Power For Positive Living
By Dr. James Hughey
Power For Positive LivingFeb 16, 2024
8.20 Love Choices
The phrase "I love you" contains some of the most powerful words in our language! The varied choices we make in using "love" as a noun or verb affects our daily attitudes, beliefs, feelings and behaviors as well as our overall physical and emotional health.
We have the choice to focus more on the pronoun "I" or on "you" when using this sentence to find a successful balance between the two.
Wellness Psychology also encourages us to learn more of the various choices you and I make to effectively love ourselves as the unique humans that we are as well as our love gifts for others.
8.19 Victimhood Choices
Life for most of us is a series of choices. How do we choose to view what is happening now and select our attitudes/behaviors in preparing for the unknown future?
Being a victim of some situation is probably a part of each life path. We choose whether our skills of managing victimhood rise to the level of becoming a professional.
A portion of our future is often unknown. Our personal power lies in the attitudes, values, beliefs and behaviors we choose to prepare ourselves for whatever lies ahead.
8.18 Psychological Fatigue
The frequent appearance of fatigue can be an alert that some system within us needs attention for some degree of healing.
Many of us recognize the appearance of physical fatigue and know of attitude and behavioral options to make changes. The appearance of other system symptoms like psychological fatigue frequently leaves many without available pre-planned options. Learning and preventively implementing information from a number of sources such as wellness psychology can be most helpful for maintaining one's emotional health.
8.17 Choices Make Our Relationships
Each generation receives input from previous generations on the important behaviors, values and beliefs that make our relationships and life journey have meaning.
One recommendation from Ann Landers in a previous decade focuses on the important words to be used in relating to others.
Wellness psychology also offers relationship guidelines to be considered and evaluated for use in one's life journey.
8.16 Passive Suicide Awareness
Active and passive acts of suicide continue to be a behavioral option for many who struggle with the hurts and pains of their life issues.
Active suicide can offer the appeal of being a quick and spontaneous decision to end the inner pain of life circumstances. For others, reaching this same decision can take more passive and indirect forms evolving over many days, weeks or months.
The processes of considering and eventually reaching an active or passive suicide decision by others can often be invisible even to the most observant and caring family/friends.
8.15 Am I Really Listening?
One of the key foundations of healthy relationships is when the participants can really listen, hear and understand what is being said by each whether there is agreement or a degree of difference.
Being quiet while another speaks physically and emotionally can be a start. Active listening takes effort and offers understanding of self and others with whom we have built relationships.
8.14 Time Currency Relationship Choices
Whether we choose an active or passive pattern in spending our time currency, the connection and disconnection choices we make with our human relationships tend to strongly affect our physical and emotional health.
Wellness psychology encourages us to better understand our daily personal time currency expenditures with an active introspective evaluation of our choices to connect and/or disconnect with the persons in our various relationships.
8.13 Culture War Invitations
Our interactions with others in our society take many forms. When society embraces polarization of absolutes like "either/or" or "winner/loser" as a valued behavior, we are likely to find ourselves with many invitations to participate in various types of life drama frequently known as culture wars.
Since the various culture war dynamics can be important to many family/friends with whom we relate, it can be significant for our emotional health to actively choose how and to what degree we personally wish to respond when you and I are invited to play in this type of life drama.
8.12 Confronting Our Wealth and Death
Two topics seem to be most difficult for many in our society: the wealth we have accumulated on our life journey and the various ways of confronting and managing the last days of our life chapter.
Some individuals seem to determine the value of their life journey by the amount of wealth they have accumulated. Many other factors such as generosity and kindness in sharing may take a secondary role.
The arrival of death gives each of us the opportunity to confront our beliefs and values about ending this gift of life we have been given. Few areas are more personal than the individual choices we make for our last life chapter.
8.11 Choosing An Open Mind
Research indicates that most people tend to accept and agree with new people and information when they are similar to what we have recorded as being positive on mental 'tapes' from our previous experiences.
People or information that do not 'fit' into our previous experiences tend to be viewed with some degree of apprehension or suspicion. This behavior makes it most difficult for us to be truly "open-minded" when faced with new/different people or situations.
Wellness psychology encourages us to learn new ways of learning emotional and behavioral views when approaching different people and situations.
8.10 Choosing Privacy Without Dishonesty
People like to be with people they perceive as being similar to themselves in beliefs, values and behaviors.Are we being dishonest when we choose not to disclose certain information about ourselves to our family and friends so as to maintain personal privacy?Can we understand and accept what others need to know about us within an honest relationship? Can too much shared information be harmful to our relationships?
Can we respect the boundaries others choose for themselves?We tend to be emotionally healthy when we accept that our decisions about privacy tend to be honest and respectful of ourselves and others.
8.9 Sharing Our Personal Secrets
One of the most significant decisions that each of us makes during our life journey is how and to what degree we want to share our inner self with individuals with whom we have created various types of relationships.
Humans do choose many types of personal secrets which can vary throughout our life journey. The individual criteria you and I select for being open and/or closed to others with various aspects of our emotional nudity tends to be a significant factor for our facade that we share with others and for our personal mental health.
