How to Develop Detachment

"In order to become detached from a person, place or thing, you need to:

First: Establish emotional boundaries between you and the person, place or thing with whom you have become overly enmeshed or dependent on.

Second: Take back power over your feelings from persons, places or things which in the past you have given power to affect your emotional well-being. 

Third: "Hand over" to your Higher Power the persons, places and things which you would like to see changed but which you cannot change on your own. 

Fourth: Make a commitment to your personal recovery and self-health by admitting to yourself and your Higher Power that there is only one person you can change and that is yourself and that for your serenity you need to let go of the "need" to fix, change, rescue or heal other persons, places and things. 

Fifth: Recognize that it is "sick" and "unhealthy" to believe that you have the power or control enough to fix, correct, change, heal or rescue another person, place or thing if they do not want to get better nor see a need to change. 

Sixth: Recognize that you need to be healthy yourself and be "squeaky clean" and a "role model" of health in order for another to recognize that there is something "wrong" with them that needs changing. 

Seventh: Continue to own your feelings as your responsibility and not blame others for the way you feel. 

Eighth: Accept personal responsibility for your own unhealthy actions, feelings and thinking and cease looking for the persons, places or things you can blame for your unhealthiness. 

Ninth: Accept that addicted fixing, rescuing, enabling are "sick" behaviors and strive to extinguish these behaviors in your relationship to persons, places and things.

Tenth: Accept that many people, places and things in your past and current life are "irrational," "unhealthy" and "toxic" influences in your life, label them honestly for what they truly are, and stop minimizing their negative impact in your life.

Eleventh: Reduce the impact of guilt and other irrational beliefs which impede your ability to develop detachment in your life. 

Twelfth: Practice "letting go" of the need to correct, fix or make better the persons, places and things in life over which you have no control or power to change. "

IZ Somewhere Over the Rainbow

Descontos

I have been listening to the audio book by Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run With The Wolves.  Dr. Estes is a Jungian analyst and post trauma specialist who's area of depth study has been the history and interpretation of multi-cultural storytelling.  In this book she talks about "Descontos".

As we know them, the descontos are the roadside markers we see at the scene of accidents, often where death has occurred. Translated from Spanish to mean "resting place".

Dr Estes submits we take metephorical view of these markers as points of rest for the small and large deaths that we encounter over our lifetime.  Our aim, she tells us, is to mark that instance where we suffered the death, with an aim to forgive and forget.  She recommends making a timeline of all these points of death and marking them.

According to Clarissa there are Four Stages to Forgiveness:

• to forgo – to leave it alone
• to forbear – to abstain from punishing
• to forget – to avert from memory, to refuse to dwell
• to forgive – to abandon the debt

“Forgiveness is an act of creation. You can choose from many ways to do it. You can forgive for now, forgive till then, forgive till the next time, forgive but give no more chances it’s a whole new game if there is another incident. You can give one more chance, give several more chances, give many chances, give chances only if. You can forgive part, all, or half of the offense. You can devise a blanket of forgiveness. You decide” 

― Clarissa Pinkola Estés

From Lundy Bancroft's Blog

“I can be in a loving relationship

with myself today, and trust my own wisdom and intuition. He is not

going to sell me his view of what

kind of person I am.”