Dysaffirmation - 2/4 - CoupleDumb

asslook 292x300 Lighten Up!!!

          Happy Monday everybody! We hope you enjoyed the holiday weekend for those of you who live in the states and we genuinely hope you took the time to watch the web series ‘Chris and Kate’ last week. It was an honor and a privilege to dissect those messed up characters and Chris Purnell is one sick puppy for coming up with that stuff. We are starting an introspective phase at CoupleDumb. We have discussed dysfunction and therapy. We have showed some great examples of how we screw up relationships and how too much of a good thing is not healthy. But in everything we do, from the heavy to the hippy stuff, we keep our sense of humor. What we’re saying is lighten up!

          Lee says: A couple weeks ago I was playing a softball game with my team. It was at least a million degrees outside, muggy and the solar flares were making it difficult to see the ball. Now I’m a big girl and I have no compunctions in sharing that I hate the heat. It is not fat friendly. I couldn’t hydrate myself enough and was getting really tired. At one point, the short stop threw the ball to me, the first baseperson, and it was in the dirt. As I bent down to get it, my whole body followed essentially having me land on my head. So I sucked that day. Totally!

          Why the sad, fat girl can’t play ball in the heat story? Easy, I joined the team for fun. I will not be winning a championship ring of any kind nor am I paid millions to endorse footwear because I play. I do it to get a little exercise and laugh my ass off, literally. So instead of beating myself up for letting down my team, I joked, laughed at my head stand and moved on. I had to remind myself to lighten up.

          I have found in my life that each individual carries with him/her an inner critic. Some of my friends call that little critical voice their ‘inner Nazi’. You can call them whatever you want but you know who I’m talking about. It’s that feeling of ‘you always disappoint people’ or ‘you’ll never amount to anything’. It is the voice that spouts dysaffirmations all day long to you. It is that little devil on your shoulder that tells you ‘Fuck it! One more drink won’t hurt’ right before you get behind the wheel.

          We all have the inner saboteur. This self destructive streak, with varying degrees of severity, can only be squelched with one thing; lighten up. Life is as serious as you want it to be and we create the drama we experience. We have all sorts of ways to say the same thing, ‘Don’t cry over spilt milk’. Clean up and move on. Our reactions to stressors are what cause us stress not the stressors themselves. Or, haven’t you noticed some people just seem better at handling stress than others?

          Life is not serious and taking it like that is the biggest waste of time. Life is ridiculous and awesome and funny and ironic and beautiful and bizarre. Things happen and we react. It is that choice that will design and define the rest of your life. We here at CoupleDumb suggest choosing wisely. Lighten up!

          Paul says: When it comes to inner Nazis, mine is a master. The voice in my head, who I have named Helen, was at one time incessant. I was a ‘waiting for the other shoe’ kind of guy. I’m better now. I keep Helen down to a daily word limit and she’s not allowed to use phrases like ‘they’re all going to die’. At some point, I figured that if I am going to have an inner Nazi, I also wanted an inner Krusty the Clown, an irreverent Jew who is going to go for the joke no matter the circumstance or consequence. So, Helen meet Krusty. Krusty meet Helen. She’ll be the topic of your humor for a while.

god The Big Dysaffirmation

We have been talking about Dysaffirmations all week; how we use them with our kids, our significant others, and how much chaos they bring to us. But each of those little dysaffirmations is a symptom of what we consider to be our big dysaffirmation, our core dysfunctional belief that serve as the queen to all of our other little crazies.

Paul says: I have a penchant for the dramatic; not big hysterics but more of a silent lone tear and fade to black type. I’m one of those people that have a constant running dialogue of doom and gloom in my head. As an example, if Lee doesn’t answer the telephone, the conclusion that I jump to is that she is dead, that she is lying in a ditch with the requisite puddle of blood and her ringing cell phone just out of reach. To add to the drama, in the scenario of my mind, two out of three children die with her. This way I am deprived of the Batman-like melancholia because I still need to raise our surviving and now total messed up child. See, I told you I had a tendency to drama.

My big dysaffirmations sound something like, ‘when everything is good, something bad is about to happen’ or, if you just want to get down to the root of my dysfunctional belief system, I dysaffirm that ‘God is out to get me’. For those of you that are reading this and do not get it, that is OK. You have other big dysaffirmations. But be assured that there are others reading this and thinking that we need to get our voices in our heads together for a nice little tea party because they would get along so well.

When we wrote Dysaffirmations: Because this kind of stupid takes work! We realized that creating the word Dysaffirmation was clever but that the second part, ‘this kind of stupid takes word’, was profound. Seeing God as a hunter, like something from Running Man, drove me to doing all kinds of stupid things and working very, very hard at maintaining them. Because I didn’t trust God, I decided to work at a Catholic Church, looking for His kindness all the way, and eventually getting screwed real hard. Please understand, I got reamed not because God is bad but because I was committed. Nothing short of a burning bush was going to change my mind.

