Don't trust what the chemicals say.

 Howdy my friends. I hope you've been well. A topic that has been on my mind a lot lately is dating and marriage – specifically because I struggle with depression, and it has affected my capacity to do these things. If you're anything like me, dating is a literally painful thing, especially when every rejection feels like a personal attack and a demerit to your character. I would like to try to instill within you a spark of hope that can grow into a bonfire, should you decide to nurture it. I would like to do this by speaking about some principle that can help you get a grasp of how you function, and how you can take action.

The first principle I'd like to discuss is taking inventory of yourself – you can't accurately find something if you don't know what you're looking for after all. I remember one of my professors saying, "intentionally acting is greater than blind determination". This is useful to know because it's an error we all tend to make at one point or another – we blindly throw ourselves at our problems rather than studying and intentionally acting. This leads to all kinds of mistakes and pains that could have been avoided. Part of the journey is finding your "why" for looking for a relationship – Why do you want a relationship? I bet part of you says, "because I don't want to be alone". This is completely valid, but it's often not the whole of it – Is it?

This is why taking inventory is so important – almost all things within us have explanations and reasons beyond the surface, yet we don't often explore what those are. Typically, the reason "I don't want to be alone" is really a fear rather than a desire – it reflects that, for one reason or another, being alone scares us, so we seek companionship to remove the discomfort. I don't want to be the bearer of bad news, but getting into a relationship for that purpose isn't going to fix that – it will only distract you for a time. Eventually it will come back with a vengeance. The reason for this is that typically the start of a new relationship or connection is full of Eros love, which is basically an infatuated love, driven by serotonin, adrenaline, norepinephrine, and dopamine.

When we're full of these chemicals, we have a buffer that makes us feel good for a time, but eventually it will wear off, and you'll suffer from withdrawals. After this, you'll want to keep chasing the high, even if it means terminating a perfectly healthy relationship to get your fix. An example of this I would like to use is from the history of medicine. In the 1800s, cough syrup often included Morphine, Chloroform, Alcohol, Cannabis, and Heroin together – it was a concoction of "feel good" chemicals, but it didn't fix anything – it just distracted from the symptoms. Now, I am not saying that our brain chemicals are a bad thing – they are actually very natural, healthy and helpful. We just have to be cognizant of what our drive is for our relationships.

Another part of this self-inventory is recognizing that your worth is not determined by what is or isn't happening in your life – especially in regard to relationships. The truth is that we're not everyone's cup of tea and that's okay, so that means that rejection isn't always personal, even if it feels like it. With this in mind, take heart that this also means that the problem isn't always you. Ask yourself if it's just the metaphorical "table" you keep sitting at – sometimes it just means that we need to get up and sit somewhere else. It's not defeat if something is not working out – it just means that something else will work out better, so it's about keeping moving and not giving up on your journey for the life you want. I hope this helps you keep moving towards the future you want, my friends. Take care.

A thought about perceptions..

 Howdy again my friends! A lot has been on my mind lately, but one of the thoughts that keeps reoccurring is on the topic of perception. As I have learned about perception, I have learned that we have actual physiological responses to things according to how we perceive them. The issue here is that sometimes what we perceive is not what has actually happened, and there is a disparity between what we perceive as truth, and what really is true. This leads to my question – How can we find truth beyond our perceptions without also discrediting our experiences?

To explore this, I actually went down a little rabbit hole and actually found myself looking at a study in the National Library of Medicine titled "How our bodies influence our perception of the world". Part of the study delved into how where we are standing affects how we perceive something. They found that how you are angled affects the distance you perceive. Now it's all well and good to know that where we stand impacts how we perceive things, but how does that help us? That is the "meat" of what I'd like to talk about.

I would like to propose that where we stand internally – including where we stand in our convictions and ideologies – influences how we perceive what we encounter. An example I would like to use is one from personal experience. I have had many encounters where yelling indicated violence because that is often what occurred during or immediately following it, so inside my perception was that all instances of yelling indicated violence. One day I encountered a couple yelling at each other and my instant perception was "this is going to get violent". What I didn't realize was that they were yelling because the husband played a prank on his wife. The yelling was because they were having fun, and it wasn't actually hostile – it was just loud.

After this experience, I was left to wonder if my perception of yelling was really accurate, or if my perception was actually tied to the loudness. This led me to understand that perception at its roots has two perspectives. First there is the perception of the conscious – this is where we perceive things conscientiously and outright – in my case it was the conscious perception of yelling equaling anger from experiences. Second, there is the perception of the subconscious – this is the perceptions we obtain that we don't notice. In my instance, loudness indicated violence according to my subconscious perception rather than yelling. Often the conscious observes the literal surface, and the subconscious observes the roots, or emotions.

With these things in mind, I'd like to broaden my scope to relationships and how we perceive them. If you're anything like me, you've probably had lots of bad experiences with relationships, and it has damaged your perception of relationships as a whole. It's easy to fall into the cognitive distortion of "all or nothing" thinking – a type of thinking pattern where we feel that since something has happened before, that will remain the "new normal". Don't beat yourself up for doing this – it's only natural to look for patterns to prevent future pain, but consider something a wise therapist once told me. He said, "You may be right ten out of ten times, but that is not to say that the eleventh time won't be different."

Now, I am not saying that you should keep throwing yourself into unhealthy relationships with reckless abandon, rather I am suggesting you question perceptions and explore them. That is the root concept here – to challenge your thinking and perceptions. We assume the worst as a kneejerk response to similar situations. You aren't evil for doing this – it is just important to remember that what you are perceiving might not actually be the case. You won't always do perfectly, but that's okay as well – we are all growing and learning, so keep at it my friends.

You've got power to change things.

