.
• Been emotionally hurt in the past and are not willing to risk getting hurt in the future.
• Had problem relationships in the past where they were belittled, misunderstood, or ignored.
• Experienced the loss of a loved one through death. They can get so caught up in unresolved grief that they are unable to open themselves up to others, fearing they will be left alone again due to death, or, abandonment.
• Experienced a hostile or bitter divorce, separation, or end of a relationship. They may be unable to believe anyone who opens up to them in a new, committed relationship.
• Been raised in or have lived in an environment emotionally and/or physically unpredictable and volatile.
• Experienced a great deal of pain at the hands of another. Even if the other finally recognizes and accepts the responsibility to change such behavior, the person fears that if they let their guard down, the pain and hurt will begin again.
• Low self-esteem and cannot believe that they are deserving of the attention, care, and concern for anyone. They have problems even trusting the positive, healthy, and reinforcing behavior of another who is sincere.
• Experienced a great deal of non-provoked victimization in their lives. They are unwilling to trust people, situations, or intuitions for fear of being victimized again.

We need to develop the behavior traits, attitudes, and beliefs in order to develop trust:

• Taking a risk to be open to others: This enables you to become a "real" person to others. It is an essential behavior in trust-building between two people because it is the establishing of the parameters of strengths and weaknesses on which you have to draw as the relationship develops.
• Becoming vulnerable: This allows you to be hurt by others who know your weaknesses and strengths. This is an essential step in trust-building between people. It lays the cards on the table in a gamble that in such total self-revelation the others will accept you for who you really are rather than for whom they want you to be. In order to get to full self-disclosure you must take the risk to be vulnerable to others. This is an important building block in trust development.
• Letting go of fear: Fear restricts your actions with others. Letting go frees you of behavioral constraints that can immobilize your emotional development. Fear or rejection, fear of failure, fear of caring, fear of success, fear of being hurt, fear of the unknown, and fear of intimacy are blocks to the development of trust relationships and can impede relationship growth if not given appropriate attention and remedial action.
• Self-acceptance: Accepting who you are and what your potential is, is an important step in letting down your guard enough to develop trusting relationship with others. If you are so insecure in your identity that you are unable to accept yourself first, how can you achieve the self-revelation necessary to develop trust? Self-acceptance through an active program of self-affirmation and self-love is a key to the development of trust.
• Self-disclosure of negative self-scripts:Your disclosing of your inability to feel good about yourself and your perceived lack of healthy self-esteem are essential in reducing miscommunication or misunderstanding between you and t he significant others in your life. This self-disclosure reveals to the others your perspective on obstacles you believe you bring to relationships. This sheds the mask of self-defensiveness and allows the other to know you as you know yourself. It is easier to trust that which is real than that which is unreal or hidden.

Marriage Tips: Rebuilding your love

Rebuilding love in your marriage takes time, wanting, willingness, desire, and the most important work. Nobody has ever told me how easy marriage is, that is because marriage is just like your career. You have to invest your time and energy into wanting to succeed in your marriage just as you would with your job.

When teenagers fall in love, the emphasis is often on each of the partner's reactions and feelings. She loves the high she gets from knowing he desires her and thinks she is pretty. She also loves being seen at the high school football game with her special guy, knowing that there are other girls who would love to be in her shoes.

He loves what being with her does to his hormones and how manly he feels with her 5'5 frame next to his 6' 1. And he loves the way she laughs and flirts with him. Each thinks the other "hung the moon," so to speak. The falling in love stage that brings ecstatic high and delights is a very special treat. But over time, either love changes and deepens or it fades away. It's just not possible to stay in that magical falling - in - love stage forever. A deeper kind of love beckons that involves selfless giving and self-sacrifice. At this stage, the emphasis is on what you can do to help and support your partner.

Deep love helps you to see the best in your partner and to minimize their faults. It helps you to encourage them to be the best they can be and to pursue their dreams and goals. Because of your love for your spouse, you become their biggest cheerleader and fan. You want to show your love and appreciation in as many ways as you can. When you disagree, you are motivated to do everything that you can to settle your differences and restore harmony in your relationship. Even when you are upset with your spouse, you realize that your anger doesn't mean that you do not still deeply love them. The emotional tempest is temporary; your love is deep-rooted and stable.

A quote by Soren Kierkegaard beautifully captures the essence of deep love: "Perfect love means to love the one through whom one became unhappy."

