Everyone has their demons. They can take the form of addictions, procrastination, lack of purpose, maladaptive ways of relating to the world, unhealthy relationships, etc. They can consume us and erode our soul. The key to defeating these demons is internalizing that they no longer work for us and the life we want to live. It’s very simple solution, yet so hard to truly implement and let go of the things that will destroy us if we continue on that path.

We keep our demons around because we know them – for good and for bad. Even if they are completely dysfunctional and mess with our life, they are known. Sometimes we just don’t know how to be without them. And sometimes, they don’t seem to be so bad for us. These demons are super sneaky deceivers.

Here are some things to remember when trying to change behaviors and patterns that no longer serve you:

• Focus on adding the new healthy behaviors at first instead of focusing on what you shouldn’t do.
• Be compassionate with yourself. At some point these behaviors served some purpose in your life. You adapted the best way you could in the situation. But now you have more tools in your toolbox and don’t need those old, ineffective tools anymore.
• Know that as you make changes, it might get stressful. If you want to have a different life, you have to be willing to do things that you’ve never done before. And at first, it will be stressful.
• Change your people, places and things that support the changes you are trying to make in your life. Be around those who inspire you to be better and support a healthier version of you.
• Be patient with yourself. Great changes don’t happen in a linear fashion. Sometimes you take a step back, and that’s okay. Just keep moving in the right direction.

 And remember, monsters live in the dark. The things that trigger your demons don’t have to be faced alone. Have someone you can talk to who can support the changes you are making.

It’s completely human to care about what the people who we love and care about think of us. We naturally want to be liked and accepted. Where things start to go off track is when we start listening to other people’s opinions over our own.

We only have this one life while we are here on this Earth. Like Ferris Bueller says, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” We are all perishable items. We need to start living accordingly.

Think about it like this: When you were a child and you were playing in your backyard you did your own thing and you didn’t care what anyone thought. You were fully present and engaged in what you were doing.

As a child I felt like my life was limitless. I could be whoever I wanted to be, and I could do anything I wanted to do someday. I was definitely a weird child, but I knew deep in my soul that I was born to stand out from the norm. I didn’t care what anyone thought of me or who they thought I should be.

But as I got older, other people’s opinions infiltrated my heart and mind. And it happened slowly. And before I knew it, I lost sight of who I was because I was so busy trying to be who they wanted me to be.

In the book The Four Agreements, there is a term used from Toltec wisdom called mitote. Mitote is basically a fog in the mind of a thousand voices, filled with ideas and messages from the world telling who you should be based on what the world says will make you feel loved and accepted. It causes us to see things incorrectly, in a completely distorted way and causes us to deviate from our true path of who we are. We become clouded by who the world says we should be and fight against our true selves. Long story short, the people telling you who you should be are the mitote and we have to silence their voices once and for good.

Here are some things to remember when the mitote get too loud:

• Other people’s opinions of you are not your business.
• The greatest prison we will ever live in is the fear of what others think.
• If you live for other people’s acceptance, you will die from their rejection.
• Worry about your character, not your reputation. Your character is who you are, and your reputation is what others think you are.
• Your life isn’t yours if you care about what others think.

Sometimes there is just no need to engage with people to bring chaos into your life. It easier said than done when the person bringing the crazy is someone you love. But at the end of the day, we are responsible for our own state of mind. And if they are doing things that you know mess with your head or threaten your mental wellness, respect yourself enough to disengage.

We tend to go wrong with these situations when we get caught up in the vicious cycle of proving to the other person why our feelings are valid, and we desperately want them to see and hear us. If it’s a situation that is threatening our mental health, we rationalize to ourselves why we need to ride it out, thinking maybe it will get better. The problem with this kind of thinking is that it ends up becoming crazymaking.

In a previous post I talked in depth about what this kind of dynamic can look like in a relationship and how you can protect your sanity. When we find ourselves in these threatening situations, we need to ask ourselves if we are vulnerable to responding to inconsistent praise from the other person. As referenced in the post:

“The crazy maker will give you praise, and you will feel good about things, and then they quickly take it away. There have been numerous studies that show how addictive inconsistent praise can be to people and how praise from someone who doesn’t give it often, is more meaningful. It’s actually been equated to the inconsistent reward of gambling addiction.”

