Interesting question, Kayla. I'm starting to think about what I like about my life and changes I want to make in the New Year.

Actually I've made lots of changes since D-day, and am almost a completely different person. Before, I was a mom of 8, and now they are all on their own.

The thing I love most is that I keep a warm and welcoming home. But it has always been like that. Even when my sons were young, our home was the gravitating point for the neighborhood. It is still like that today, 20 years later. So that will remain the same.

Let's see. Cookies:

1) "Mexican wedding cookies" in response to a request from my friend's partner
2) Chocolate chip cookies, 2 batches: the first with nuts and few white chocolate chips thrown in and the second with nuts and a few butterscotch nuts thrown in.
3) Bourbon balls - with a touch of Grand Marnier in addition to the bourbon

Also made turkey noodle soup.

:happyhanukkah:

Good question Kayla.

Right now it's just living one day at a time for me. (Am going to start a new thread I think...) But overall, want to lose weight and be generally healthier - and come out the other side of everything that's happening.

Not too inspiring I guess but at the moment it feels like alot!

:happyhanukkah:

Thought I would bump up the thread, and since this is a thread on focusing on 'positive chat'...

here is a video on 'happiness' that I thought interesting and inspiring.

Of all the things he said, for me, the images that 'stayed' in my mind were.... do you want to live life with the highs and lows of a wave? or, do you want the peacefulness and balance found at the bottom of the ocean, whether or not there is storm up above on the surface of the ocean?

....or something like that.

**edit**

...bumping up thread...

...looking for contribution to thread...

here's mine (source: dailygood.org):

Three Words of Wisdom: "Don't We All?"--posted by jaydeebug on Jan 1, 2009


One evening I was parked in front of the mall wiping off my car. I had just come from the car wash and was waiting for my wife to get out of work. Coming my way from across the parking lot was, what society would consider, a bum. From the looks of him, he had no car, no home, no clean clothes, and no money. There are times when you feel generous but there are other times that you just don't want to be bothered. This was one of the "don't want to be bothered" times.

"I hope he doesn't ask me for money," I thought. He didn't. He came and sat on the curb in front of the bus stop and he didn't look like he could have enough money to even ride the bus. After a few minutes he spoke. "That's a very nice car," he said. He was ragged but had an air of dignity around him.

I said, "Thanks," and continued wiping off my car.

He sat there quietly as I worked. The expected plea for money never came. As the silence between us widened something inside me said, "Ask him if he needs any help." I was sure that he would say yes, but I held true to the inner voice.

"Do you need any help?" I asked. He answered in three simple but profound words that I shall never forget. We often look for wisdom in great men and women. We expect it from those of higher learning and accomplishments. I expected nothing but an outstretched grimy hand. He spoke three words that shook me.

"Don't we all?" he said.

I needed help. Maybe not for bus fare or a place to sleep, but I needed help. I reached in my wallet and gave him not only enough for bus fare but enough to get a warm meal and shelter for the day. Those three little words still ring true. No matter how much you have, no matter how much you have accomplished, you need help too. No matter how little you have, no matter how loaded you are with problems, even without money or a place to sleep, you can give help. Even if it's just a compliment, you can give that.

You never know when you may see someone that appears to have it all. They are waiting on you to give them what they don't have. A different perspective on life, a glimpse at something beautiful, a respite from daily chaos, that only you through a torn world can see. -- Cal

Bumping for the Plan B'rs - here's an invitation to peruse the Cafe's bookstore - embrace the thoughts that help you focus on your own personal recovery...

Luna - I just read your addition to the cafe again tonight - I really needed to read it.

Don't we all need some help?

I noticed over the last two days how many people break their promises - in little ways.

I'm in sales - so when people break promises it hits me in my ability to keep my commitments on a financial level. But worse, I have let it attack my faith that somehow everything will be alright.

Then someone kind of softly reminded me - what do you focus on - and I realized that the majority of the threads I'm trying to help out with some experience, strength and hope are all about infidelity - well duh! yeah! I'm on an infidelity board. That's what happens to people who are here!

But I opened this cafe with the idea that there was a place to go where the focus was on personal recovery rather than trying to fix their WSs. And rather than keep the doors open, with a daily thought or focus, I'd let this page fall off two months ago.

So patrons - my apologies. The cafe is now open.

A couple new books are on the shelves and an old audio tape set plays in the background which was recorded by the author of one of these books.

The tapes? "Mental Toughness" by James Loehr - I'm going to wear them out so I'm going to be finding a CD burner this week - promise! I love the guidance on self-care!!

The books? You Squared by Price Pritchett - a beautiful little short self-help book about finding solutions outside our normal preconceived way.

The other - Toughness Training for Life by James Loehr.

If you'd like, I'll be happy to start a study group on toughness training or Four Agreements.

Please feel free to redirect to the cafe - those here who are suffering from Overexposure to WS Waywardness!

In the opening post of this thread, I introduced a topic of working on one's self.

In reading some of the threads this week a common theme began to come clear to me:

If you fail to manage your emotions in the limbo of deciding whether you want to recover personally, recover maritally or both, your emotions become your enemy.

I work in a field where emotions will bias your perceptions and blind you to what needs to be done. It is no different in regard to relationships.

