One small positive thought in the morning can change your whole day




Monday, September 26, 2016

What's Your Hammer?

It has always made me giggle when a doctor takes that little hammer and finds just the right spot to make our bodies react with a swift kick. How does that happen? Even when we’re telling ourselves to not react, we still do. Although I find myself being amused by this at the doctor, I am far from amused when other ‘hammers’ in my life cause me to react when I don’t want to. There are certain things that cause a knee jerk reaction in me that drives me crazy, but can also debilitate me from my normal day-to-day routine. There are so many hammers, but here are a few.
Made to feel:
-unimportant
-overlooked
-insignificant
-never chosen
-unlov (ed) (able)
-left out
My mornings are crazy busy, getting 5 kids out the door while I’m also trying to get to work on time. (I’m still not used to saying 5 kids since my 6th has moved on to college). Although seldom easy, some mornings definitely go more smoothly than others. This morning I found myself yelling at each kid for different reasons at different times and really none of it had to be hashed out before 8am, but I couldn’t stop myself. Of course, I have enough maturity to realize that I am the only one who has control of myself and no one can make me behave a certain way, but why do I do that if it’s really not my heart to act that way? My best answer to this question is that I got hammered by someone first thing this morning who made me feel unimportant. My body reacted in a way that negatively impacted everyone else around me, but it also had a debilitating effect on me. It hurt. It literally took the breath from me and made me not care about the rest of my day. At the time, I wasn’t even aware that the ‘hammer’ had been dropped. I knew that it made me angry, but I had no idea that the blow was so deep that I would continue to react to it for the rest of the morning. I thought it was just something that happened and then I moved on, but from that point forward, I viewed everything that happened through the lens of “everyone views me as unimportant and this is how they show it”. Sometimes a “knee jerk” reaction to this feeling might be to go eat an entire chocolate cake; or to skip working out and drown ourselves in social media; or just yell at everyone around us. None of which really makes us feel better, but I’ve been guilty of each one at different times. I have specific thoughts about how to take our swords and fight that beast that comes against us, but for today, I think it's enough to say that the first thing we have to do when we are reacting in ways that we don’t want to, it to look closely at what our hammers are. The hammer is not usually the person or situation, it’s the feeling within us that is drawn out and then causes us to react. We have to have an awareness about what makes us vulnerable to behave in ways that we don’t like and then to make a decision. We have to decide whether we believe it or not. Am I really unimportant? I know my answer so I think I will go about the rest of my day and forgive myself for our rough start. I will probably hug and kiss my husband and kids when they get home and I think I’ll skip the chocolate cake.
Many Blessings,
Lori

2 comments:

  1. How did I not know that you blog on this site? Something led me to this blog, in this moment. I needed it. Thank you sister. -GGP

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  2. Are you writing from inside my head today?????

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