Insanity

Insanity.
You know the definition.
Doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results.

It's easy to think of our "insane" ways regarding our behaviors... even though you want to lose weight, you still enjoy eating Oreo cookies... even though you know that exercising is healthy, you find yourself with a million reasons why you need to check Facebook, and sit on your couch all night instead of getting on the treadmill, etc. But you know, those behaviors are actually pretty easy to change. Whether you begin to make small changes and reduce things toward moderation, or cut behaviors completely out of your life, things like this are easy.

But what if your insanity is harder?

What if your insanity lies in your thoughts, in your feelings, in your beliefs about yourself and others? What if you learned your insanity patterns as a coping mechanism for things that you have experienced in life... and that even though these coping mechanisms no longer serve you purpose, you haven't learned how to let them go?

For me, I think the most important step in making sense of our insanity is the ability to RECOGNIZE it as insane. We have to lift our veil of denial and gain insight into lives, recognizing that our patterns of behavior (or thought, or feeling) aren't healthy -- that is, that we are doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting life to turn out differently. 

Have you been chasing job after job looking for fulfillment, only to realize that fulfillment does NOT come in the form of a paycheck but in the behaviors that you do outside of work (volunteerism, church, family)? Have you been chasing relationships, only to find yourself run ragged to the point of giving up hope that you were meant to be in a relationship at all? (The "insanity" part could be in the kind of person you are attracting, the approach you are going for, the vibe you are giving, or even the belief in yourself of being worthy of a healthy relationship.) Have you been miserable IN a relationship, thinking that if only YOU changed your ways (and not the other person changing too) your relationship would be better off?

In order to get that insight, I think we need to step back and examine ourselves. Look at your patterns of choices that you have been making. Are they good and healthy? Have they been leading you to fulfillment and happiness? Have they been leading you to sadness and despair? For either one of those questions, I think it is also important to identify at what point you began feeling that way. Perhaps this flowchart may help...

If you want something you've never had, you have to do something you've never done. Oftentimes we need to do something different... sometimes, it's something that we've never done before, in order to get different results.