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How to Love Your Enemies: No Faking Allowed
One of the biggest surprises that adult life has brought me is the fact that I have enemies. I’m not talking about the devil or even people who find me annoying. I am talking about bona fide enemies who actively wish me harm or who for reasons of their own, hate me. Another surprise that adult life brought my way is how easy it is to hate them back. Hatred is a bleak desert of an emotion. And it pretty much always leads to despair. After all, no life springs forth from the kind of hatred one feels towards someone similarly inclined towards oneself. And because we know that we…
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Five Passive Aggressive Types To Disinvite From Your Life
Proverbs says a lot about fools, but the uniting factor in all the different verses is the underlying assumption that you will deal with a lot of them. Some are easier to spot than others, usually because their mouth proclaims the news quite loudly. If this seems harsh, let me mitigate it by the admission that sometimes my own mouth has often robbed others of the illusion that I am among the wise. As a former passive aggressive (mostly) person, I have developed an eye for these types. Most often I meet them at work where passive-aggressive behavior is often honed to a fine art. After all, the group cc…
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The Codependent Behavior that Kills Your Joy
I spent most of my life thinking that codependent behavior was buying alcohol for alcoholics. I pictured a weak but loving person giving some drunk on the street a bottle of booze because at least the addict would be happy for a little while. Or maybe going to the bar, picking their loved one off the floor and taking them home, putting them to bed, only to do it again the next day. My ideas were mostly informed, I believe, by the movies. Turns out codependent behavior is a little more complicated. Turns out I didn’t just have codependent tendencies, but full-blown behaviors that needed to be addressed. So this…
Healing Through Art & Words
