I don't remember now, why this book caught my eye, but it did. Looking back now, I feel like Recovery was a classroom and the right textbooks came along in exactly the right order for me ... That's the way it was with this book too ... The Real You - Become The Person You Were Meant To Be by Dr. Kevin Leman. He also wrote The New Birth Order Book and includes a chapter on birth order in this book along with Childhood Memories, Learning Your Love Language and a section on Personality Types. Part of recovery ... part of counseling ... part of healing involves looking back ... not in a hurtful, blaming way but in an effort to understand how we got to where we are now ... It's like being our own archeologist, looking for patterns and elements that make-up the person we are today. We have Talked about the 12-steps of Co-Dependents Anonymous ... I think this would come under the category of Step Four:
Twelve-Step Program
1. We admitted we were powerless ... that our lives had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood him.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7. Humbly ask Him to remove our shortcomings.
8. Made a list of persons we had harmed and became willing to make amends to them all.
9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible except when to do so would injure them or others.
10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it.
11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understand Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry it out.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to others, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.
Making a moral inventory ... Sounds kind of scary but nothing is scary when we break it down into manageable steps. The Real You helped me break that down a bit. Dr. Leman says in the first few pages:
... You were stopped short by the title. You're interested in finding out more about what makes you the way you are. Maybe, you have always wondered why you're so different from your siblings - after all, you grew up in the same home environment and had the same parents, but you probably represent opposite points on the personality scale.
Why is That?
In short, you want to know what kind of personality you have - Is it a good personality, a winning personality, a destructive personality?
But the mere fact that you're asking that question shows me that you have another aim in mind - you're wondering if you might be able to us this book to IMPROVE your personality. Maybe you wish you could be more outgoing, more sociable, or more confident. Maybe you've been told that you have a grating personality and you want a completely different you? You're sort of like the women who come on Oprah for those makeover Changes -straight hair, drab clothing, and poorly applied make-up, crying out, "I need a change. What I've got just isn't working!" Forty minutes later these same women walk out looking like models - or at least like attractive anchorwomen.
Well, it will take more than 40 minutes, but I believe personality make-overs are just as possible as appearance makeovers. I've seen it happen too many times to believe otherwise.
The first step toward changing your personality or behavior is to take a look at your personality and decide what it is you want to change ... In this book, I'm going to do my best to get you to rethink everything you've been doing, all the assumptions you hold, and every rule book you live by. No, you may never have realized that you even have a rule book, but let me assure you that you do. It's there, and for some of you, it's ruining your life!
At this point, the hair started to stand up at the back of my neck ... I read three or four books at the same time. I had just started The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz and had just read about Toltec Wisdom ... which says we all live by spoken and unspoken beliefs (agreements) that we have gathered since birth. We can transform our lives by replacing any negative agreements with these Four Agreements. This time, for the sake of discussing "our rule book", I have highlighted the Third Agreement:
- Be Impeccable With Your Word.
- Don't Take Anything Personally.
- Don't Make Assumptions.
We have the tendency to make assumptions about everything. The problem with making assumptions is that we BELIEVE they are truth. We could swear they are real. We make assumptions about what others are doing or thinking - we take it personally - then we blame them and react by sending emotional poison with our word. That is why whenever we make assumptions, we are asking for problems.
We make assumptions, we misunderstand, we take it personally, and we end up creating a whole big drama for nothing ... We create a lot of emotional poison just by making assumptions and taking it personally ... we only see what we want to see and hear what we want to hear. We don't perceive things the way they are ... when the truth comes out, we find out it was not what we thought at all ...
Making assumptions in our relationships is really asking for problems. Often we make the assumption that our partners know what we think and that we don't have to say what we want ... Making assumptions in relationships leads to a lot of fights, a lot of difficulties, a lot of misunderstanding with people we supposedly love ... when we believe in something we assume we are right about it to the point that we will destroy relationships in order to defend our position.
We make the assumption that everyone sees life the way we do. We assume that others think the way we think, feel the way we feel, judge the way we judge, and abuse the way we abuse. This is the biggest assumption that humans make. And this is why we have a fear of being ourselves around others. Because we think everyone else will judge us, victimize us, abuse us and blame us as we do ourselves. So even before others have a chance to reject us, we have already rejected ourselves.
This is the way the human mind works ... Often when you go into a relationship with someone you like, you have to justify why you like that person. You only see what you want to see and you deny there are things you don't like about that person ... Your love will not change anybody. If others change, it's because they want to change, not because you can change them. Then something happens between the two of you, and you get hurt. Suddenly you see what you didn't want to see before, only now it is amplified by emotional poison. Now you have to justify your emotional pain and blame them for your choices ...
REAL LOVE IS ACCEPTING OTHER PEOPLE THE WAY THEY ARE WITHOUT TRYING TO CHANGE THEM. If we try to change them, this means we don't really like them ... If others feel they have to change you, that means they really don't love you just the way you are. So why be with someone if you're not the way he or she wants you to be? ...
- Always Do Your Best.
I specifically highlighted Don't Make Assumptions because that is how we have built our rule book. It consists of our own assumptions and the assumptions of people around us and most of those assumptions were not based on fact but our perceptions. Apparently, this was a message I needed to hear:
What IF everything I believe to be TRUE about myself and others isn't really true at all?
That question had two answers. It might be time for me take a good look at the things I believe, truly evaluate them for TRUTH, and if they are NOT true, get rid of them!
How can we DO that? Take a minute to think about the things you think. We'll look at it closer tomorrow ... We CAN change some things ... if we REALLY want to ...
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