If you are in entertainment, publishing, the arts or similar, it will behoove you to stop career comparison in its tracks and make real friends so you can share, vent and uplift one another. Image credit: 4peteseek on Flickr.

To Former “Difficult” Children: Some things to remember if you still have guilt or shame around being 'difficult' for your parents or baggage around not fitting their expectations. (Image credit: allspice1 on Flickr.)

Another article about Part X! Photo credit: Sodanie Chea

You may not be able to reduce their power over the US, but you can reduce how much power and space they take up in your mind. It's hard, but you can still do good and keep some solace.

Now that you've identified Part X (see my last post) and are learning its patterns, here are some methods you can use to diminish its power and stop self sabotaging, ruminating or spiraling.

How to isolate the thoughts that hold you back and keep you feeling small so you can eventually silence them

When you were a child, what did you think adulthood looked like? What was society telling you about being grown-up? I, for one, had a very materialistic conception - I thought I’d own a house and wake up one day in this house owning a Swedish exercise ball like the one my parents had. I would feel an incomprehensible need to do weird bouncy exercises on this ball. This would make me an adult. My mother pictured something similar, that she’d wake up one morning with heels on. I think we were all taught to picture hyper specific circumstances or material things as hallmarks of adulthood: owning a home, having a steady career, marriage, children, exercise balls, etc. But adulthood doesn’t always look like this. In fact nowadays, adulthood does not look like this for most people - many adults simply cannot afford home ownership. Lots of adults wait on or forego marriage or children entirely. Many of us bounce around from one job to the next with no clear career path in front of us. So I thought I’d try to write down a series of more skill and mindset oriented hallmarks of adulthood so we don’t all beat ourselves up for not being what or where we expected to be in adulthood. You don’t have to have all of these things I’m listing to fit these better hallmarks of adulthood, or even some of them. You just have to be working towards them. 

Something I hear from my clients all the time: “I know this negative statement about myself isn’t true, but I believe it nonetheless.”