Search Results for: anger

How To Deal With Domineering Women

One of the challenges of growing up with a domineering mother who routinely disrespected our boundaries as an infant or adolescent, is that we can become hypersensitive to boundary violations with women as an adult. This can make domineering women particularly difficult to deal with when we encounter them in our daily lives. However, being assertive with such women can help us heal our wounded inner child when we stand up to them powerfully in a way that wasn’t safe for us as a child to stand up to our mother.

This leaves us feeling more confident and powerful in our interactions with other people generally; especially those who remind us unconsciously of our domineering mother. (more…)

By Graham Stoney, ago

How To Deal With An Abusive Father

I just got this question about dealing with an abusive father from my article about How To Recover From a Critical Parent:

I have a 50 year old father who has always been over-controlling, mean, critical, manipulative, judgmental and border-line abusive. These traits are becoming more pronounced as he ages (except the abusive part) and he has tried to use psychological tactics to separate me from my girlfriend and to make me feel guilty for not spending time with him. I just want to move out but Sydney housing is the most over-inflated in the world at the moment. I’m not sure how much longer I can take it. I think the reason behind his issues is he never knew his father but it’s ridiculously unfair to burden your son with this cr@p. He has a girlfriend of 7 years who you can tell isn’t compatible with him. They fight all the time and she’s depressed. She’s cheated before as a form of escapism but he manipulated her to stay with him (probably because he feels lonely). The whole situation is so pathetic. Because of his emotional and physical abuse as a kid, I live with anxiety and depression. Do you have any advice?

Sounds like your father is a real challenge to live with, and you’re still carrying the emotional scars from how he treated you as a kid. The really important thing when you have a father who is emotionally and/or physically abusive  is good boundaries. That’s hard to do while you’re still dependent on him for your physical needs such as housing, so the first thing to do is to start working towards getting out of there and into a place where you’re living with sane, reasonable people. I get that Sydney is a nightmare housing-wise, which is why I did share accommodation for a long time when I first moved out of home.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

What You Can Change and What You Can’t by Martin E.P. Seligman

Martin Seligman is one of my favourite personal development authors. Not only are his books easy to read, but as the founder of the Positive Psychology movement he’s got the academic credentials and professional experience to know what the research says, and what he’s talking about.

His book What You Can Change and What You Can’t is billed as “The Complete Guide to Successful Self-Improvement”. I was drawn to this book while contemplating the question: “Just how much can a person change?” I was particularly interested in whether it’s possible to make major changes in how we relate to other people, like if an introvert can become an extrovert. I’ve done the Myers Briggs Personality Type Indicator a couple of times in the past and I was never certain whether I was really an introvert, or just a traumatised extrovert. I love hanging around people when it goes well, but it hasn’t always gone as well as I would have liked and some of my early interactions with people were quite traumatic. I believe this is what led me to develop tremendous social anxiety. (more…)

By Graham Stoney, ago

How I Discovered Non-Violent Communication (NVC)

I first came across Marshall Rosenberg’s Non-Violent Communication (NVC) because I wasn’t getting my needs met in relationships with other people, and recognised that the communication skills I had inherited from my parents were terrible. I also wanted a way of communicating that would help me heal some of the pain from my past without forever going to therapy, and reduce the stress I felt around relating to other people.

I was a volunteer crisis counsellor with a local telephone hotline here in Sydney, Australia for 9 years, and the way we related to callers was all based on Rogerian therapy (“Sounds like you feel …”). Marshall Rosenberg studied with Carl Rogers and used Rogers’ empathy model as the basis for NVC, adding the concept of needs as the underlying basis for feelings. So when I came across NVC it was a natural fit for me.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

How To Heal Intergenerational Unworthiness Trauma

Intergenerational Unworthiness Trauma is a term I coined this morning to describe feelings of unworthiness and insecurity that are passed from parents to their children down successive generations.

Parents who feel fundamentally unworthy create a lack of secure attachment with their infants, leading to children with insecure, avoidant or disorganized attachment styles. When these children grow into adults, they pass the trauma on to their own children through their inability to bond emotionally with them. Everyone in the family ends up with emotional abandonment trauma manifesting as core feelings of unworthiness.

In other words, parents who feel fundamentally unworthy, insecure or broken are unable to raise children with deep feelings of worthiness themselves.

The cycle repeats down the generations until someone recognises and breaks it by doing the emotional healing work to deal with their own traumatic attachment wound, so they can create a secure attachment to the children in the next generation.

I have experienced this personally, and believe it is the underlying issue that undermined my own self-confidence for so long, ultimately leading me to create this website. (more…)

By Graham Stoney, ago

The Single Biggest Mistake Of My Life

I was telling a female friend of mine recently about a realisation I’d come to regarding the single biggest mistake of my life. The one that had caused me more pain and grief than anything else.

The biggest mistake I ever made was taking on a false belief. An idea, the consequences of which were enormous. It fundamentally changed how I behaved around other people, leading me to suppress and alter my whole concept of who I was. This one belief and it’s consequences led me to end up hating myself and thinking there was something wrong with me.

It’s an idea that I took on so early in my childhood that I can’t even remember when I decided to believe in it. Although I borrowed this idea from the people closest to me while growing up, it was still my choice to adopt it in my own life; something I now regret.

So what was the faulty idea behind the biggest mistake of my life?

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By Graham Stoney, ago

How To Put Your Mother In Her Rightful Place

I was visiting my parent’s place on the weekend and seeing some relatives from interstate who I don’t often get the chance to hang out with. At one point we were all sitting in the lounge room listening to my father describe the apocalyptic nightmares he’s been having lately, while my controlling mother kept interrupting, talking over him, “correcting” him and just generally dominating the conversation.

Take Your Mother Off The Power Pedestal

I’ve always found my mother’s domineering behavior annoying, but I used to be far too scared of her to stand up to it. This time though I casually lent towards her, put my hand on her arm and said “Mum, could you be quiet please. I want to hear what my father is saying”.

She moved her arm to brush me off dismissively in a way I’ve always found infuriating. This time though rather than feeling powerless and simply capitulating, I [intlink id=”2809″ type=”post”]channeled my anger into assertiveness[/intlink]: “Don’t just brush me off!”, I said, “I want to hear what he’s saying.”

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By Graham Stoney, ago

Ten Step Towards Loving Yourself

Today is Valentine’s day: the day on which people traditionally express and celebrate their love for each other. But what about loving ourselves? Many people have had the idea of self-love beaten out of them through early life experiences, so here are Ten Steps Towards Loving Yourself: (more…)

By Graham Stoney, ago