Granted, this can certainly be a challenge at times, but it's an important point to understand. When your love is truly constant, then you want to be sure you don't say or do things when you're upset that will tear the fabric of your relationship. It's all too easy to act hastily on impulse and cause long-term damage. As you grow and deepen in your capacity to love, your starting place may be your spouse and any children in the marriage. But love that grows cannot be contained, and you'll find yourself reaching out to those around you in a spirit of sharing and giving. Thus love truly transforms not only the lover but also the world around you.

The conclusion is always the same: Love is the most powerful and still the most unknown energy of the world. A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person. Expect people to be better than they are, it helps them to become better. We waste time looking for the perfect lover, instead of creating the perfect love.

Love works wonders~

Communication is the core to a healthy marriage

Good "Communication" involves listening, assertiveness, and responsibility.

Communication is about getting our needs met through and with others. A primary problem in our society is people don't understand each other, here are a few prime examples:

• We do not communicate our personal needs and dislikes in an assertive way.
• We do not understand what someone else is trying to convey to us.

When you sit down and actually think about communication in your marriage, it takes more work to NOT communicate than it does TO communicate. Communication is just expressing our needs, our dislikes being empathetic and a good listener.

As women we need to get our feelings out, we tell our friends, our sisters, our mothers, whomever we have a relationship with that has been built with communication. The first person we should be communicating with oddly enough is the last person every time?

Understanding others is easy:

• Good listening. The importance of "just" listening
• Empathize your responses. restating what was said without solutions, embellishment, or talk about ourselves. The focus stays on the "other" person.

Communication becomes an unconscious, automatic pattern that is difficult to change and involves practice and not just learning but un-learning the old familiar ways.

Communication is the healthy way of getting our needs met and stating our dislikes. When effective communication is not used or learned, people learn unhealthy tactics to cope and meet their needs.

I am guilty and I am sure many of you can relate:

• non-verbal
• passive-aggression
• isolation
• acting out
• verbal aggression
• passive anger
• numbing - "I don't care"
• depression

When you are aware of everything that you are feeling, all the time, you are in continual communication with yourself. Learning how to listen to that communication, and act on it, is your purpose. Becoming aware of what you are feeling

The choice that confronts you is whether to ease the pain you feel by escaping from it into thoughts or activities, or to keep your attention inward in order to learn where your discomfort is coming from, and heal the source of it. A way to avoid painful emotions is to escape into an activity. It is easier to focus your thoughts elsewhere than to experience the intense physical pain of a hurtful emotion.

The first step in uncovering the origin of a compulsion is the hardest. To uncover the origin of a compulsion, you must stop doing what is compulsive, therefore you must "acknowledge" and experience what you feel when you do. If you flee back into an activity or your thoughts, be gentle with yourself. If the intensity of a painful emotion is more than you can endure without striking out at another person to to experience it for one minute without distracting yourself.

The time the pain of rage, superior, jealousy, or vengefulness comes, try experience it without distraction for two minutes. Do that consciously. Being aware of your emotions is the first step. If you are not aware of what you are feeling in your body and what you are thinking, you are not aware of the present moment. When you are not aware of your emotions, your attention is focused on the circumstances around you.

Emotional awareness is the healing remedy for a fixation on external circumstances. When you are fixated on events of your life, your attention is absorbed. When you are aware of your emotions and what is occurring around you, you step into the present "real" moment.

