Archive for November, 2006

It is commonly assumed that your negative feelings are completely replaced by positive ones when you forgive someone.

The problem with this expectation is that it’s so categorical, that it puts forgiveness out of reach and leaves you with no option but to not forgive at all.

When you grant “genuine forgiveness”, you make room for anger and identify it as normal and adaptive.

You don’t replace it with compassion or love and simply wipe the slate clean. This sort of magical reversal is not what happens to real people who have suffered real emotional injuries.

Even years from now, when you think about how you’ve been hurt or when something calls up the memory of your suffering, your old pain may resurface, grab hold of you, and drag you down.

To expect otherwise is to deny the power of the human brain to conjure up traumatic moments and force you to re-experience them with the same clarity of detail, the same visceral intensity, as when they first occurred.

Even if you forgive an offender, even if you’re dedicated to a life of equanimity, there may be times when you experience spasms of hate and cannot separate what he did to you from who he is.

A growing body of research shows that chronic negative emotions such as bitterness, cynicism, mistrust, and hostility - all expressions of not forgiving - sap your energy and undermine your mental and physical well-being.

A recent study found that subjects who were instructed to rehearse unforgiving responses to a violation experienced elevated blood pressure and increased arousal of the sympathetic nervous system.

If these physiological effects are chronic and intense, they could compromise your immune system, increasing the risk of cancer or infectious diseases, or building calcifications in the coronary arteries leading to cardiovascular disease.

Mistrust

Refusing to Forgive may isolate you not just from the person who hurt you but from those who have done you no harm. Mistrust is like blood seeping from a wound, staining everything it touches.

Morbidly absorbed in the injury, you may push everyone away, even those who care for you and want to help you heal. Unable to open up to them, or even admit that you welcome their support, you’re likely to stand firm but alone.

Stabilizing and strengthening yourself requires more than a shot of indignation. You need to turn inward and make sense of the injury so you can go on with your life.

The true definition of forgiveness should center on the advantages of feeling peaceful.

Finding peace does not need to be complicated. Remember, all grievances begin when something in a person’s life happens that they do not want to happen.

From that initial unpleasantness they take things too personally, blame the offender for how they feel, and tell a grievance story.

The grievance means that too much space is rented in their minds to hurt and anger.

Remember this definition of forgiveness: It is first foremost a practical definition. Your goal is to feel peaceful.

The feeling of peace comes as you heal your grievances - blaming less, taking responsibility for how you feel, and changing the story you tell.

This is called peace forgiveness. As you feel more and more peace, you are progressing in your goal to heal from your grievances. You are learning to forgive.

Advantages of Forgiveness

A major advantage from forgiveness emerges as we give more love and care to the important people in our lives.

I know from my own experience and those of many others that hurts from the past often cause us to draw away and mistrust the very people who are trying to love us.

Desire can lead a person to misery. When a person feels unfilled, it can result in yearning, or burning desires, which include cravings.

When a person feels grieved it brings them intense experiences of sorrow, which prompts deep sadness.

Often a loss, such as death of a friend or family member results in such feelings.

Some people move ahead fairly, quickly after a loved one dies, while others hold the grief inside for years.

Death

Death is a fear that sparks the emotions, which puts images in the mind. The images of personifications usually represent destruction and/or extinction.

Death however could be a positive act. Death brings forth peace, which puts elements together.

A person rests forever, when he goes to the grave. Since faulty misbelieves arrive, which involve the soul going to purgatory, hell, or heaven once the person dies has interrupted and caused depression for many.

The truth is the bible tells us that when a person dies he rests in his grave until the final judgment where resurrection takes place.

At this point the person either is, delivered to a paradise land, or else to the second death, which means no more.

Sometimes when you feel blue or sad, you may not know what to do to recover from your state of mind.

Sometimes when you think it is getting better, all of a sudden you may feel sad and blue again.

Sometimes people may experience feel aches and pains, which cannot explain and when the doctor fails to see any cause for the pain they will instantly think the pain is exaggerated. Doctors while holding PHD and Doctrines do not have all the answers.

Depressed people may feel fatigue, or worn out during the day hours. Sometimes they will face the problem of sleepless nights.

Some days these people will feel extremely depressed and lose interest in enjoying favorite activities, sports, entertainment and so on. Sometimes their stomach hurts or feels tension without any specific reason.

They often endure headaches, which increases stress. They endure dizziness, stress, anxiety; irritable, restlessness, feel like they are worthless, indecisiveness and many more. All these things will make them to have suicidal thoughts.

You might find comfort in knowing that help is available to you if you experience these types of problems.

At some time or other, we all have faced depression in our lives.

Some of us have been fortunate to have faced only a mild form of depression while others have not been so fortunate and faced a more severe version of depression.

For such people the treatment might lie in psychoanalysis.

Psychotherapy in reference is the treatment, which minimum usage of medicines is, employed yet talking is the primary function in this therapy.

Psychotherapy can be of various types like Cognitive Behavior Therapy, rational emotional therapy, interpersonal therapy, etc. The various types of therapies used are main supporter elements, which decide on the severity of the case.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is the most widely used therapeutic strategy. This therapy is the procedure of introducing something by replacing it with another, and by creating an environment whereas the patient feels at ease.

The patient is then works alongside the therapist to become aware of the causes of their depression. The patient is then, asked to note down the various negative thoughts that occur to him or her during the course of the day.

It’s a well-known fact that when a high-ranking manager takes a younger employee under his or her wing, becomes that person’s mentor.

The protégé not only has a head start for advancement, but will obtain more know-how about the work, the workings of the company, and the “tricks of the trade” than others.

By structuring a mentoring program and assigning the best people on your team the responsibility of mentoring a new member, you take a giant step forward in encouraging productivity and growth in the newcomer.

A structured mentoring program requires that chosen mentors be willing to take on the job. Compelling someone to be a mentor is self-defeating.

Not everybody is interested in or qualified for this assignment. New mentors should be trained in the art of mentoring by experienced people.

If you’re a first-time mentor, you’re probably unsure of how to deal with this new responsibility. If you have had your own successful experience with a mentor, use that as a guide.

If not, seek out a member of your organization who has a reputation as a great mentor and ask for advice, counsel, and guidance. Ask him or her to be your mentor in mentoring.

The role of the manager in developing employees is to help employees figure out exactly where they want to go, and then to give the support and organizational resources for employees to get there.

But employee development is a two-way street. Employees must also contribute by identifying the areas where development will aid to make them better and more prolific workers in the future and relaying this information to their managers.

Once needs are identified, plans developed, and resources identified, managers and employees can work together to turn them into reality.

In the following steps, we’ll explore the best way for managers to approach the development process with their employees.

Step 1: Meet with your employees about their careers.

What’s the best way to determine the path your employees want to take in their careers? Ask them! You might, for example, think that your top software engineer has her sights set on your organization’s chief technology officer position, when she would actually much rather keep coding software.

Once you determine where in the organization your employee wants her career to go, then you’ll have a baseline from which to work.