Loving well means being mindfulness and radical acceptance.
I have to admit. The first time I heard the phrase “mindfulness” it conjured up images of a room full of people sitting on yoga mats. Not that there is anything wrong with yoga, but I’ve always been a running and biking kind of girl. The idea of quieting myself in any way was simply foreign to me. After all, I was the over-reactive crazy mom. That’s how I was wired. That’s how God created me, right?
As the chaos in our family grew however, I began to realize that I was a major contributor. The pain of what was happening in our home almost daily was so intense that I knew that if something didn’t change it could cause irreparable damage to our entire family.
What I learned through some great therapy was that mindfulness and radical acceptance where entirely different than what I thought they were.
Mindfulness is simply balancing your emotions. It’s not being too extreme in your logical mind, overthinking and over-analyzing everything that did happen, is happening and may be going to happen, not responding with any emotion, including empathy or compassion. And it’s not being too far to the other extreme in our emotional mind, which was where I always landed. That meant responding to everything with anger or assumptions or judgement. Not waiting to get all of the facts or information before formulating opinions. The words open-ended question were not in my vocabulary. I would rush to a quick conclusion to every situation and of course I was always right.
Radical acceptance goes hand in hand with mindfulness. It means just assessing the situation without judgement. That means listening without drawing quick conclusions, asking questions to get information and simply waiting to respond. And then it means responding thoughtfully and intentionally without blurting out the first things that comes into your mind.
Both of these practices are critical when dealing with a loved one with a use disorder. When they are out of control, you can maintain control. When they are verbally berating you, you can pause and listen without immediately jumping to conclusions. When they ask you for money or lose their cellphone for the 12,000th time you can simply listen without responding or without finding it necessary to “make a point.”
The most beneficial thing about this for me was that by staying balanced I can become intentional about my actions and my words. I am no longer subject to my emotions and go to sleep at night, in peace, knowing that I hadn’t contributed to the damage that addiction was already doing to our family. It also allows me to be “in the moment.” Neither assuming the worst based on the past nor stealing precious moments from the future by “expecting” negative outcomes. It means loving well by just “being.” And for me, as I’ve learned to control my thoughts, control my tongue (which took sometimes biting it), and manage my reactions and emotions slowly but surely things started to change in my relationships with every member of my family.
Copyright @ 2018 Pam Jones Lanhart