Brooke,

Thank you for your help!

It has taken me a while to understand how to model correctly. I can see the growth in modeling and my thinking, and what I need to work on.

Initially I believed that my issues were with my Husband. Now I see and understand my issues are with me, my thinking and how I interpret what I hear. This is liberating and scary at the same time. It is not that my husband is negative, it is that I allow his comments to have a negative affect on me. It will take me a long time to retrain my brain to not interpret statements with negative wording (I don’t like, it wasn’t good, it could have been better, ‘whatever’, etc) as not being negative. It goes against everything I learned in grammar class.

The challenge for me is to learn how to hear these words and think in such a way that frees me from feeling negativity. I much prefer to be around people who see possibility and positivity in experiences. I have a few friends who are so energizing for me to be with and talk to because I receive their statements and thoughts as positive.

For example, I can go to dinner with my Husband and my (positive) friend and her husband. Walking away from dinner, after the same wait staff and dining experience, my husband may say something like “The acoustics in that place were awful – it was so hard to have a conversation” while my friend may say something like “That was the best steak I’ve had in a long time!” Same experience. Different comments after. My impulse is to think my husband is negative and my friend is positive and so feel better about my friend than my husband

Here is where some of my work lies, I think.

Maybe I am lazy and want the thinking to be done for me and that’s why I enjoy spending time with people whose comments and behavior make it easy for me think a positive thought. Maybe I am blaming my husband for the very thing that I am doing – namely finding the obvious negative instead of looking for the positive. I think I can safely say my husband is more accepting and patient of me than I think I am with him. I might think I want more from him, but I now i am discovering that I really want more from me. Only I don’t know what it is. The SCS class is an opportunity to learn and uncover what I want/need from myself

So I think I have work to do here as well.

My compelling reason for this shift in thinking (negativity) and learning more about my needs is to grow my marriage by discovering what it is I need to do for myself to ensure I live my life to the fullest without dependency on anyone else. There is an underlying fear that I have always had that if I do what I need to do to take care of myself, I will somehow be leaving my husband and family behind. That our connectivity as a family is somehow dependent on my presence helping everyone else get what they want and ignoring what I want. What if I really start making plans to explore activities that inspire and challenge me outside the family and the result is I leave my husband behind or drop the ball on parenting. My husband’s career demands up to 70 plus hours a week – so he isn’t home often and the day to day responsibilities of raising our children fall mostly on me. There is no complaint here on this fact by either of us, by the way. But my mind does find this limiting to my personal development. We both feel strongly that a parent is home when the children get home from school and that we eat dinner together as a family as many nights during the week as possible.

So, my GOAL is to change my engagement with the world this year.

Here are my steps to achieving this:
1. Continue running though models to understand what thinking I need to change and work on creating new thought patterns that support feelings of empowerment, happiness, positivity and possibility.
2. Create and honor boundaries for myself. These boundaries will protect my time so I can spend time with friends, plan activities I enjoy and learn to let go on some control issues I have in the family
3. Commit to spending time with my husband engaging in activities that don’t involve the children three times a month. This does not include dinner on the weekends. (we already do this – I want to do more with him)

So, this is my first pass at a refined goal. Thank you for providing feedback and suggestions on improvement

Thank you for your time and leadership!