 Howdy again my lovely folks! If you all know me (or even if you don't) you will quickly find that I love family. It's no secret that families are complex ecosystems that develop future generations and perpetuate systems of society, but they aren't always easy. With that in mind, I must confess that my upbringing was turbulent and not the healthiest – something I reckon many of you can sympathize with. This leads to a major question: How can we create a healthier culture for our family of creation that doesn't perpetuate the flaws of our family of origin?

When your family situation and upbringing are less than ideal, it's not uncommon for you to feel broken and out of place. Often this is a type of social cognitive dissonance that we experience when the actions or values of our family of origin do not match that of the societal expectations and standards. Family culture and systems help influence how we interpret our worldview, and when facing any form of cognitive dissonance, we must choose to either change our values or change our actions to address the discomfort we feel. I'd like to cover some steps that can hopefully help to launch you on your journey to better horizons.

The first step I'd like to emphasize is that of figuring out what your family culture is. When addressing a wound, you have to first acknowledge that you are hurt and find where you were hurt. Once upon a time, I was trained to become an Emergency Medical Technician, or EMT for short. Part of that training was learning how to rapidly triage a patient, and that training emphasized how asking questions, paired with observing responses, environmental factors, and "negative space". These put together paint a more complete picture, so we know how to best help. The process is similar when figuring out what to address when dealing with breaking the cycle of generational issues.

Generational issues are hard to really notice without taking an outside perspective, so it's good to find multiple outside examples to get a good frame of reference of what's within – that's what negative space is. What's amazing about this approach is you get to choose what you want to perpetuate, and what you want to do away with. Life stops being a force that acts upon you, and to a certain extent becomes a thing to be acted upon. Once you find what can be acted upon, then comes the responsibility to act, or to let things slide. A simple rule I've learned to adopt in relation to this is that you can't be mad with the outcomes of the things you refused to address.

Part of addressing things is to acknowledge the efforts of your family with the acceptance that they were doing the best they knew how. Now I know, in many instances, it feels like they should have known better, but the truth is there is a disparity between knowing what something is and applying it. An example I would like to use is that of knowing what tools are versus using those tools to build a house – you can know what tools are but not know how to apply them to build a house. Likewise, people can know the "tools" used for building a healthy family dynamic but not know how to apply them to building a home. It is your responsibility to observe what made the home broken and learn how to apply the tools to build a new, better home and dynamic. I know that the pain of the past can't be changed, but the power is in you to change the pain of the future – I believe in you, my friends.

Gotta Start Somewhere...

 Howdy! I have been thinking about developing/maintaining relationships quite a lot lately, and I have realized a valuable tool that I hadn't even considered – Symbolic Interactionism. I promise I will make it make sense, so just bear with me. If y'all are anything like me, then developing and maintaining relationships is a nightmare – so much confusion and strain. To clarify, symbolic interactionism is basically a theory that tries to explain how things develop meaning to us, as well to society as a whole.

Now let's consider why it is so useful to us! What is a big part of being a part of any social circle or relationship? It's the sense of self that we maintain, and how we perceive ourselves. Without a good sense of self, we tend to be prone to ending up in unfulfilling relationships and situations, even when we don't fully realize it. Think about it! How many times have you found yourself looking in the mirror after a certain interaction and thinking to yourself "how did I end up in this situation?" Part of the answer is symbolic interactionism! Subconsciously we put ourselves where we "feel" we belong, all depending upon our sense of self.

Think about it! We sometimes stick with crappy relationships because we feel like we can't do better, or because they are meaningful to us for some reason or another. That is another aspect of symbolic interactionism – it delves into how something gains meaning to us, and when we're staying in some relationships, it's because we've tied certain meaning to them. Through multiple interactions, we develop a perception of ourselves and what something means to us, and our relationships reflect this fact.

If you look at it, that is exactly how relationships develop – you encounter someone and as you interact with them, they gain a certain meaning to you, for better or worse. As you interact with people, those interactions reinforce or challenge certain behaviors within yourself. Here's an example: Bob was never really one for washing his hands before meals, he just never really understood why it mattered. One day, Bob meets Ashley, and they hit it off – now it's date six and Bob really likes Ashley, but he finds out that she loves cleanliness in all forms. For her, it's a major dealbreaker if whoever she is dating isn't practicing cleanliness. What should Bob do? He can either "stick to his guns" and risk ending this meaningful relationship, which would reinforce his current behavior, or he can recognize that his relationship with Ashely is more important. If his relationship is more significant to him, then he will engage in behaviors that reflect the meaning of that relationship.

Now we reach a new dilemma – what do we do when our relationships reinforce things that we really don't like about ourselves? This is where the sense of self is crucial – a defined sense of self helps us to recognize the direction we want to go, as well as see when we are not going in that direction. Symbolic interactionism is important to know since we have the power to decide where we go, and what kind of relationships we want. We actually have the power to decide what is meaningful to us and reinforce those things. An example I'll give is one from experience. I used to hate going to the gym. I thought it was stupid and a waste of time, but eventually I decided to push through the pain, and I realized that I wanted to be physically fit. It took time, but I realized that what I was doing was worthwhile – that my health was worth something to me, and that it was worth investing that time in. As I changed my framing, my relationship with myself changed, and so did what going to the gym meant to me as well.

As we change what we mean to ourselves, we change the outcomes for that future version of 'us', and symbolic interactionism is a means by which we can address change. As we review who we see ourselves as, and what we want to become, we can have more power to decide what we'll put meaning on, and what we will permit from those around us. My hope is that you will be enabled to develop a self-image that screams "I love who I am" so that you can better pursue the life you are desiring. Love life – don't just "endure" the cards you've been dealt – you're worth so much more than that.