I can honestly say that there have been too many times in my life that I have fallen into this trap. And it was simply because I didn’t believe that I was enough on my own. My value and worth were dependent on external validation, and whether or not someone else saw me and heard me. You can only imagine how much I chased inconsistent praise and rewards! It was clearly not a sound strategy, but as you work on yourself more, you dismantle that childhood programming of needing external validation and you finally internalize that you are enough. And you deserve to vibrate on a higher frequency and protect yourself from chaos and nonsense.

What about you? Are you tolerating people or situations that threaten your peace of mind, self-respect, values, morals or self-worth? If so, what can you start doing today to protect your mental health?

We are not what happened to us or our decisions. They are things happened to us or are things we did. They are not who we are. Yet the struggles we face sometimes grip us to the point where we become our struggle.

When we go through hardships and traumas, it is appropriate take the time you need, whatever that is or whatever it looks like, to deal with it. That is an important part of the process. Where things get tricky is when we become consumed by it.

For me, sometimes I do get trapped in a place where I become consumed by it. But then I check myself and think about Jocko Willink’s motivation video, “Good.” If I can look at my struggles and say “good”, it means I’m still breathing and I’m still alive. I still have some fight left, so I can get up, dust off and reload, recalibrate and re-engage. Now I can go back into the attack and overcome my struggle. Here’s his short motivational video:

You see, we can take our struggles and let them fuel us, rather than define us. It is what we do with the hand that we are dealt that matters.

No matter what your struggle is, remember that we were never created to live depressed, defeated, guilty, condemned, ashamed or unworthy. We were created to be victorious.

Taking complete ownership of yourself and your actions is critical in forming deep, meaningful and healthy relationships with others. At the end of the day, you are responsible for your role in the relationship and how you choose to behave. When you take ownership of yourself, you are deciding not to play the blame game or play the victim. It’s taking an active role in creating a place of honesty, integrity, vulnerability and safety in the relationship. It isn’t enough for one person to take accountability – both partners have to be willing to do so for their relationship to thrive.

What does taking accountability look like?

Accountability means taking responsibility when you have accidentally done something wrong, hurt someone else, or let someone down. It’s apologizing for it, but also making a commitment to change the behavior. It’s hearing and seeing your partner and responding to their needs. It’s giving them compassion and empathy. Being accountable also means being honest and transparent with your partner. It is being open and vulnerable about your feelings, even when you feel sacred or when you have to have a difficult conversation.

When choosing ownership, you also have to be able to clearly see what is and isn’t your responsibility.

Don’t accept responsibility or blame for something that is truly not yours to carry. This is where you’ll see many unhealthy relationships with an imbalanced dynamic. One partner doesn’t take enough responsibility for themselves, whereas the other takes on too much responsibility that isn’t even theirs. I have a disposition to occasionally take on other people’s responsibility in relationships, so I have to be mindful of it and challenge myself at times. I literally ask myself if a friend told me that she was really responsible for X (and X is something that is clearly not her responsibility), what would I say to her? 

Are you accountable in your relationships? Do you have a toxic behavior that you need to change? If so, what can you start doing today to change it?

All of our experiences – the good, the bad and the ugly, shape who we are. We have to remember that our experiences are just that – experiences. What happened to us or what we have gone through does not have to define us.

Trauma creates changes we don’t choose, but how healing flips the control back to us and allows us to create the change that we do choose. Healing from our trauma allows us to take back our power. We get to choose from that point forward how things are going to go. What we can do in taking back our power becomes limitless. We get to determine what we will do with our experience and how it will shape us going forward. But more so, healing is our responsibility. While we aren’t responsible for what happened to us, we are responsible for healing ourselves.

We ultimately get to choose how we integrate those experiences, even if they are awful, into our lives. No one has the perfect life and we all have challenges. And some of us go through some horrible things. But ultimately, we get to choose how we respond to it.

When you think about it, the people who become really successful have often gone through horrific events in their life to become who they are. For example, as a child, Oprah Winfrey went through hell enduring sexual abuse. She struggled to make it on television as a journalist and was told by people in the industry that she was “unfit” for television. Oh, how wrong they were about this woman! She went on to help so many people and became known as the “Queen of All Media”.  Another example of someone who really had some horrible experiences in his life is Sylvester Stallone. Those experiences shaped him so much, he was inspired to write Rocky. Listen to Tony Robbins tell his story:

If you are struggling right now with experiences you have had, know that you are not alone. Integrating experiences into our lives takes time. And sometimes it’s okay to grieve and experience challenges because that is part of the healing process. It’s okay to fall down every now and again – just don’t stay there.