Marriage Tips: Help and Hope

* Go for help. A reputable therapist and supportive spouse is a very important tool here, because others can help you see your own co-dependent behavior and attitudes in ways you may not see yourself.
* Make recovery a first priority. Like all addictions, co-dependency is insidious, you may recognize yourself in the symptoms, but then deny their importance or deny that they apply to you after all. You may decide to change, and then time after time find yourself doing the same old things. Making recovery a first priority means outlining your destructive behaviors, finding alternative behaviors, and then implementing them! It means, challenging yourself, talking with others about changing, and then changing!
* Begin to know yourself. The more you learn about this disease, the more you will see how it creeps into every aspect of your life, and how destructive it can be. Listening to others, and identifying with them can help you recognize yourself and understand yourself, and setting higher standards, more appropriate goals.
* Develop a spiritual side through daily practice. An inner life is important to those recovering from co-dependency, because it will allow you to see that you are love able, and that your whole world does NOT have to revolve around your spouse. Find serenity outside of your daily life and family... any activity which is serene and focuses you on a source of nurturing outside of your brain. (Mine is the gym!)
* This is a tough one for me, still to this day: STOP managing and controlling others. This is a big challenge, but an important one. Here you stop telling the other what to do, how to live, what is wrong - or right with him. You stop intervening, helping, advising, you simply stop. You allow this other person to make his or her own decisions, for right or for wrong, you let them live their own life. Marriage is NOT ownership!!! This includes taking responsibility for their own mistakes, their unhappiness, their issues and their own growth. You cannot help them without helping yourself first.
* Courageously face your own problems and shortcomings. Now that you have liberated your energy from the other person's life, you have lots of time and energy to focus on your own life. All the things that occupied you with your husband might actually need attention in your OWN life! Often co-dependents say that they never realized how chaotic their own lives were, or how empty, how lonely, etc. Now is your time to face yourself, instead of dissipating your energy on trying to fix someone else.
* Cultivate whatever you need to develop as an individual. In facing yourself, you may see that you need to get in touch with your anger, or grieve what you have lost or what you never had, or contact your inner life. You need to sit still with yourself, that is important...WITH YOURSELF... and find out what you need to do, what you need to be, what you need to address to continue with your development in life.
* Become "selfish." At this point, you need to practice putting yourself first. Do you know how they tell parents on airplanes to always put on your oxygen mask first before trying to help your child with their mask? The adult has to be able to breathe and the have his or her needs adequately addressed before being able to help anybody. This is true for all aspects of life, not just for oxygen masks! Make sure your basic needs are met before you start giving away your time, energy, money, and other resources. Make sure you get your sleep, your meals, your serenity, and whatever else is important to you. When you are adequately supplied, then and only then will you have "stuff" to give to someone else. I never cared what decisions were being made, and let my husband run the show. I had to START CARING.... to show up and have an opinion. It is important here to learn how to advocate for ourselves.
* I love this one~ But I still struggling daily with it. Begin to feel that you are worthy of all life has to offer. This is tricky. Most people, if asked, will say "of course I think I am worthy!" But if you look at their lives, you may see a pattern which belies that belief. They are unhappy in their work, underemployed, bored or otherwise unhappy. No real future goals put into play. Perhaps they don't take care of their bodies, and they are frequently ill. Or they become very obsessive ( this is what I did.) and compulsive. They do not complain, or realize what needs fixing in there life. They just take it as it comes at them never asking how do these areas reflect my self-esteem?

Recovery from c-dependency is based on increased self-esteem... a self-esteem which can be gained by increased self-knowledge, your strong points and your weak points, and a full acceptance of yourself. There is a basic self-love, which you carefully nurture and expand. You get in touch with your feelings and attitudes about every aspect of your personality, including your sexuality. You begin to not only accept, but to actually cherish every aspect of yourself: your personality, your appearance, your beliefs and values, your body, your interests and accomplishments. You begin to validate yourself.

As you do this, you can enjoy being with others, especially your husband, who believes you are fine just as you are. You will not need to be needed in order to feel worthy.

You also work on accepting others as they are, without trying to change them to meet your needs. You know that you are safe because your standards are higher; you become open and trusting, but only with APPROPRIATE people.

You no longer expose yourself to the exploitation of those who are not interested in your well-being. Usually this means many friendships will be lost. (I struggled here, loosing some friends was tough, but I soon realized what the real definition of friends) Your higher criteria and standards are reflected in your approach to relationships. You will find a circle of supportive friends, your husband and healthy interests to see you through crises.

Your values change; now rather than your husband, you value your peace of mind and serenity above all else. You lose interest in the struggles, drama and chaos of the past. You become protective of yourself, your health and your well-being. You come to realize that for a relationship to work, it must be between partners who are equal and on not empowering the other. You want loved more than you need loved and you will find that your spouse will start respecting you with the love that you were trying to force the first time.

You come to know that you are worthy of the best that life has to offer, and you know that with help, perhaps, you can find a way to achieve that!

ASKING FOR HELP IS OK! You need to learn to ask for help instead of helping others first.

Marriage Tips- My journey begins.

