Are you in Control of your Skeletons?

The following Video Blog contains some of the written blog below plus my usual add-ons. ;)

I was laughing like crazy at Groucho Marx this morning. He says; ‘Alimony is like buying hay for a dead horse.’

He’s super funny. You may remember him from the old films as the guy with the eyebrows, moustache glasses and cigar which was his signature look from the old Vaudeville days. I find the funniest quotes from him and WC Fields.

The alimony quote can be applied to so many parts of our life. There are millions of people who have to give a certain amount of money every month to someone they aren’t married to anymore. Then there are the people have to pay off old debts. The bank may have cancelled a credit card 5 years ago that you are still trying to tackle. There is nothing more annoying than seeing money go out the door and nothing in return. I am hearing about people finally getting out of debt though, this is really encouraging. I think we have all had a rough go financially at some point.

The hardest part of starting over is the realization that getting into debt can happen in minutes, days or weeks whereas getting out of debt doesn’t happen as quickly. Marriage and divorce happens the same way. You buy a cheap marriage license, you may spend a few thousand on the wedding, but then after the purchase of the house, children and alimony expenditures, divorce is super costly.

The idea here is that the things we get ourselves into do not recover at the same speed. If you fall in the mud, it takes a second. To get your hair and clothes clean is where the time is spent. Then, you look back to see a trail of muck straight through your home staining the carpet. Overwhelmed, you decide you’ll take care of that later.

I believe we should be giving ourselves permission and time to recover but don’t look at too much of it. If today we get the mud off of ourselves, awesome! If the clothes need to soak overnight, so be it. If we can’t afford the carpet cleaner until next week sometime, that’s how it’s going to be.

I think the inhibiting part of cleaning up any of our mess is our pride and embarrassment level. We hide the bills in stacks and drawers so we don’t have to look at them. We pretend things are great to family and friends when they are really bad. We’ll spend the money on our grass, shrubs and driveways instead so we at least “look” good to everyone else.

There are a few ways I have managed to climb out. One was making brutally honest lists. You quit the avoidance and write down everything you owe, all the problems you have to face…have a really good cry or go into hysterics, whatever you have to do, then tackle it at the freshest part of your day. Most people obsess over their problems when they are emotional or tired.

I start by prioritizing the problems and the only way I can really know what the true problems are is by beginning to omit the superficial problems in my life that in previous blogs I have said really don’t matter. I will only tackle one problem at a time and I only deal with what is immediately in front of me.

The other thing I find people have a hard time with is asking for help. It’s easier to set aside the mounting bills but the truth is there are debt-consolidation programs which DO work. I’ve seen them work for people. The other thing is asking for help from family and friends. Even a shoulder to cry on is helpful if they can’t help in another way. Showing your list to a family member or friend can gain new perspective. Even if all they do is point at your list and say, ‘Oh heck, Fred owed twice that much and got out’ you can feel a bit less alone and have some new courage.

Outside of debt, we seem to have a list of things we give to others like alimony every month which are depleting us. This could be our anger, our bitterness and our frustration. You may have a weekly phone call with an ex which resembles the skipping record of all the problems in your marriage. There may be someone calling you all the time depleting your soul on a regular basis. How do you get that relationship turned around or off your plate? How do these things get crossed off the list too? What are the things in our day absorbing the day which feels like the dead horse? You know, the things which will never miraculously become a horse again? Are we given emotion and expending energy to them?

I think they need to be on that list too.

The biggest hurdle in making a list of any of our burdens is we truly believe someone is going to see the list. That person is usually us. We might be horrified to see it all in one place.

Crossing bitterness off my list today,

Karen :)

“Humor is reason gone mad.” ~Groucho Marx

What is Trapping You?

In one of my relationships, I probably stayed for three years too long. (it may have been more, but hey who’s counting?) If you know what this feels like, you’ll understand what I mean by the ‘shifting percentage’. It’s where things start out at 100% good and it starts a steady decline at a certain rate per year. At some point it’s about 50% good, 50% bad which is the teetering time where you apply the old song, ‘Should I stay or Should I go?’. For me, those last 3 years declined well under 0. It’s where it becomes not just 100% bad, but seems to scrape underneath the fingernails for extra dirt.