That is the nature of the dysaffirmation. Like any affirmation, if you do not whole heartedly buy into it then it does not work. ‘It’s better to be fucked up than wrong’. Obviously, at some point I was enlightened with a small piece of insight or I could not write about it. With that insight, I have started a little war of affirmation versus dysaffirmation. Slowly but surely I am chipping away at my dysfunctional beliefs. Now, if Lee doesn’t answer the cell phone, I do not assume that she is dead. Instead I assume that she is having an affair. See, I’m getting better.

Lee says: Ring, Ring. I’m not answering. Paul’s big dysaffirmation not only ruled his life but it affected mine as well. How’s a girl to get her swerve on if her man is calling every five minutes? I kid. Paul’s silent anxiety was ever present in our marriage. I couldn’t say something like ‘Oh, I need to tell you something,’ and be distracted without my husband pining until I told him my little story or nugget of insight.

The weirder part is that we shared big dysaffirmations. In my case, mine sounds like ‘the other shoe will drop soon’; same concept but more fashionable. My thoughts were that I was happy and Paul was too perfect to be true. As a mother, these thoughts extended to my children. When I had a miscarriage (this occurred between Bobby 5 and Ricky 2), I knew it was God resetting the balance to the universe. He was punishing me for wanting more happiness. How dare I?! I remember clearly this was the point where Paul’s big dysaffirmation met mine and… oh the thrills! He said he was pissed at God and I said, ‘Oh shit, here comes the lightening!’ I was afraid He would take away the happiness I already had, namely Paul, Jeannie and Bobby. But, some good therapy helped us get pregnant again and Ricky joined our family. Now we’re happy. But not too happy…

happycouple I am not worthy.

There was a guy one night on a dark deserted road that got a flat tire and realized he had no jack. In the distance he saw a light and thought to himself, ‘Maybe it’s a house’. He started walking towards the light and as he got closer he realized he was correct and thought, ‘Maybe they have a jack’. As he approached the yard he saw that there were several cars parked in front and thought, ‘One of these cars must have a jack.’ As he walked up the walkway he thought, ‘What if these guys are a bunch of dicks and won’t let me borrow it?’ As he knocked on the door he became angry at the thought. By the time the door opened he was fuming and said ‘Shove your jack up your ass’.

Lee says: Our Dysaffirmations were partly written with this joke in mind. I have told it a million times in therapy. The idea that we make judgments and decisions about situations before they even occur is the most dysfunctional thing that we do. Our expectations become as solid as our realities and we will accept no surprises.

How many of you out there question the sanity of someone who is interested in you? This lack of self esteem is as common as brown eyes. People who deny feeling this way are either lying or have a personality disorder. ‘I will not allow reality to interfere with my self perception’ is a dysaffirmation we all maintain. We have our beliefs about ourselves and God help anyone who contradicts it. If you believe that you are unlovable due to your looks or weight then you will not accept the attention and affection of another. They are blind, stupid and poor judges of character. Who needs them?

Having positive self esteem is important but eliminating our dysaffirmations is paramount to creating a healthy relationship. I can feel that I am a sexy woman with skills that men would definitely enjoy but if I have dysaffirmations regarding men like ‘All men want one thing’ or ‘Men are all abusive’, I will never let a man near me.

This is the crazy, stupid stuff people do. The lies and games people play are such a waste of time. We live in a ‘get them before they get you’ dysaffirmational society. All forms of media perpetuate the myth that relationships are doomed. We create messed up beliefs and then Google for supporting evidence. You want to cheat on your spouse, check the statistics. You want to find rationalizations for not marrying someone other than you’re a chicken shit, look up the history of the institution.

A relationship is an emotional commitment. We need to use our abilities to cognate to make good decisions based on the respect and honor of the partner without forgetting your integrity. Your beliefs about society and how loathsome we are have no place in this commitment and yet we give them center stage. We rationalize or disaffirm our happy reality and find ourselves alone.

In my warped mind, I was always too fat and bitchy to love (ooh, I should write that one down for the next Dysaffirmation book). I was like a bad song. I wasn’t looking for love but it found me. I couldn’t believe an intelligent, witty and loving man like Paul could ever want a woman like me. And yet, here we are. This relationship has been more about dumping dysfunctional ideas than butterflies and rainbows. We work at this every day because occasionally, one of us gives in to the crazy thoughts. Luckily we keep holy water, an old priest and a young priest on standby.

Paul says: I have a lot of dysaffirmational beliefs, probably more than most. Oh wait, that is a dysaffirmation. ‘I will be more screwed up than others so that I can be better at something.’ Crap, I was going to write a paragraph or two on how messed up I am, but now I need to go to my happy place and tell myself that ‘people love me’ over and over again.

Lighten Up!!!

The Big Dysaffirmation

I am not worthy.

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