As I started therapy, I not only learned many knew and disturbing things about myself. I changed therapist about 1 month or so into my journey and found the most amazing spiritual, honest, empathetic yet not afraid to tell me when I was screwing up female therapist named Tammi. She broke the news to me early on that I was suffering from Co-Dependency! What the hell is that? I was stumped. I knew I had issues, but this was something that I had never even heard of: Please read the below carefully, and perhaps you will find yourself saying "this sounds just like me!" Those were my words exactly when I read and re-read the information my wonderful therapist sent me.

CO-DEPENDENCY~

By now, many people have heard the term "co-dependency." That is because the syndrome of co-dependency is so widespread, and it appears with ever increasing frequency. What is co-dependency, exactly? And why is it so harmful?

Co-dependency is actually an umbrella term; it represents an entire range of feelings, beliefs about ourselves, behaviors and symptoms. The main characteristic is a BIG focus on another person. This is usually our loved one- spouse, significant other. But a persona who is co-dependent often is focused on EVERYBODY else, rather than on herself. For example, when going out to a restaurant with a group, everyone might be trying to decide on where to go. The co-dependent person will demur, saying, " I don't care, anywhere is ok with me." While this can be a very useful strategy in a group and make getting places easier, for the co-dependent, this lack of decision making ability and knee-jerk compliance is a big problem. The co-dependent becomes so compliant and passive, eager to please the others that she really does forget to know what she wants, likes and prefers!

Typically, the co-dependent person came from a home in which their emotional needs were not met. Their parents were not able to provide the attention, warmth and responsiveness which kids need in order to feel that their needs count. So, they grew up feeling that their needs did NOT matter, that their desires were unimportant, that they themselves were 2nd class citizens. Over time, the co-dependent person actually FORGETS what there needs, desires, feelings about things even are.

Of course, as kids, we try to get the response we need from our parents... at least until we give up completely. But we remain always drawn to that same sort of familiar person... an emotionally unavailable person whom we can try to get love from, whom we can try to "change." The need to re-play the childhood drama and TRY, TRY ,TRY to achieve a different ending is so intense, that it determines even the type of person the co-dependent is drawn to! A person who is kind, stable, reliable and interested would not be attractive, typically to the co-dependent person... they would appear "boring." Having received very little nurturing, the co-dependent tries to fill this unmet need vicariously, by becoming a care-giver, especially to any person who appears in some way needy.

Many consequences flow from this sorry state of affairs. For one, co-dependents become addicted to emotional pain. They are drawn to people who are not available to them, or who reject them.

The co-dependent is often immobilized by romantic obsessions. They search for the "magical dream" in others to make them feel complete. They might idealize other people and endow them with powerful symbolism.

In the relationship, the co-dependent will do anything to keep it from dissolving. This is because she is terrified of abandonment, the same psychic abandonment she felt as a kid when the parents were not there. So nothing is too much trouble, takes too much time or is too expensive if it will "help" the person the co-dependent is involved with. Co-dependents are willing to take more than 50% of the responsibility, guilt and blame in any relationship.

Accustomed to lack of love support, and stability in a relationship, co-dependents are willing to wait, hope, and try harder to please. At the same time, they have a desperate need to control the relationship. this is because the need for the missing love and security is the foremost motivation in any relationship for a co-dependent. Co-dependent people mask these efforts to control people and situations as "being helpful." In fact, attempts to "help" other people, when these others are adults, almost always have elements of control in them.

The paradox here is that co-dependents really fear relationships, because of their bad track record at home! In the relationship, they fear abandonment and rejection. This is because deep inside, there is some sort of belief that they do not deserve the love they seek, they do not deserve to be happy. Rather, they must work to earn the right to be happy... and of course, they never win and commonly ending in abandonment. Since the co-dependent does not understand what is happening in there destructive life they usually cannot save there relationship and it is too late. The co-dependent needs to have the relationship partner understand the addiction in depth to help to co-dependent.

By being drawn to people with problems that need fixing, or by being enmeshed in situations that are chaotic, uncertain and emotionally painful, they avoid focusing on their responsibility to themselves. In trying to conceal the demanding-ness from themselves and others, they grow more isolated and alienated from themselves and from the very people they long to be close to! They may be predisposed emotionally and often biochemically to becoming addicted to drugs, alcohol, and /or certain foods, especially sugary ones. They may have a tendency toward episodes of depression, which they try to hide or deny.