8.8 Psychological Blame Games
One of the major choices we each make in developing positive mental health for ourselves is discovering various ways to understand and assign responsibility for various mental blame games. When we decide to assign some degree of blame for our thoughts, feelings and behaviors we can choose to place responsibility for them entirely on ourselves or on some continuum to the other extreme of placing blame entirely on other people and situations.
Reality indicates that most of the responsibility for our thoughts, feelings and behaviors are healthyfully located at some point between the two extremes. Mental health encourages us to seek to understand the specific ways we assign the responsibility for our personal life choices.
8.7 My Friend Print
Friend Print processes were developed for those persons who seek information to better answer the introspective question of "Who Am I?". Friend Prints are structured to better understand the value of psychological exercising in developing and maintaining ones personal mental health.
Using an initial list of five persons that a listener calls friend, one is encouraged to create their own Friend Print beginning with 25+ categories of description. Having this completed Friend Print allows an individual to see visually in a single place some characteristics of their friendship circle.
8.6 My Friendship Store
Seeking and understanding our individual friendship circles can be a powerful contributor to our personal mental health system.
One analogy which can be useful is comparing our behavior in a book store with what one might do in their individual Friend Store whether shopping for a book or a friend. Another possibility to consider is what we each write on our personal billboard as we offer ourselves to others as bringing value into a friendship.
8.5 Healthy Friendships Change
If we are fortunate with our friendships we encourage ourselves and others to adapt to the life changes that are taking place within ourselves and others. Much of our emotional life is finding healthy ways to handle the frequent changes that we and others make with our daily choices.
Making healthy changes in self tends to be one of the most difficult challenges we humans have. Some may choose to change their friends or seek new friends as our life path varies. We can build historical friends of many years if we accept that "we do not have to change friends when we accept that our current friends are also changing - just like us."
8.4 Choosing Our Truth For Relationships
As humans we tend to believe that how we see the choices of living and relating to other people tend to be correct and good. Persons who have a different viewpoint from ours may be seen as misinformed, untruthful or ignorant. We may be called to correct the errors of other viewpoints with our family and friends by imposing our specific beliefs and values. We can easily believe that we are helping another person when we impose the opportunity to see 'the truth' as we see it.
8.3 Choosing Personal Life Spices
Wellness Psychology's foundation of personal power is that each of us has many individual life choices. In so many ways the type of life path we choose for ourselves is a result of the internal and external relationship choices we make.
Structuring the personal 'spices' we bring into our life both internally and externally can allow better understanding of our relations with self and others. Comparing and contrasting our relationship choices with the daily spices we make for food preferences can provide valuable insight into our personal emotions, values, beliefs and behavior.
8.2 Using Personal Reframing Power
Many individuals can verbalize that they do have the personal power to frame and reframe their own attitudes, feelings and behaviors. The human challenge seems to come in making the decision to IMPLEMENT their personal choices.
Without taking action, words remain words. Possibilities remain possibilities. Can we support and encourage ourselves along with family and friends to implement actions to reframe our/their attitudes, feelings and behaviors that tend to bring us and them more happiness?
8.1 Our Choice Junctions
The personal path that each of us takes going from childhood to adulthood is unique and challenging.
Our parents usually begin our life path by teaching the values of familiarity and safety. Accepting habituation as an attitude and behavior option allows us to grow within the shelter and safety of the home environment.
As an adult we often discover that what has worked for us in the past is not working currently. Until we experiment with new thoughts and behaviors at these 'choice junctions' we tend to stay stuck and frustrated in an unhealthy pattern.
Mid Season Bonus-Where Are The Answers I Seek?
Where Are The Answers I Seek?
Your host completes a trilogy of visits with "Hello, Henry" on WBT, AM 1110, in Charlotte, NC. This broadcast also completes the series of interviews to promote personal retreating with Friend Ship at Sea and was done after the KGBC production of Power for Positive Living.
In addition to an active conversation on various aspects of wellness psychology, your host and Henry pose many questions and answers for listeners to consider as they face issues in their lives. One caller's inquiry allows the discussion of where do each of us seek the answers to the questions of life. Do we tend to seek "the answers" from outside sources or do we tend to believe that we that we can discover answers only within ourselves? Or do we tend to see life as "a gift we have only to receive" and not spend time with introspective exploration. The concept of "degreeism" returns with an approach of finding ways to avoid either/or responses and then seek to learn from a merging of possible answers.
7.20 Saying Goodbye
Saying Goodbye
While some of us may have difficulty saying 'hello' to people, it is often the external and internal goodbyes that provide most of us the biggest challenges by invoking anxiety and stress. Learning to say goodbye in a healthy manner is a significant part of the grieving process when we lose someone or something important to us.
7.19 The Last Chapter
7.18 All Things End: What Have I Learned?
All Things End: What Have I Learned?
