I’ve been pondering my attachment to the past a lot recently.  The last of my belongings from my former home were delivered last week.  It was a long time coming and I opened each box with anticipation, looking for certain items that I was sure would be there.  Alas, two treasured books were missing … and I mourn them.

Through the twists and turns my life has taken since 2006, I’ve experienced a lot of loss.  One would think that it would get easier to shrug it off but the memory of these things, and the loss of them now realized, sort of makes me sad.

Another year has passed, according to the anniversary of my birth.  As I assess my life’s condition, I can’t help measuring what is as it relates to what was.

“The past is our definition. we may strive, with good reason, to escape it, or to escape what is bad in it, but we will escape it only by adding something better to it.” ~ Wendell Berry

What is better?  The last time that I declared to myself that my life would be better by allowing time for a relationship, my desired reality seemed to manifest.  When I met my former beau,  I thought my dreams had come true.  But they hadn’t.  The reflection of love in that fun house mirror was distorted and ugly at the end.  And the transition from joyful serenity to anxious un-joy was so … abrupt.

This is a video which I was introduced to about a year ago.  It is 16-minutes long but well worth the watch.  Not only does it have a good message that we all have special gifts, it is an example of how being attached to a specific outcome can affect us … and help us to find ourselves anew.

Our smiles make a difference for others, and smiling makes us feel better inside too.   Enjoy the film and let me know what you think.

Whether or not we admit to it at the time, what each of us has experienced at the end of our relationship with a Narcissistic Partner is grief for the loss of that relationship.

The most widely accepted definition of the stages of grief has 5 stages, which I will review for you here:.

The Five Stages of Grief

1. Denial is looking past what is real with a mindset that it isn’t what you know it to be.
2. Anger is the retaliatory phase where we try to get even or feel jealousy.
3. Bargaining often begins before the actual loss.  We make deals to maintain our relationship or pray to whatever Deity we claim for resolution that will keep our lives whole and our relationship in tact.

I’ve developed kind of a habit of listing to National Public Radio on Sundays.   During the course of the day, I overheard an interview with a graduate student that piqued my interest.  Her research revealed that babies as young as 3-months old preferred the toys who had exhibited better character.  Allow me to explain, for this may seem a little abstract.

This young woman basically played with babies by performing little skits using toys.  Her observations were that, once the play was finished, the babies preferred the toys who had been “nice”during playtime.  When asked how she knew how the baby was reacting to character rather than a preferred color, she explained that she would use two stuffed toys of different colors in multiple experiments with different children.  In spite of the color of the toy, infants predominantly chose the “nice” toy over the one whose part in the play had been “mean.”