The sometimes drain of always giving to others

Encouragement needs to be reciprocal.  If you are always encouraging, affirming, supporting, giving pats on the back, but never receiving any of your own, then it's easy to wear down and begin to feel emotionally depleted.

We don't encourage others just so we can be praised for it or told how great we are.  We do it because we care, we love, we empathize, we identify, and because we want something good for that person.

But caregivers, people who give of themselves to others, also need their own good feelings of affirmation, acceptance, and appreciation.

Find ways to be available to good feelings of acceptance, appreciation, and gratitude for who you are, how you give of yourself to others, and for the love you share.  Be with those who offer these affirmations to you.  Be open to the generosity and care of others.  Freely accept smiles, warm embraces, encouraging words, loving touches, and grace from the friends and people who love and appreciate you.

Be willing to treat yourself in ways that fulfill some of your own needs for acknowledgement and care.

© 2011 Timothy Moody

Teaching Recovery, Rather Than Treating Addiction

I have often wondered if a more personalized, human approach to addiction recovery would be better than shaming people into giving up their addictions. Here is an article on how just that kind of program is having positive results. See it here: Viewpoint: Teaching Recovery

"I've come back from the colorless world of despair..."

"In my own worst seasons I've come back from the colorless world of despair by forcing myself to look hard, for a long time, at a single glorious thing: a flame of red geranium outside my bedroom window.  And then another: my daughter in a yellow dress.  And another: the perfect outline of a full, dark sphere behind the crescent moon.  Until I learned to be in love with my life again.  Like a stroke victim retraining new parts of the brain to grasp lost skills, I have taught myself joy, over and over again." ~ From, High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now or Never, by Barbara Kingsolver

You are not a mistake

"You are not a mistake. You are not a problem to be solved. But you won't discover this until you are willing to stop banging your head against the wall of shaming and caging and fearing yourself." ~ Geneen Roth, “Women, Food, and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything”