The following passages are from the book “Pulling your own strings” by Dr Wayne W. Dyer. My hope is that new BS’s on these boards who feel unwilling, unsure and/or afraid to apply effective MB principles (like exposure) to help bust up their WS’s A’s, will find this thread helpful and will give them the necessary courage to apply and take these steps. On different occasions, I’ve already posted this to two BS’s, but I thought it would be a good idea to put it on a new thread where more people can read it. Here it is:

[color:"blue"]A NEW LOOK AT STRENGTH [/color]

Being strong in no way implies being powerful, manipulative, or even forceful. By operating from strength, I mean leading your life from the twin positions of worth and effectiveness.

You are always a worthy, important human being, and there is never any reason to conduct yourself, or allow others to pull or push you, in any direction in which your basic merit as a human being is challenged. Moreover, in any situation you have a choice between (1) being effective and reaching your goals, or (2) being effective and, ultimately, being restricted from doing what you desire. In most cases – not all, but most – you can be effective, and in all cased, you can operate from the position of your own intrinsic worth as a person.

In dealing with your self-worth, remind yourself that by definition it must come from yourself. You are worthy not because others say so, or because of what you accomplish, or because of your achievements. Rather, you are precious and you say so, because you believe it, and most importantly, because you ACT as if you are worthy.

Being a non-victim starts with the principle of saying and believing that you are valuable, but it is put into practice when you begin behaving as if you are worthwhile. This is the essence of strength, and of course, of not being a victim. You can’t act out of needs to be powerful or intimidating, but you must act from strength which guarantees you will be treated as a worthy person simply because you believe down to your very soul that you do count.

Being effective is not an universal given, as is your own self-esteem. At times you will not attain your goals. Occasionally you will find people irrationally impossible to deal with, or encounter situations where you’ll have to back off or compromise to avoid being further victimized. You can, however, cut these “losses” down to an unavoidable minimum, and more important, you can eliminate totally the emotional upsets of being thwarted now and then.

Being effective simply means you apply all your personal resources and use all available strategies, short of stepping on others, to achieve your objectives. Your own worth and personal effectiveness are the cornerstones of operating from strength.

Keep in mind that a breakdown of the word invalid, meaning a physically weak person, comes out in valid. By living your life from a position of emotional weakness you are not only a loser most of the time, but you virtually invalidate yourself as a person. “But”, “you must ask, “why would I ever do a thing like that to myself?”

[color:"blue"] FEAR: SOMETHING THAT RESIDES IN YOU[/color]

Most of the reasons you’d give yourself for not operating from strength involve some kind of fear of “what will happen if…”. You may even admit that you are often “paralyzed by fear.” But what is it that you think comes from somewhere out of the blue and immobilizes you? If you started on a scavenger hunt today and you were told to bring back a bucket full of fear, you could look forever, but you’d always come home empty-handed. Fear simply does not exist out there in the world. It is something that you do to yourself by thinking fearful thoughts and having fearsome expectations. No one in this world can hurt you unless you allow it, and then of course you are hurting yourself.

You may be victimized because you’ve convinced yourself that some person won’t like you, or that some disaster will befall you, or that there are any of thousands of other excuses, if you do things your way. But the fear is internal, and is supported by a neat little system of thoughts which you cleverly use to avoid dealing directly with your self-imposed dread. You may express these thoughts to yourself in sentences like the following:

I’ll fail
I’ll look stupid
I’m unattractive
I’m not sure
They might hurt me
They might not like me
I’d feel too guilty
I’ll lose everything
They might get mad at me
U might lose my job
God won’t let me into heaven
Something bad will probably happen if I do
I know I’ll feel awful if I say that
I won’t be able to live with myself.

Thoughts like these betray and internal support system and maintain a fear-based personality which keeps you from operating from strength. Every time you reach inward and come up with one of these fear sentences, you’ve consulted your weakness mentality, and the victim stamp will soon be evident on your forehead.

If you have to have a guarantee that everything will be all right before you take a risk, you will never get off first base, because the future is promised to no one. There are no guarantees on life’s services to you, so you’ll have to toss away your panicky thoughts if you want to get what you want out of life. Moreover, almost all your fearful thoughts are purely head trips. The disasters you envision will rarely surface. Remember the ancient sage who said, “I’m an old man, and I’ve had many troubles, most of which have never happened.”

The brilliant English author and lexicographer Samuel Johnson once wrote,

All fear is painful, and when it conduces not to safety, is painful without use – Every consideration, therefore, by which groundless terrors may be removed, adds something to human happiness.

Johnosn’s words are still vital some two hundered years after he wrote them. If your fears are groundless, they are useless, and removing them is indispensable for you happiness.