No doubt about it, co-dependency can be a serious addiction. Most of us have some of these characteristics, at least at times. And we have to ask what can be done about it? Fortunately, there is hope for the person caught in the trap of co-dependent relationships/personality traits. Recovery from co-dependency is much like recovery from any other addiction: it takes time, commitment, willingness to do the work and an incredibly supportive reliable partner.

To read about how to put the magic back in your marriage GO HERE

Secrets to a happy Marriage, Click HERE

Marriage Tips: My personal experiences

I am going to share with you my personal struggles. My life was literally turned upside down on June 8th 2006. My marriage was falling apart, my life was falling apart and after months of completely torching myself, I finally decided to stand up and do something! I had to make changes for myself, not just to save my marriage but for myself to be the best person that I could be. Here is the story of the start of my therapy~

Realizing my negative

This list I made and read outloud to myself everyday for 3 months.

* I overcompensate
* I protect at all costs
* I second guess my own actions and often override common sense
* I have difficulties making decisions
* I struggle for control
* I live in a constant state of denial
* I make unreasonable compromises that seriously impact on my my life, my happiness and even the happiness of my husband and kids
* I maintain an unrealistic view that if "I" do the right things, my husband will change his behavior and love me more
* I am vulnerable to manipulation, which interferes to my healing and change
* I place little value on my own needs and instead assume responsibility for those relationships in my life
* I tend to communicate on a superficial level finding it difficult to discuss my true feelings
* I am unwilling to accept responsibility for my own behavior and recovery leading to me making excuses
* I project my own inadequacies on others and blame others for my problems
* I am unable to keep promises or commitments
* I am afraid to express myself when I am hurt or angry
* I will not expres my opinions if it means making my husband upset
* I take my frustrations out on my kids for not having control of my life
* I put my personal life before my kids
* I deny and pretend that I have control over my emotions about my kids
* I cannot be honest when I am in a situation that I fell is detrimental to me
* I try to force my husband to have a relationship with my kids/ his stepkids
* I am afraid of failure and showing failure
* I am afraid to show my true feelings in fear of getting hurt
* I am not goal oriented
* I am a pesimist
As you can see it is extremely hard to admit ones OWN faults. Taking ownership is the best way to see reality and grow from there.





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Marriage Tips

Martial bliss? What exactly is that?? Marriage is the hardest job a woman has in her life. Women have taken on the role as the caretaker, the pleaser, the foundation. I am guilty! I make my husband happy! Even if I am not happy, I make sure my husband is happy and then in some weird way I become happy. At some point we must really disect ourselves and figure out what makes us happy and seek it. Life is too short to be miserable. I want to be in love and feel loved every minute of the day. I do believe marriage is work, but when has our labor become too hard?

I would like to hear some suggestions on how you make your marriage work? What sacrifices you make, or just to vent your frustrations. We can help each other.

Please check out some of the links I have attached, the offer great support with amazing information. Check out my favorite, it was a blessing to me when I was going through a very tough spell.







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Marriage Tips: Crossing over the 7 year hump in your marriage

Women and marriage, why is that we sacrifice everything and our husbands rarely sacrifice anything? Or at least we "feel" this way. After being married for a wonderful 10 years now I realize that we are the glue! But how much glue do we really need to go through for our husbands to start giving back? This past year I went through a very rough spell in my life and marriage. I felt very taken advantage of in my marriage, I felt I was always giving and never receiving. I made the worst mistake, of never conveying these feelings to my husband. Instead I wanted him to think our life was just peaches and cream.

I just sucked it up! I never complained, I worked my 10+ hours a day came home did his dishes from breakfast, started a load of laundry cleaning up here and there, and before you knew it I was making dinner taking a bath and off to bed to just wake up and do it all over again the next day.

I found myself letting the things that I loved to do and having my own life slipping away. I was living my life through my husband. I started getting depressed, sleeping a lot, not eating, no desire of life.

It took my life being turned upside down to realize that I have a life, I am my life, I am an intelligent driven individual! I was living in the fantasy world that I need a night in shiny armor to come and take care of me. My expections of what my marriage should be were so high that how could he possible ever reach them? Something funny about expectations, if he doesn't know what they are, how could he possible ever fullfill them? I am in the process of repairing my life for me! It takes some time, and it takes patience. And so far the hardest part for me has been giving up the control aspect of my marriage, and realizing "he can take care of himself!"



GO HERE for some great information that I believe will be useful to you

I have attached a few other links with useful information/ guidance.

Go Here

Go Here

For My personal Favorite Go Here