My counselor at that time was the one who set me on the right track. He’d ask why I hadn’t left yet. My answer was simple, "I can’t afford to."
When we discussed my career plans and the job I was doing at the time, he’d asked why I hadn’t moved on to do music fulltime. It was the same response, "I can’t afford to."

He wondered why I couldn’t afford to leave the bad relationship and if I stayed why I couldn’t afford to take the leap in my career. My answer (which was a surprise to me to) was, "I guess it’s not only money that is trapping me."

He told me he was big on making lists. I have a successful uncle who coincidentally at that time told me how lists not only saved his life, but saved his sleep also. I now try to make a list every night before bed of what I need to accomplish the next day and then I go to bed. I promise to not take anything that is on that list to sleep with me so my rest is uninterrupted by my own thoughts.

He explained to me that leaving a bad relationship (as long as it isn’t abusive) sometimes works better if you have a game plan. So that’s what I did. I made a list of daily things I needed to accomplish and a list of long-term goals and shorter-term goals to get me there. One of the things he couldn’t believe was that my partner had a personal bank account, but that my bank account was joint. He encouraged me to start one for myself. So I opened an account with a pitiful $10. I looked at my book they gave me and was exasperated at how small the amount was and how it seemed I would never make any kind of move with that. But what he did was teach me how to put every extra dollar lying around into the account suggesting too many people won’t make a deposit unless it’s large.

My bank book makes me laugh. If you look in it, you’ll see $5 deposits in it. The idea was that I didn’t touch it. I could have saved it at home in a sock, but that didn’t feel the same as seeing the climbing total. I enjoyed watching it inch up that I actually started looking for coins to roll up and take to the bank, sifting through the laundry pockets, wherever I could find it. It also kept my mind focused, as measly as that sounds.
The idea behind doing this was two-fold. It kept my mind occupied on something tangible and it gave me some independence. My counselor explained that even if I ended up staying in the relationship and it all worked out, everyone should be saving this way no matter what. I never realized how I was frittering away the dollars and cents. So it was a good lesson in money management.

His concern he said was that many people are trapped in bad relationships, they get in a brutal fight and then abruptly leave with no game plan. They are basically standing in the middle of the street with a bag in hand. Then the tears pour torrentially and they really want to give up. It’s like insult to injury to have to start over with nothing.

So, I did find out money was trapping me in the relationship, but what I found out was the bigger trap was my own daily thoughts and how I allocated them. I had accumulated a large account of negative energy. When we are upset by our situation, it’s so simple (and often understandable) that we wallow in self-pity on top of our already tumultuous relationship. It’s simply not helpful. I was trapped by my brain spending time thinking about nostalgic years prior to the rough time and I wasn’t thinking clearly.

My lists taught me to get my brain back into some mode of operation again. I applied the term, "flying under the radar" to my life. It became my new approach. Flying under the radar was where I began biting my tongue and biding my time (which some of you may recognize from the Funeral Mute song) I kept focused on the biggest thing trapping me-my own sadness. Once I figured this out, I gained a new focus which ended up leading to my new life. I applied it in all areas. I allocated more time each day to my choice career while still logically keeping the job that I was also trapped in but paid. Basically all parts of my life started the climb back out of hell and the percentages got back up to where they were. Why should I expect that something that declined over years should take minutes to fix itself? I just tried to keep an eye on the daily accomplishments and it was a lot less overwhelming.

The human brain has a tendency to stir thoughts like a chili in a slow cooker. You almost don’t recognize any one part of it anymore by the time it’s cooked! But putting a pen to paper can keep a person centered. It did me anyways. Understanding what was trapping me was the first step in prying open the teeth of it. It wasn’t just money, it was my own desperation.

Focus and clarity I think sometimes are a special gift….or in many cases we just have to learn them.

Much love on you!
Karen :)

"Patience is the ability to count down before you blast off." ~ Author Unknown