[color:"blue"] EXPERIENCE AS AN ANTIDOTE TO FEAR[/color]

You cannot learn anything, undermine any fear, unless you are willing to DO something. Doing, the antidote to fear and most self-defeating behavior, is shunned by most victims who operate from weakness. But the maximum of education that makes the most sense to me is:

I hear: I forget
I see: I remember
I Do: I understand

You will never know what it feels like to get rid of a fear until you risk behavior that confronts it. Just as no one can teach you fear, no one can teach you not to be afraid. Your fears are your own unique sensations, and you alone are going to have to challenge them. You just have to get out there, grovel around, fail a lot, try this, change that – in a word, experiment. But can you really imagine that experimenting and experiencing, will decrease your wisdom and chances for success? If you refuse to give yourself the necessary experiences, you are saying to yourself, “I refuse to know”. And refusing to know will make you weak and assure your victimization by others.

You can’t know strengths unless you are willing to test yourself - and if all tests always succeeded, there would be no need for them, so you can’t stop testing whenever you fail. When you get to the point where you are willing to attempt anything that seems worthwhile to YOU (not them, you), then you will understand experience as the antidote to fear. Benjamin Disraeli, the witty nineteenth-century English statesman and author, said it quite succinctly in his earlier writings:

Experience is the child of Thought, and Thought is the child of Action. We cannot learn men from books.

First you think, and then you do, and only thirdly do you know. And that is how you challenge all the timidity that keeps you a victim.

[color:"blue"] COURAGE: A NECESSARY COMMODITY FOR NON-VICTIMS[/color]

Willingness to confront fear is called courage. You will find it very hard to overcome your fears unless you are willing to muster up some valor, even though you will find that you already posses it if you are willing to realize it.

Courage means flying in the face of criticism, relying on yourself, being willing to accept and learn from the consequences of all your choices. It means believing enough in yourself and in living your life as you choose so that you cut the strings whose ends other people hold and use to pull you in contrary directions.

You can make your mental leaps toward courage by repeatedly asking yourself: ”What is the worst thing that could happen to me if…?” When you consider the possibilities realistically, you will almost always find that nothing damaging or painful can happen when you take the necessary steps away from being a knee-jerk victim. Usually you will find that, like a child afraid of the dark, you are afraid of nothing, because nothing is the worst thing that could happen to you. Failing generally means ending up where you started, and while it may not be utopia, it is certainly a situation you can handle. Cora Harris, the American author, said it this say:

The bravest thing you can do when you are not brave is to profess courage and act accordingly.

I like the idea of professing courage, because the important thing to do is act, rather than to try to convince yourself of how brave you are or aren’t at any given moment.

[color:"blue"] UNDERSTANDING YOUR OPERATING-FROM-WEAKNESS DIVIDENDS[/color]

Any time you catch yourself paralyzed by fear – in a world, victimized – ask yourself: “What am I getting out of this?” Your first temptation will be to answer, “Nothing”. But go a little deeper and you’ll ask why people find it easier to be victims than to take strong stances of their own, to pull their own strings.

You can seemingly avoid a lot of risks, avoid ever “putting yourself on the spot”, by simply giving up and letting others take control. If things go badly you can blame whoever is pulling your strings, call them bad names, and neatly avoid your own greater responsibility. At the same time you can conveniently avoid having to change; you are “free” to remain a “good little victim”, getting regular dividends of phony approval from the victimizers of the world.

The payoff of weakness almost all come out of your avoidance of risks. Keep in mind that it is crucial for you to always be appraised of your own reward system, self-defeating though it may be, as you work toward improving the quality of your life in every behavioral and mental dimension.

[color:"blue"] NEVER PLACE ANYONE’S HEAD ABOVE YOUR OWN[/color]

If you are ready to give “operating form strength” a serious go, you will have to stop placing other people above yourself in value and worth. Whenever you give another person more prestige than you give yourself, you have set yourself yup to be victimized.

Strength is a word I used with a great amount of pre-thought. I’ve been careful to define it in explicit terms. Being cantankerous, unruly, obnoxious, deceitful, and the like is not advocated, since it will almost always turn away the very people you want to have help you. I am, of course, supportive of being able to be obnoxious if it is called for on extreme occasions. You just don’t have to be passive or weak as you walk through your life steps, and that is really the fundamental lesson of this chapter. Be a worthy, effective, self-important you, rather than a sniveling permission-seeking victim who believes that everyone is more important than you are.

[color:"blue"] ISN’T IT IRONIC – PEOPLE RESPECT STRENGTH[/color]

If you really want to be respected, take a hard look at those who are so expert at getting respect. You will quickly deduce that you will not gain anyone’s respect, including your own, by operating from weakness. You must set aside the idea that people will not like you if you behave assertively.

Whenever you find yourself standing up for what you believe and wondering what everyone else is thinking, rest assured that if you took a private poll, you would find almost everyone secretly pulling for you, and admiring your attitude of toughness. So not setting your goals according to which ones will win the immediate approval of others may, paradoxically, help you get their approval in the long run – and no one is denying that if feels better to receive approval than to be rejected. It might just be comforting to know that the people whose approval you are most concerned about are much more prone to respect you when you behave from your own convictions than when you simply tag along and do what is expected of you.

Thank you for posting this - I wish I would have seen this 2 years ago shortly after D-day. BUT - I wouldn't have followed this anyway..I was a VICTIM - I was afraid of the "what if's".Everything you posted was how I felt -

If I exposed him - he'd leave me..
If I contacted OW - he'd divorce me...