The need to control others is born out of insecurity, anxiety, fear and low self-esteem. If someone feels out of control emotionally or mentally and cannot regulate their own feelings, they turn outward to get that sense of control and security from something external – typically another person.

Their sense of self-esteem and well-being is dependent on the reassurances that control gives them. However, they never really have real control over someone else and any morsel of control they do have, is very short lived. And when they perceive any sense of losing that control, the cycle starts again because they desperately need that external reassurance by having control to feel secure. These people are highly outcome dependent and will go to great lengths to get their needs met by controlling others.

The desire to control others can come from many places. Perhaps one feels uncertain about the future and feels that they are powerless in the situation, so they seek to control others so that they feel more certain. Someone who fears abandonment may try to control their significant other so that he or she doesn’t leave them. They may constantly test the waters by behaving poorly to see if their partner will leave them and feel reassured when they don’t. But ironically, this kind of behavior ends up pushing the other away and creating a self-fulfilling prophecy of abandonment. Someone who secretly feels like a fraud may try to control others’ impressions of them because they fear being “found out” and rejected or abandoned.

These are all ineffective thought patterns that cannot be changed by anything external. It can only be addressed within.

The tricky thing about this kind of behavior is that it is typically deeply ingrained in people. They learned as a child that how you feel loved, safe and secure is through controlling others. They were taught as a child that they get their needs met through manipulation and influence. And if that is the only way they know how to get their needs met, it is going to take some time and consistent effort to reprogram their brain to get their needs met in a healthier way.

When someone attempts to control you, remember that it is born out of feeling of lack that they feel is within themselves. They may project confidence, but underneath the surface is insecurity. Remember that their behavior has everything to do about how they feel about themselves and nothing to do with you.

Here are some steps you can take when responding to someone who is trying to control you:

1.) Communicate with them about how their behavior is impacting you. Use “I” statements instead of “You”.

2.) Offer to help brainstorm alternatives to the controlling behavior. Like mentioned previously, controllers don’t often know how else to get their needs met. By offering up ways you prefer they interact with you, they can understand a healthier, more effective way to get their needs met. For example, if your partner has a habit of committing your time to things before asking you, tell him or her to ask you first so you can check your calendar.

3.) Understand what you really want and respond accordingly. Don’t just give in to a controller’s demand to keep the peace. If a boundary needs to be set, this is the time to set it. Be clear and firm with your boundary.

4.) Don’t get sucked in to debating your feelings or why what you feel is valid. How you feel is valid and you don’t need the other person to agree. Remember that they derive a sense of security and safety by controlling other people. They will see you asserting yourself as a power struggle. If they don’t like what they are hearing from you, they will be highly motivated to wear you down, so you agree with them and they feel better. As tempting as it may be to end the conversation and just agree, if you do, you are teaching them that this tactic will work on you and it will be repeated. If they keep trying to get you to engage, simply tell them that you will both have to agree to disagree, or that it is what it is and end the conversation.

When we don’t own who we are, we feel like we need to be someone else to measure up. We come from a place of lack and not feeling like we are good enough as we are. But the truth is, it is our imperfections and flaws that make us relatable, unique, beautiful and…human.

If we can’t accept ourselves as we are, how can we believe that other people will? Even if they do, we won’t be able to see it.

Remember that the experiences and struggles you have had do not define you. Don’t let your struggle become your identity.

Here are some things to remember about your value and worth:

• Your value doesn’t decrease based on someone’s inability to see your worth.
• Self-love, self-respect, self-worth all starts with the word “self” because you can’t get them from anyone else.
• If you find yourself constantly trying to prove your worth to someone else, you have already forgotten your value.
• In order to love who you are, you cannot hate the experiences that shaped you.
• You are not your mistakes. They are what you did, not who you are.

Like Danielle LaPorte says, “You will always be too much of something for someone: too big, too loud, too soft, too edgy. If you round out your edges, you lose your edge. Apologize for mistakes. Apologize for unintentionally hurting someone- profusely. But don’t apologize for being who you are.”

Be proud of who you are. Own everything about yourself. Have the courage to step up and live your story. You never know who may see you and feel inspired to do the same.