Emotions are what took our wayward loved ones down a path that violates everything they once stood for. Why should we follow that broken path?

This thread runs a theme of feeding your heart and mind in a way that allows YOU to be in control of your destiny in spite of what you feel.

I think it's time to pull this thread out of obscurity and let people start thinking in terms of self-empowerment rather than self-sabotage.

Friends of your personal recovery and marriage recovery are those encouraging PLANNED action with specific purposes and intentions. Enemies of your personal recovery feed the emotions - poking at your pain with the "divorce his *** now" stick or asking you questions that feed your pain rather than your logic. If you feel a rabid clamoring in your chest about your future, then withdraw from those things that stimulate more rabid feelings!

You need cold hard logic to plan your future with any finesse.

Emotions will fill you with fear and dread, revenge, or false hope. Those feelings must be set aside. Take back your power! Set the feelings aside, until they can be tamed into something warm and inviting and encouraging!

What an INCREDIBLE idea :o)

Yours is a very on-target point, KaylaAndy. As one who grew up in a very dysfunctional family, showing emotions was almost unheard of, and certainly was not well handled by anyone if and when they arose. So I became quite the analytical type, and kept my emotions in check -- a practice that ultimately led me to no good; I became an alcoholic (like my parents) and had great difficulty in expressing my wants and needs in intimate relationships.

Now, when faced with one of the worst events possible in one's life, I found I could not contain my emotions and my logical mind for some reason decided to become absent.

At the end (at this writing, I'm referring to it as such), I allowed my emotional buildup to rise to the surface and ended up spewing anger and vitriol at the woman who had violated every belief and principle I thought she held (just today I was wondering how her A.A. Fourth Step --the one that talks about taking a "moral inventory"-- might go). I am not proud of how this otherwise calm and reasoned person could become such an angry, hurt and venomous character.

My hope now in continuing to read and learn from MarriageBuilders is how to become a more emotional person when emotion is called for, and a more calm and reasoned person when emotionalism is the destructive path to take. The wonder of all this is that I find that I really do have emotions, not just those "feelings" that I buried and pushed aside for all those years.

Hey Fred - good point. "Feelings buried alive never die" is the title of one book I read in my anon recovery.

I'm not talking about stuffing feelings or medicating feelings with alcohol or otherwise trying to kill them.

They need to be felt, acknowledged and validated in order to heal.

The analyzer that shuts off or medicates emotions doesn't get those warm, inviting and healing emotions any more than he/she feels the cold sick feelings of betrayal.

We need to learn how to "process" those feelings. I love the 4th step inventory work because it is a safe way to walk through the landmines and trauma rooms of our past and deal with which part is self inflicted, which part is other inflicted; which parts have I need of seeking forgiveness (amends) and which parts to I need to unconditionally forgive and move on?

But in the first wisps of cold morning light after a night of pain (d-day), we must first triage ourselves and take methodical and planned actions based on our overall plan and goal, rather than impulsive rage, defensiveness, or pain.

The treatment of healing is not comfortable. Ask any soldier wounded in battle. Getting wounded was only the beginning. Not the end.

Magnificent, madame Andy.

Bumping for our new group of Plan B-ers!

Bumping an awesome thread!

Bumping for Teaser and others. Join in some positive support and let's help another group of Plan B-ers survive and thrive!

Thanks Kayla(I love that name)

Bumping for Mehr

Bumping for 2Sweet

I've been thinking about the players who hurt their spouses over and over and over again.

Then they come here and think that they can play us too. People like Pep, Mel, MaritalBliss, Scotland (the Anointed Plan B Queen!) Princessmeggy, Lexxy, Neak, and many others from times past who's wisdom remains - they think they're going to fool those who were fooled just one too many times? Ain't fooling with us again.

We see through the playah who doesn't answer questions, who's wife has disappeared, who presumes to speak for his wife who ain't talking.

We see through the wayward STBX who comes and gloats that now the betrayed has started dating...

THIS is why there's a Plan B. The crazy Playah or the gloating wayward. Be GONE with all of them. Plan B does that.

The insanity of infidelity becomes a non-issue in Plan B. I am encouraged whenever a man or a woman says "I'm worth more than the trauma and drama of a lying cheating snake-in-the-grass is bringing into my life."

The nature of human behavior is that someone does not move from arrogant, prideful, deceitful cruelty to charming compliant and marriage material overnight. Not while taking potshots at the help.

Having been a student of human nature for most of my life, if I have learned only one thing it is that people can only behave in congruence with their underlying beliefs of service, or entitlement.

Please, betrayed spouses, recognize that this one truth bears repeating.

Plan B will allow time for the demons to be truly expelled from a wayward who desires to retain a relationship with you. Plan B lets them scream, rant, rave, to the silent unlistening walls. Let their pride crumble at your unyielding Plan B remoteness. If they have the heart to recover.

Plan B removes you from caring. You are rebuilding your sanity. Your life moves on a separate track, developing the ability to think clear of the poison - the sweet and the bitter both. You will be able to make decisions for your future, based on your own best interests and those interests and needs of your children. You will find the ability to laugh again.

That is the promise of Plan B.

That is why so many experienced people here recommend it. I hope you understand why it is such a vital and necessary step, if not to recover your marriage, to recover your own soul.