Well, I've since done it and he's not done a darn thing yet..So seeing his reaction (though he did shut me out more, became enraged, but only because he lost "control" of me the victim) were only my fears, my what if's...

And only because I don't care what he does anymore - have I become empowered and strong against those that have tried to continue making me the "victim"..

I consider myself a conflict avoider - when in fact - I may just be fearful of others reactions - which only gives them power over me and only reinforces their lack of respect for me....

Those days are "almost" gone..I'm still learning how to get thru all this but I'm 100% stronger than 2 years ago..

THanks again..

^^^Bump^^^

*thumbs up* and *snaps*

for *Suzet*

this is fab-u-less ... daahling

Thank you also for posting this. I've lived with a lot of the fears since the first D-day 10 years ago. It took a lot of my inner energy to get thru that ordeal.

Now 10 years later, older & wiser, and dealing with my WH second "A" I feel a strengh that I never Knew I could find. Maybe this strengh is temporary? Who's to know, but focusing on myself & rebuilding my own self esteem feels like the right thing to do now.

Thanks again
BW - 43 (me)
WH - 45
M - 24 yrs
DD - 21
DS - 19

Only interested in recovery for myself at this time

Thanks Pepper, I’ve fixed the typo! <img src="/ubbt/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />

THAT was an ironic typo if there ever was one .... sometimes, the typos are sooooo funnee.

REALLY an excellent post Suzet* .... may I suggest you bump this one regularly?

... there fixed MY typos

would that be LESS than fab-u? <img src="/ubbt/images/graemlins/pfft.gif" alt="" />

It IS excellent. Thank you Suzet for taking the time to post this. It makes me want to read the entire book.

Susan <img src="/ubbt/images/graemlins/cool.gif" alt="" />

This is so true Pep… I remember a few years ago I was typing a Mathematics questionnaire for my boss (the Head of the Maths Department) and in stead of sec I typed sex… I felt SOOO embarrassed when he asked me to correct the typo… <img src="/ubbt/images/graemlins/blush.gif" alt="" />

I will do so Pep. I’m glad you’ve enjoyed the post! <img src="/ubbt/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" /> My wish is that this post will be helpful to many people (especially newcomers) around here and give them the courage to do what they need to do... You know, I can just imagine how difficult (and even frightened) it must sometimes be for BS's to take certain steps (like exposure for example).

I think it’s very normal and human to initially feel afraid of the possible consequences and reaction of the WS’s should these steps be taken… even while the BS consciously knows and realize that the M have the best chance of survival (and often the only chance of survival) should these steps be taken.

In general, I think the thing to fear most in life is FEAR itself – and this applies to all areas in life... And sometimes even the fear of fear (if this make sense) becomes a problem... I have struggled (and sometimes still struggle) with this myself.

Susan, it will be worthwhile to read the whole book. It’s really a good book and there are also some practical guidelines in it. <img src="/ubbt/images/graemlins/cool.gif" alt="" />

^bumping^ for Faithful follower. Read this again ~ operating from strength! <img src="/ubbt/images/graemlins/wink.gif" alt="" />

Susan

Wow, how did I miss this thread? Thanks, Susan.

Bump

Great post Suzet. I always feel vindicated when I have come to a conclusion through study, prayer and experience that I find is later borne out by the treatise of the wise and expert community.

Great post.

Suzet,

Great post. The strength a BS has to muster from d/d forward is incredible. What is more amazing is the inner strength we find at times like these. Looking back I have seen the impossible not only tackled but conquered.

Thanks for this booster post. Hope many more read it. <img src="/ubbt/images/graemlins/wink.gif" alt="" />

Mahalo,
L.

Bob and Orchid, you’re welcome and I’m glad the article is helpfull! <img src="/ubbt/images/graemlins/cool.gif" alt="" />

NS: Bob, I saw you were on a 2 week holiday - how nice! <img src="/ubbt/images/graemlins/laugh.gif" alt="" /> Welcome back and I hope everything is well with you and Squid. <img src="/ubbt/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />

Blessings,
Suzet

Thanks for this post Suzet..........I was directed here by Orchid (thanks, babe).

I, like many others, am finally finding my strength when I see that my personal victimization doesn't work - for me or my WH.

I find, deep down, that I am not afraid - of being alone, or of living honestly. Not afraid of WH's anger.

And most importantly - not afraid that someone won't like me. If I like myself, then when someone doesn't like me (and really, what's not to like?) because I won't play 'the victim', then it is really no loss to me.

I lived my entire life afraid that someone (anyone) wouldn't like me. Also, I can insert "love" for "like".

If we can't love (like) ourselves, then, really, why should we expect anyone else to?

K

Thanks Suzet* I needed that!!
<img src="/ubbt/images/graemlins/grin.gif" alt="" />

The ultimate price of BS meekness/ WS fence sitting

The above is a ‘real life’ story and I thought it would be helpful and applicable to attach the above story to this thread. The story in the above link shows what can possibly happen if a BS decides to NOT operate from strength and therefore NOT take the necessary steps to avoid and/or stop "fence sitting" by the WS.