At some point, in some way, all living things eventually meet death and our one chance to live this unique gift of life will come to an end. We each have many choices as we live and our personal choices have consequences throughout our life path. One personal guideline that can be helpful in pondering positive and healthy choices for our latter days is: I cannot go back and change the beginning. I can start where I am and change the ending. Except in our memories, yesterday is gone. Like doing an eulogy, it is difficult for most of us to summarize both positively and negatively what we have and have not learned on our individual life path. Each of us will basically answer the questions: Who Am I? What have I learned to maximize my remaining days of life to be positive and healthy?7.17 Is This My Last Chance?
Is This My Last Chance?
One of the major assets of living life is knowing that at some point our individual life will come to an end. Knowing that our life will eventually end can give tremendous value to each of us on making our personal decisions for whatever time remains. One choice that has positively affected my emotional health has been a choice to frame each interaction with another as though it could be my last chance to frame our relationship. If family/friends were to never interact with me due to their illness or death, I wanted them to leave this earth with an accurate understanding of how and why they were important to me.7.16 What Do I Choose to Leave Behind?
7.15 Life and Death
7.14 Managing Expectations Of Self And Others
Managing Expectations of Self and Others
Wellness Psychology recognizes that each of us has the power to 'frame' his/her world into the specific perceptions that we choose. We have the personal responsibility for viewing our world along with the power to accept, reject or modify our choices.
We frequently need to ventilate our feelings with others. This process of sharing with another tends to reduce the emotional pressures we feel with the frustrations of life. Seeking information about options different than receiving advice can be helpful.
Expectations change. Do we choose the power to accept, reject or modify them? Do we choose the 'victim' roles and seek to blame others for our own choices? Are we willing to explore the reasons we offer for our choices versus the challenges of finding the 'real' reasons we have for framing our world and the resultant choices?
7.13 Presence: Best Gift for Human Connection
Presence: Best Gift for Human Connection
Our in-person presence can often be the most valuable and useful gift that we have to give to others as we build and maintain our human connections. The emotionally healthy person recognizes the presence or absence of other humans can significantly affect one's mental health. Each of us comes into life with the need to have some type and degree of relating and connections with other humans. Regardless of age, gender, geography, social group, etc., this need for some level of social connection is practically universal. Learning and understanding the various roles of being present for another is a significant gift to connecting and supporting our relationship with them.7.12 One + One = One or Two?
7.11 Mirror, Mirror On the Wall (Part 2)
7.10 Mirror, Mirror on the Wall (Part 1)
7.9 Invisible Pain
Invisible Pain
Finding a healthy balance to the joys and pains of living life is a continual process for most of us. What is hurtful and painful to one person may or may not be the same for another or it may require a different degree to register. We can often better understand and choose our responses to physical pain like a broken arm, cancer, strokes, etc. Depression comes in many forms and degrees; it frequently appears to be invisible in the people around us. Not understanding the diverse dynamics of depression or lacking the best vocabulary to convey the personal presence of depression, many in our society may choose to conceal their confused feelings and thoughts. Concealment also prevents one from hearing useless phrases like get happy or advice like 'go and be around lots of people'. Pain is pain whether it is visible to ourselves and others or whether it remains internal and invisible except to the most astute. Recognizing the presence of invisible pain like depression allows us to decide on our personal responses to offer healthy and beneficial support.7.8 Who Am I? (Part Four)
7.7 Who Am I? (Part Three)
7.6 Who Am I? (Part Two)
7.5 Who Am I? (Part One)
7.4 There Are No Trees At Sea (part 2)
7.3 There Are No Trees At Sea (part 1)
7.2 Life Risk Choices
7.1 Framing My Gift of Life
Mid-Season Bonus: Can I Help Others With Their Needs, Not Mine?
6.20 Same Messages, Different Words
6.19 Conversational Boundaries
Conversational Boundaries
While some persons thrive on the conflict of participating in culture wars, we can choose alternate paths for ourselves. Handling the stresses of diversity in our society can be a challenge, but is always a personal choice.
6.18 Conversational Rituals
6.17 Do I Want A Real Conversation?
6.16 Do We Understand Each Other?
6.15 What Is A Positive Attitude?
What Is A Positive Attitude?
Using various emotional tools like a positive-view camera or a positive magnifying glass, we each make choices on how we see various aspects of our world and the people in it. What we choose to see generally will translate into the attitudes we develop.
6.14 Mourning Our Loss of Yesterday
Mourning Our Loss of Yesterday
Life seems to be a constant parade of gain and loss. Many cannot fully appreciate their present-day choices since they are still focusing on an inability to let go of their past. Yesterday is gone as are any changes we wish to make about it. We hopefully can learn from the assets and liabilities of living our personal history, but any change whether positive or negative for the future will be a result of choices we make today. Wishing for any change in our past is almost certain to be a stressor in some degree for our current and future mental health.6.13 Opportunity Learning with Deprivation
Opportunity Learning with Deprivation
Much of our daily life is lived by implementing the choices we have made during previous days. We tend to accept these situations as normal and they become our personal habits in thoughts, feelings and behaviors. There are times when we are deprived of what we consider normal and have the opportunity to make new choices from our habitual patterns. What we choose to learn and implement with changes from periods of deprivation can be informative and provide opportunities. We are unique individuals and each will decide what these deprivation experiences teach us.