LEARN FROM IT

Bad stuff happens and if we're paying attention, we look for the lesson. This isn't to say that random bad things don't happen. They do. Just watch the news. People get what they don't deserve all the times. In our difficult economy, people lose jobs and homes and self-respect. Most of them don't deserve any of this, but asking yourself what you need to learn is a good response to crappy things.

This is true in a lot of situations and it doesn't mean you're accepting that you're stupid. Not true.

But you need to figure out the best life choices and this isn't easy. The only way we really learn is by getting the consequences of our choices. Some very small percentage of us sometimes learn from seeing others' choices, but this is rare.

Parents tend to want to shelter their kids from the bad choices, and this is very natural, but carried too far, it blunts the learning process. Let's face it, we need to screw up sometimes to see how life works. When a tiny scrap of humanity is born into your family, you tend to want to buffer all the cold winds from it, but don't always give in to this urge.

When bad things happen to you--whether this is financial, physical or relational--your best response is to look at what you've contributed to the problem. Sometimes our contribution is in the form of what we didn't do or what we did out of concern for another, but we really need to see the results of our actions in order to get the most from the crummy times.

We certainly want to minimize these and learning from them can enable us to achieve this.
Our lessons are more obvious when they just involve us, but life doesn't always work this way. Relationships more often end in split-ups than any of us want. This may happen early in a dating experience, after you've been together a while or years into a marriage. When there are so many emotions and a ton of history, it can be difficult to see our own contributions. You know, the stuff you did and didn't do.

That's the part you have some control over--the stuff you did.

How you respond to various things is in your power, even if you feel really powerless over what's going on. You decide what to say, what to do, when to act--all of your behaviors. It may sound as if I'm over-simplifying, but this is an important issue. You contribute half of any relationship, romantic, relational or friendship. You get to decide on how you respond to whatever is happening. This is your power. You get to walk away, to stay in and work at being different or to turn your partner/friend into the police.

Think about the Madoff family. They had to respond to significantly bad behavior on Bernie Madoff's part and he was their father, her husband. What would you do if your relative made some REALLY bad choices? Cheated or kill someone? Involved herself in infidelity or beat his kids?

It all gets much murkier when you're in the mix; when you're close to the situation. One of my clients took an open-container ticket for a boyfriend she's no longer with. Already with several DUIs to his discredit, he handed her the can of beer. In hindsight, she feels really stupid for having allowed this, but at the moment, he was her soul mate, the man she shared her life with.
Not so simple.

These kinds of choices are made clearer when you can separate out your part, what you've done or not done. Make sure you're clear on your part. What you contributed to the situation. She wasn't the one with the DUIs, but she did accept the beer from him when the officer stopped them. She has to look at her part.

We all need to learn from our choices--and we need not to beat ourselves up so badly that we can't see the lesson. We've all done foolish things for a variety of reasons. That's just part of being human, but we can choose to learn from our choices, to develop wisdom from what works for us and what doesn't.

You may feel badly about situations, but make sure you forgive yourself and learn from it.